USA Trip 2005 - Part 6
July 2005
Rifle, Colorado
We stopped at a town called Rifle, getting the last available room at The Rusty Cannon Motel. The motel room was actually more comfortable than the Hyatt's, despite being cheaper and in a much smaller town! And I wasn't the only one who thought that - later on, we found Thomas Warfield's opinion of the Hyatt:
"In comparison, we stayed at two other hotels during the trip. These hotels were not fancy, big city hotels but rather small motels in the middle of nowhere Kansas. Yet both of these hotels had free internet access in the room. And their connections were much, much better. These small hotels (a Days Inn and a Super 8) were 10 times better than the Hyatt Regency in nearly every way." - Thomas Warfield, A Shareware Life
When I checked my email at Rifle I found that Jessica Dewell had replied to my email. She's the President of the Association of Shareware Professionals, who I met during the tornado alert at the conference. We arranged to meet in Seattle, later in the trip.
(Jessica co-founded an E-Commerce company called RegNow when she left high school. It was sold in 1999 for $2 Million US cash, plus stock options, to a company called Digital River. She's only 3 years older than me too.)
As the road-trip progressed we took lots of stops along the way. It was nothing like I'd expected - I'd been planning for bumpy dirt roads and greasy-spoon roadside diners. Instead, the highways are paved all the way, with rest stops every 70 miles (roughly every hour). Exits from the highway to each city are clearly signposted, and for large towns they have several official signs leading up to it, each listing the fast-food outlets, petrol/gas companies and hotels in that town.
So rather than going to "greasy spoon diners" (I really didn't see many of them), we went to the main chains like McDonalds, Wendys (like McDonalds but better), Dairy Queen, and Denny's. Though as a result, I did get thoroughly sick of fast-food!
