Away2 Home2 Suites

When I drove out to Roseville Wednesday evening ahead of a customer visit Thursday morning I stayed at a Home2 Suites hotel. Home2 Suites is one of the many brands in the Hilton Hotels portfolio. (How many? Hilton currently has 18 distinct brands.) Although Hilton is one of the collections of brands I always check when I'm planning a trip, this is only my second stay at a Home2 Suites ever... and my first stay was over 6 years ago.

Why so few stays? Well, that one stay years ago kind of turned me off the brand. I felt they were cheaping out compared to other budget-business traveler brands, and their style of marketing to Millennials rubbed me the wrong way.



This stay reminded me that there's not anything fundamentally wrong with Home2 Suites. Maybe their materials seemed cheap 6 years ago, but nowadays they seem in line with most other mid-range hotels. And their rooms are more spacious than most. The photo above shows a room with a king bed, a bureau, a sofa, and a generously wide desk. Oh, and there's a kitchenette!



This kitchenette is actually a plus vs. most other mid-range hotels. It lacks the stove top that Residence Inns have, but the full size fridge and microwave (which Residence Inns and a few others also have) is a big improvement over the dorm-size refrigerators and tiny microwaves common in most other hotels. The full size fridge means that on a longer stay I can stash some mornings eats and evening snacks in the room... and if I take home half a pizza after dining out, there's no worries about fitting that pizza box in the fridge.

Speaking of eats, Home2 Suites' breakfast remains a minus. This is where the brand's Millennials-focused marketing turns me off. They style their breakfast as young and hip and appealing to a younger, hipper clientele. They contrast it with the staid, generic, prepackaged crap that other mid-range hotels have descended to offering. But Home2 Suites' breakfast is just fancy-looking prepackaged crap.

As with most Millennial marketing I hate, Millennials aren't the problem; it's the people writing the ad copy that treats Millennials as chumps that irks me. Well, with that big fridge I had plenty of room to bring my own dang breakfast... which I ate in my spacious room at the desk more than wide enough to spread my two computers out.

Take Me Home, Country Roads

West Virginia Travelog #2
Beckley, WV - Sat, 16 Sep 2023. 12:30pm

🎵 Almost heaven
West Virginia
Blue Ridge Mountains
Shenandoah River 🎵

Those are the opening words of a famous American song John Denver released as a single in 1971. "Take Me Home, Country Roads" is famous around the English speaking world— I've read that many Brits think it's our national anthem— and it has a special meaning to me. Although I never lived in West Virginia, the two geographic features it name-checks in its opening words are places I knew and loved in Virginia when I grew up there. Today, though, we're driven those country roads to West Virginia. ...Well, okay, it was mostly Interstate 77 we drove today, but it passed through beautiful and remote country. Does that count as a country road? 😅

The driving portion of our trip started when we landed at Charlotte (North Carolina) airport this morning. It was a 3 hour 15 minute drive to Beckley, WV, where we're staying the next three nights.

Some might wonder why we flew to NC when there are airports in WV. The reason is that we were able to get a nonstop red-eye from SFO to CLT. Flying to any point in WV, or an airport nearer to the border of it, would've required connecting flights. The added time for those would've meant a longer door-to-door time than the route we chose.

Have a Slow Day!

We were rolling in our rental car by 8:30 this morning. Our first order of business once clear of the airport was to find a quick breakfast. We tried a nearby 7-Eleven... they had nothing prepared for hot food. The rollers and warmers were all totally empty. Staff just didn't care about that part of their jobs.

Fortunately there was another 7-Eleven nearby... and that one, too, had totally lackadaisical staff. There were a few hot items ready to go, filling maybe 15% of the space, but then when I went to get a soda from the soda fountain I found that half the sodas weren't working and the other half were connected wrong. Like, really, how hard is it to recognize that "Diet Coke" is not the dispenser to hook up the "Orange Crush" syrup to? I mean, even if you're functionally illiterate, you could at least try sounding out the words. Or counting the letters. Or looking at their shapes.

We tried— and walked out of— a third convenience store before we struck gold on our 4th try. Good ol' QT. Their soda fountain selection was marvelous, and they had a whole kitchen running with hot food to order via kiosk. I ordered up a personal-sized pepperoni pizza while Hawk got a hot pretzel dusted with cinnamon.

Tunnels and Tolls

With something resembling breakfast in our bellies we started making tracks northward to West Virginia. From North Carolina we crossed into Virginia. I was surprised when I-77 traversed first one, then a second, big tunnel. They're the Big Walker Mountain Tunnel and the East River Mountain Tunnel. The latter is over a mile long. The odd thing to me is that neither tunnel crosses under a particularly high or treacherous mountain. Plenty of other Interstate routes would curve around these hills, gaining the 500' or so of elevation necessary to cross them. Here, engineers were like, "Yay, an excuse to use tons of dynamite!"

The second tunnel crossed us over into West Virginia. Yay! And there I-77 becomes a toll road. Boo. And it's not like the toll is even paying for all the dynamite required to bore those tunnels or the upkeep on them. Those tunnels are in Virginia; different state, different transportation budget.

$4.25 later we arrived in Beckley.