parktrotter

We’re traveling again, visiting family in the farm country near Merced, California. We spent Christmas day there, where our boys played with their cousins (eight years old, six years old, three years old–oh, the noise, noise, noise, NOISE). I just realized that we have spent the last three Christmases in this same hotel, the Ramada on Childs Avenue next to highway 99. Again, I usually hate hotels, but I have grown fond of this one, and I wanted to take a brief break from the Disney-blogging and give them a good review.

In a limited way, at least: we have stayed every time in the family suite, and always only on Christmas night, so this may be the hotel-review equivalent of Daffy’s insurance policy (the one that covers a black eye obtained in a hailstorm on the Fourth of July in a stampede of elephants and one baby zebra, etc). But at $129, I think it’s a bargain: you get two big rooms, two TVs, two coffee machines, two bathrooms, etc. One room has two queen beds, one has one big king. This is not a fancy place, mind you: we need new fixtures in the bathroom, where the tiling, for instance, is quaint–and I don’t mean bed-and-breakfast-in-Vermont quaint, I mean old-and-busted quaint. But in the end, these are minor flaws.

And this is Merced, where the most prominent local feature is probably the gang-banger graffiti, visible on every flat surface along the highway and everywhere else. They need to clean it up by any means possible. Let’s get convicts out on chain gangs if necessary, painting that garbage over; they’re otherwise advertising the unlivable quality of this whole area in the loudest tones.

Graffiti aside, the Ramada is convenient for Yosemite National Park; the highway 140 exit for the park is just north on 99.

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