Sometimes things come together so nicely that you just have to stop and savor it.

That happened to me not too long ago on a road trip through Santa Cruz, when my love of front porches and my quest for cheap motel rooms collided sweetly on a beautiful California evening.

As was my routine that road trip, I had stopped for a late afternoon ice cream/wireless access break and logged onto hotels.com to see what I could find in the way of thrifty accommodations in Santa Cruz, where I planned to spend the night.  (Yes, I still travel with a laptop…no smartphone yet)

I usually don’t plan things so far in advance, but I was trying to do my daughter a favor by using her hotels.com login to book a room and therefore earn her some rewards points.

The ‘rewards,’ however, as she has remarked, don’t add up to much when I travel.  That’s because I’m aiming for rooms in the $30-$50 bracket.

I have this thing about motels.  I don’t like to spend a lot of money for a place to sleep.  I camp out a fair bit, sometimes going upscale in a KOA or similar, so I can have a swimming pool, and often in town parks, where the prices start at zero and sometimes get as high as $10.

But I didn’t have the camping trailer with me on this trip. So I used the ‘less expensive first’ filter on hotels.com that afternoon and found a few possibilities in Santa Cruz.

In addition to price, I look for free wireless and someplace where the rooms open right onto the parking lot.  I haven’t liked walking down a hallway to my room since my days in a college dormitory.  I also pay attention to what part of town I am in.  I don’t mind a bit of grit with my surroundings, but too much and the nocturnal noise levels can get pretty high.

I settled on a National 9 Motel on Plymouth Street.  It’s part of a small regional chain with about 25 locations in California, Nevada, Wyoming, Utah, New Mexico and Colorado.

And it has a great slogan:  “The Best Mornings Begin At Nine”

So when I got to Santa Cruz that evening I headed over there, checked in and drove the short distance from the office to my room.  The motel consists of more than one building with parking slots scattered about.

I parked in the spot the clerk told me to use and looked out the windshield at my room.

Photo by Ron Haines

WOW!

A motel room with a front porch!  I couldn’t believe my luck.  The first thing I did was move a chair from the room out onto the porch, put my feet up on the railing and just sit there. (I am assuming you know what I think of front porches.  If you don’t, read this.)

Yes, the room was a postage stamp and the bathroom even smaller and I had to hang a towel over the side window to keep the street lamp from shining in all night, but the bed was comfortable and that front porch made it all good, so very good.  If I hadn’t been on a schedule I’d have stayed another night just to be able to call that place home for a bit longer.

I realized in the morning when I looked around that I had really lucked out.  The main part of the motel is a dull, boring, L-shaped, two-story building, with a row of doors upstairs and down.

I had ended up in a portion of an adjacent small house that had been incorporated into the motel operation at some point and that’s why it had the front porch.  I was almost in the nearby residential neighborhood.

Isn’t it great when everything falls into place?