The outside of the Abbycreek Inn is not its best side. Tan walls with brown trim rise from the asphalt that surrounds it like a horseshoe, the color not all that different from the grassy hills of the Methow Valley around us. There’s chipped paint and
wobbly-looking balconies. I booked this roadside motel last-minute on a holiday weekend—for what had to have been the last dog-friendly vacancy in the tourism hub of Winthrop. But it doesn’t take long for me to understand where Abbycreek’s charm lies.

It’s inside the courtyard formed by that tan shell, with green lawns defying the dry air of North Central Washington. Picnic tables and wood swings fill the space between rows of room doors. Trees and flowering shrubs and, somehow, a trio of a pool, hot tub, and itty-bitty, barrel-shaped sauna. The kicker? People are using all these seats and spaces; their chatter echoes across the cocoon of a courtyard.  

We’ve driven halfway across the state to check in at a place where shelves of DVDs in the lobby count as an amenity. Where clothing hanger bars are mounted directly on the room walls and breakfast means a DIY waffle iron, hot biscuits and gravy, and cereal dispensers. It’s a reminder of how the classic motel once faithfully delivered the ideal American vacation.

Motels date back only to the 1920s, far more recent than the concept of a hotel (and inns were flashing No Vacancy signs back in Jesus’s time). In the early days, cabin camps and autocamps sprung up as drivers took their new motorcars farther and farther from home, forming their own congenial ecosystem on the road. “There Packards run shoulders with Fords,” wrote the auto touring publication Tourist Trade in 1932. After World War II, motor hotels—motels—blossomed along America’s highways, but it wasn’t long before air travel, gas shortages, and the whims of twentieth-century culture shifts made them feel like a relic.

Motels, then, had a brief but crucial heyday, celebrating the car by putting it front and center, parked right next to the room. By the 1960s the term “no-tell motel” was in use, alluding to tawdry assignations, and Psycho cemented the motel as an out-of-the-way murder spot. But even as chain hotels literally steered the cars away to parking lots and garages, and moved room entrances indoors, a few stalwarts survived—and provide a vibe no carpeted corridor could.

“Because it’s retro, it goes back to the good days when America was different,” says Andrew Oberembt. He manages the Atomic Motel in Astoria, Oregon, a property that blatantly calls back to the midcentury prime of the form. He sees almost every guest cite an old memory of a motel stay, from their own childhood or even their parents’ stories.

“Anybody can do a chain,” says Oberembt. “There’s no mystery to it, you forget about the hotel.” His guests pose in front of the orange and blue trim, or the cutouts of Dean Martin and Marilyn Monroe next to the midcentury modern furniture in the lobby. When Washington-based Frank Hotels took over the property about five years  ago, they didn’t change the bones of what was then the Lamplighter Motel in downtown Astoria; most of the updates were to furnishings like beds and retro mini fridges.

As motels fade, many have been reworked into “boutique hotels” with high-end soaps or craft beers at check-in, Instagram-ready Pendleton blankets tossed across the beds. While I hold some fondness for those next-generation design pieces—LOGE Camps is particularly good at those glow-ups, with locations in Westport, Leavenworth, and beyond—I can’t help but treasure the motels that stayed, well, motels.

The Abbycreek isn’t even necessarily a motel, says owner Joshua Buehler; cars aren’t right next to the room doors, but those doors do open to the outdoors. “We’re not a hotel and we’re not a motel and we’re almost not an inn, exactly,” he says. Built in 1990, the place doesn’t have the retro swagger of the Atomic, but inside the courtyard is its own throwback to a space not crafted for social media. The convivial atmosphere may be why the Abbycreek boasts so many families who return annually; Buehler says he sees their kids grow year after year. 

Across the state a few months later, I checked into the Tradewinds on the Bay, a 16-room establishment now owned by the Shoalwater Bay Tribe on the Washington Coast. It’s less than a mile from the stately Tokeland Inn—a historic property that made our list of the best hotels and restaurants across the state—but offers something shaggier. Here every room boasts a tiny kitchen (though signs warn you not to clean fresh-caught clams in them), and I spotted the manager’s cat skulking about the property.

The motel feels lived-in, not meticulously designed. It may have been built in the 1950s, but it has a dog run behind a chain-link fence and weather-beaten shake siding, not atomic age kitsch. Still, windows look out on the marshy expanse that separates the building from a long beach; after a walk with boots squelching into the tidelands we reach proper sand and a view across Willapa Bay. Firepits dot the lawn. When we fail to successfully light our own campfire, the family next to us invites us to theirs and we witness spectacular s’mores creations. Like the Abbycreek, this place inspires return visits across generations.

Kids have the run of Tradewinds during the day, but at night we adults enter the glass-enclosed hot tub, a greenhouse of steam meant to protect the tub on this drizzly, windy stretch of Northwest coastline. The deck-top bubble amplifies the slap of raindrops on the exterior, while inside the windows fog up to show the hearts and happy-face doodles made by children earlier in the day. 

Will these archetypal motels survive? Abbycreek owner Buehler, who with his wife also holds the Idle-a-While motel in nearby Twisp, notes that their small size makes it easier to endure the slow offseasons; no overnight chains have set up in the whiplash snow-to-sun weather of the Methow Valley. As Airbnb and hotel prices seem to one-up each other to crawl higher and higher, the motels feel low-stress, low-commitment, low-expectation. 

It’s too hot to stay inside the hot tub dome for long—there’s a reason enclosing them like a hamster ball is rare—so we retreat to the rickety lawn chairs outside our room. Like the Atomic and the Abbycreek, the place is undeniably memorable, and I feel like I’m reliving 1980s road trips that I never actually took. No two motels are alike, and in a world of sleek sameness, that sticks with you.