8 Types of Roadside Motel Every 1970s Family Stayed In

The station wagon pulled off the interstate around 8pm, everyone tired, nobody willing to admit it. Dad squinted at the vacancy sign while Mom counted heads. What kind of motel would it be tonight? Because in 1975, that mattered. There were categories, and every family knew them by heart. Here are the eight your family slept in at least once.

The Mom-and-Pop Court Motel

Run by a couple who lived in unit one and answered the office bell in slippers. The wife handled check-in while the husband handled the busted ice machine, and both of them remembered your name if you came through twice. Twelve rooms, maybe fourteen. Rates written on an index card taped to the counter.

These were the motels that actually meant something by the time you pulled in. Clean sheets because she washed them herself. A pot of coffee in the office at 6am because he always made too much. You paid cash and got a paddle key fob the size of a small paperback so you wouldn’t walk off with it.

The Holiday Inn With the Green Sign

This was the upgrade night—the one when Dad decided the family had earned something better than the first vacancy sign off the highway.

The Great Sign did most of the selling. Its green arrow and yellow starburst promised a swimming pool, a restaurant and air conditioning that actually worked. Inside were two double beds with quilted floral spreads, a color television mounted on a swivel arm, a plastic ice bucket and drinking glasses wrapped in paper. ‘Kids Stay Free’ was the phrase that made the rate easier to accept.

The pool was the real attraction. Half the driving day got planned around reaching the Holiday Inn early enough for a swim before dinner. Nobody wanted to climb back into the station wagon afterward, so the family ate in the hotel restaurant, ordered from the children’s menu and treated pancakes the next morning like part of the vacation.

The Howard Johnson’s Motor Lodge

You spotted the orange roof from a mile out and started asking about ice cream. Twenty-eight flavors, fried clams, and a motor lodge attached. HoJo’s was the only motel in America that came with its own religion.

Rooms were fine. Standard-issue, clean, forgettable. What mattered was the restaurant next door, where you could order the same fried clam strips in Rhode Island and Georgia and know they’d taste identical. That reliability was the whole business model, and for a traveling family in 1975, it was worth everything.

The TraveLodge or Best Western Off the Exit

The workhorse. Not fancy, not sad, just there. You spotted the sign from the interstate, Dad said fine, and forty seconds later you were in the parking lot.

The Sleepy Bear or the Best Western crown told you what you were getting. Corridor-access rooms opening straight to the parking lot so you could unload the wagon without walking a mile. Two double beds, orange or brown carpet, a bathroom with wrapped soap the size of a domino, and a TV that got four channels if you fiddled with the antenna. Cheap enough that Dad didn’t wince at the front desk.

The Themed Wigwam or Kitsch Motel

You didn’t stop at a Wigwam Motel because it was practical. You stopped because you’d been driving through Arizona for six hours and there was a giant concrete teepee with a neon sign.

The kitsch motel came in many flavors. Teepees on Route 66. A castle in Wisconsin. A ship-shaped motel in South Carolina. Log cabins pretending to be Paul Bunyan’s cousins. Rooms were usually tight and the plumbing suspect, but the memory of sleeping inside a concrete teepee outlasted every chain room you ever booked. That was the trade, and every kid in the wagon knew it was a good one.

The Downtown Businessman’s Motor Hotel

Rarer for a family, but it happened. Dad had a work meeting in Cleveland or Kansas City, everybody piled in the wagon, and instead of the interstate stop you ended up downtown at a motor hotel with an elevator and a lobby.

These were the motels trying to be hotels. Four stories instead of two, a restaurant with a hostess, a coffee shop that opened at 6am for the traveling salesmen. The rooms felt smaller and darker than the suburban ones, but you could look out the window and see a city street, which for a kid from a small town was the whole point of the trip.

The Truly Sketchy Last-Resort Motel

Every family had one of these nights. The one where Dad had pushed too far, everything was full because of a convention or a football game, and the only vacancy sign for sixty miles was flickering with half its letters out.

Mom made a face. Dad said it was one night. The room had a bedspread nobody wanted to touch, a bathroom with a rust ring in the tub, and a lock that felt more like a suggestion than a commitment. You slept in your clothes. You left at 5am. Nobody talked about it for the rest of the trip, and it became the motel everyone remembered forever.

The Beach or Lake Resort Motel

This was not the motel you found at the end of a long driving day. This was the reason for the trip, booked months ahead and revisited the same week every summer, sometimes in the same room if your parents called early enough.

The building sat low along the water, painted seafoam, coral or sun-faded white, with metal railings and balconies draped in wet swimsuits. Rooms came with a kitchenette, a two-burner stove and a refrigerator that hummed through the night. The carpet was built to survive sand, the bedspreads were nautical or floral, and the bathroom floor never stayed completely dry.

Many of these properties disappeared as waterfront land became more valuable, replaced by condominiums, larger hotels or redevelopment that kept the view and erased everything else. The survivors still have the old proportions: doors opening outdoors, a pool in the middle, neon at the roadside and no real reason to leave until checkout.

Try This: A few classic Jersey Shore motels still preserve the look, including the Blue Marlin and the restored 1957 Caribbean Motel in Wildwood Crest. Book a room, bring a book and spend one night somewhere that still turns on the neon after dark.