Parking Lot

Toledo, Ohio

Some people go to great lengths to avoid having power lines or towers or other perfectly ordinary parts of the world we live in show up in their pictures. To me, these structures are fascinating and I'm always happy to include their quite wonderful shapes into pictures that are mainly about other things. Sometimes they are the most important thing in the picture. This was the parking lot of the Motel 6 I ended up in at the end of 9/14/11. The area was so rough that even I noticed it and felt a bit uncomfortable, unloaded everything out of the car and sort of worried about the car. But the room was perfectly neat and clean, and wildly cheap at 26.99 plus 2.99 for WiFi, plus taxes, etc. A far cry from the motel in the same chain near Madison, WI, where the surroundings were a normal shopping district with a crazy pizza joint cum entertainment center catering to kids directly across the street. The motel was hideously ratty, and cost ten bucks more. So much for making your decisions based on expectations about a chain.

The truck had the tractor's big diesel shut down of course, but the engine that runs the reefer for the trailer was droning away. Wherever this guy was going, he must have been way over his legal road time limit to be pulled in so early in the evening.