Abilene, Texas
This room is at the Abilene West, Best Western motel—the place with the interesting lobby—where I stayed on June 3 while I photographed the Town and Country Drive-in Theater in the afternoon and then early morning.
Back in September of 2011 I did a twelve day road trip in the upper Midwest where I found that independent old-fashioned motels had almost entirely disappeared, but low-end chain motels (ie, Motel 6) were with just one exception, perfectly acceptable places to stay. On my travels this summer, independent motels were again almost non-existent, but also with a couple exceptions the inexpensive motels looked really awful. I ended up having to stay at mid-level places, considerably raising the cost of lodging, which was already figured as the single biggest expense item.
At least the better motels tended to include good WiFi service. This was typical evening activity. One portable hard drive is backing up the MacBook's internal drive, a second is storing all the digital capture files, while a third is used to back up the capture drive. My smart phone is charging, and behind the computer a camera battery is on its charger. The computer is online at Blogger, probably working on the blog post linked at the top of this post. Missing is some additional clutter: a pair of external speakers to play the internet feed from Sirius XM. I must not have set them up yet when I took this snap. It was really wonderful during weeks and weeks on the road to constantly have access to the Symphony Hall and Real Jazz XM channels in the car and the room.
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