Romper Room

Besides the swimming pools and the occasional swing sets, there really wasn't much to do once we got to a motel and settled in for the rest of the day. Dad, having sat behind the wheel all day usually laid down on the bed, put a couple of quarters in the "Magic Fingers" bed vibrator and took a nap with the TV on. Usually there was nothing on TV anyway - remember; these were the days before cable and even in large cities you were lucky to get 3 or 4 channels on a motel TV, but for the most part we stayed in very small towns and had a choice of 1 or 2 channels offering re-runs of Hee Haw or Spanish speaking religious shows. The early days of Motel 6 the TV watching wasn't even free, you had to put quarters in and pay by the hour, much like the vibrating beds. This was kind of annoying for us kids, and my mom too, because it represented the ultimate in "cheap" for a motel, having to pay for right of TV watching seemed like punishment and forced us to budget the viewing time carefully, it was also ammunition for dad to exercise his power trips and teach us lessons about how nothing is free, not even TV, so if we wanted to watch cartoons it'll have to come out of our own allowances. However, we survived and more often than not found something else to do.

So out of sheer boredom us kids invented a few activities to keep us occupied and kept our muscles from being atrophied from hours sitting in a car packed with four other people and 3 ice chests. We came up with a game we called "Romper Room", which was a hybrid version of tag, and for the most part didn't have any rules except running around the motel and avoiding each other. This game was best played at Motel 6's because the building layouts were somewhat maze-like, usually with multiple complexes, double storied with various stairs, and surrounded by parking lot (which was considered off limits) So for hours at a time we would run around the terraces and walkways with no particular object or goal in mind other than to not be in close proximity to the others that were playing. On a few occasions we would encounter other stranger kids in the motel and engage them in a session of romper room, but usually they didn't understand the motive and lack of rules and quickly lost interest, leaving each group of kids to play their separate games in parallel.

Actually, we tended to avoid other stranger kids, there was no point in pursuing a friendship that was going to last only an hour or two, and it was safe to say we had nothing in common with the other kids, other than we happened to be staying the night in the same motel, then we were off the next morning to our next destination never to see each other again... but more on that later