Before we left, Jim and I set an aggressive goal for our cross country hotel budget. Because both of us are competitive, and neither of us wanted to be “the quitter” or to be deemed weak or the “bougie one” the topic of upping our hotel game never came up, and we stuck with our (in hindsight) risky, low-rent hotel budget until we got all the way to the Rockies. I’ll admit here that my healthy fear of the MRSA virus (honed over yearly viewings of the mandatory good hygiene videos over 10+ years of high school coaching) caused me to break first. And even then, I brought it up by saying “you realize, that neither of our daughters would step foot in some of these hotels.”

What I liked about our “under $100 including dog fee” hotels: the price of course, the staff and the guests were very friendly overall, the showers had good water pressure, and the bedding was clean. Because we had a dog, we were always on the ground floor, and I liked the easy access of that. One lobby had The Brady Bunch on the big screen, and Jim had a lively discussion with the front desk clerk and cleaning lady about the plot line.

What I didn’t like: Those ground floor pet rooms? Well, quite frankly, they’d all been previously inhabited by other people’s pets. Ew! The air sometimes had the moist, fresh scent of wet carpet combined with Febreeze. Furniture wasn’t as new as in – say – your average DMV, and we looked dubiously at the carpet and the couch or cushioned chairs wondering what accidents had occurred there. The locations tended to be set in the industrial sections on the outskirts of the city – leading Jim to say every place we stayed: “I’ll be taking the dog out here.” Again no mention of why. Possibly it had something to do with the two running black vehicles with darkened windows in the back parking lot, or the four giant guys pounding beers with a smoker in the bed of their pickup truck outside of their incredibly messy rooms (they’d been living there awhile), or the pounding base and brief yelling outside one night, or the late night traffic from the KFC drive thru next door. He allowed me to walk Pasha some mornings, and I enjoyed watching Pasha frolic in the vacant, weed-strewn lots.

After I broke, I’m pretty sure I heard Jim release an audible sigh of relief, and from then on we stayed in hotels – still on the first floor – but a step or three above where we’d been staying and without the fear of contracting any virus or being mugged.