One-Star Accommodations? Not Even Close!
If you own breeds that hunt and you hunt with them, you will likely make trips to areas where birds (gun dogs), jackrabbits (Sighthounds), bunnies, hares and raccoons (small hounds and coonhounds) are plentiful.
Since nothing discourages a hunting dog more than not finding game, you’ll probably make special trips, probably hundreds of miles from your home. so your dog will have a lot of opportunities to find game. These areas for the most part are not where Marriott, Hilton, Hyatt or even Motel 6 are likely to have properties.
So, the odds are pretty good you are likely to find yourself in places where lodging is sparse looking for a place to bed down for the night. Which means you are faced with the prospect of staying in whatever is available. And, those last three words are, in Hamlet’s famous “to be or not to be” soliloquy, the rub. Because all too frequently, what’s available ranges from barely tolerable to gawdawful. So this is something of a public-service announcement alerting those of you who are rookies to the dangers that lurk in the realm of lodging for hunters.
Since nothing discourages a hunting dog more than not finding game, you’ll probably make special trips, probably hundreds of miles from your home.
On one occasion, my hunting partners and I stayed in what had been billed as a “country resort” in the Saskatchewan guidebooks. While the “country” was accurate, the “resort” part required an extremely liberal interpretation. Our first big problem turned out to be finding the place. It was tucked back in some brush-covered hills that surrounded a prairie lake. But what really gave us trouble was the fact that a huge “For Sale” sign very nearly covered the sign displaying the name of the resort. We drove past the “For Sale” sign three times before someone thought to jump out of the truck and check what the sign behind it advertised. Sure enough, it was the “resort” where we had reservations and, yes, it was an omen.
The cabin we had reserved had been described as having three bedrooms, a kitchen, a bath and a large living room. While technically it did match that description, many pertinent details clearly had been omitted. Such as the cabin was totally out of plumb. Not only did the north side of the cabin list to port, but it also must have had a keel because it also slanted toward the middle, and the south side matched except it listed to starboard.
Attempting to stow some gear in the bedrooms, we discovered that they were so tiny the bed occupied the entire available floor space. The only way to get into or out of the bed was to crawl over the foot. The Chesapeakes, incidentally, mastered “bed entry” a lot quicker than did their owners.
The bathroom light took something more than a half-hour to generate enough light to see the fixtures. It was also apparent, when the first unlucky occupant stepped into the shower, that the water heater could not produce sufficient warm water for a tooth brushing, let alone a shower. While the floors may have seen a mop or a vacuum, it hadn’t been for at least a century and perhaps longer. Calling the place a pigsty would have been sufficient reason for any self-respecting pig to stomp off in a huff.
One of the hunters in the group ran a full-service filling station, and he rigged up one of the lanterns we used when setting decoys so there was a light in the bathroom but no towels, which was of little consequence because there was no hot water. By the next morning, there was also no cold water in the bathroom. No water meant no water for the toilet. Thus any water for flushing had to be hauled by dog bucket — about four buckets per flush — from the kitchen sink, whose faucets, by some miracle, still produced water.
That luxury did not last long, as by midday there was no water anywhere except in the jugs we had in the vehicles for the dogs. We also had no heat, and it goes without saying that the second the furnace succumbed, a cold front, hatched somewhere north of the Arctic Circle, arrived with all the fury those fronts can generate. There was a potbellied stove in the living room, but it was apparent when the firebox door was opened that the last time it was used was probably about the same time as the carpet was vacuumed. A further deterrent to its use was that there was no wood.
After the morning hunt in which the cold front did its level best to freeze us to death, we returned to the cabin. Watching the hunters enter the cabin I kept thinking I had seen this picture before. Then I remembered. It was in the movie “Battleground” after the survivors of the 101st Airborne were relieved following the Siege of Bastogne during the Battle of the Bulge in World War II.
Even the Chesapeakes, their outer coats rattling with ice, were drooping. The dogs, being quicker, smarter or both, dropped on the first blanket or sleeping bag they could find, pulling it around them as they attempted to preserve whatever body heat remained while their human partners sat in frozen silence, vainly trying to thaw semi-frozen hands with the steam from their coffee cups.
No one acquainted with this group would ever describe any of these hunters, or their dogs, as a wimps, but enough was enough, and wimp out we did. We departed the cabin without so much as a backward glance. Later we learned that part of the resort, including the out-of-plumb cabin, had burned. Sold, it would appear, to the insurance company. Its demise was unlamented.
As bad as the “country resort” was, it was luxurious compared to what a guy I know who has dual-champion Sighthounds encountered on a trip to give his hounds some work on jackrabbits.
“My brother-in-law and I took our hounds to Wyoming, where you can hunt jackrabbits with hounds. We had been told the area was infested with jackrabbits, and the ranchers would welcome jackrabbit hunters. That part was true. There were a LOT of jacks in the area, and the ranchers were very willing to let us hunt on their land. We had a very successful hunt, and both the brother-in-law and I as well as the hounds were pretty tired at the end of the day. That’s when the problem occurred.
“We asked one of the ranchers where there was a place to stay. His initial response, ‘Laramie,’ wasn’t exactly a workable answer since Laramie was more than 100 miles away. His next comment was even more ominous. He said there was a motel in a nearby town but added, ‘I wouldn’t recommend it unless you are desperate.’ We were pretty desperate and, ever the optimists, we said, how bad can it be?’ Well, we found out.
After a hard day of hunting, the hounds slept in the truck on clean bedding, which was more than could be said for the hunters.
“There are four different kinds of cockroaches in Wyoming and I think all four varieties were in our room. If the motel staff ever actually entered the room, it was clear they just stepped on the roaches they saw and didn’t bother to clean up the dead ones. Before you could call the room ‘filthy,’ it would have to have been a whole lot cleaner. The shower, which both of us desperately needed, was too disgusting to even consider using, the toilet had cigarette ashes on it, the bed sheets and towels were stained, the floor was greasy, and the mirror was covered with some sort of sludge we couldn’t clean off. The mattresses were thin and lumpy, and the bedsprings looked like the ones on the cots when I was in Army boot camp. It was so bad that we left the hounds in the truck. At least they got to sleep on clean bedding.
“Needless to say, after one night, we moved our jackrabbit hunting to an area a lot closer to Laramie. There might not have been quite as many jacks in the new area, but there were enough. And the bonus was a roach-free motel room with a clean shower and towels!”
While the hounds found plenty of jackrabbits on their Wyoming hunt, their owners weren’t so lucky finding decent lodging.
A guy who hunts with his dual-champion Vizslas recounted a lodging-from-hell story similar to the one the Sighthound owner told.
“We were pheasant and quail hunting in a pretty isolated part of Kansas where towns are few and far between. Towns with any lodging are even fewer and farther. Anyway, the farmer on whose land we were hunting wasn’t very encouraging when we asked about a place to stay for the night. He said there was a ‘sort of’ motel in a little town about 20 miles from his farm but, in his words, ‘I wouldn’t let my dog stay there.’
“When we saw our room, I could understand why he wouldn’t consider it as lodging for his dog. When I flipped on the light in the room, the roaches and a mouse scurried off to their hiding places. In addition to the carpeting being filthy and the bathroom a mess, it happened to be a rather warm Indian summer day, and the air conditioning didn’t work. After talking with the front-desk people, it took roughly two hours for a maintenance man to show up. All he did was kick the air-conditioning unit a couple of times and when it didn’t start, said, ‘Damned if I know what’s wrong with it.’ They finally gave us a different room that still had roaches, dirty floors, and a filthy bathroom, but the air worked.
“Along about 0-dark-30, I was awakened by my hunting partner screaming an oath, the bed light turned on and boots being thrown. That commotion was followed almost instantly by the charge of the Vizsla brigade, with the dogs jumping all over the beds and racing around the room knocking over chairs, lamps and anything else not nailed down in hot pursuit of a large rat. Eventually the dogs managed to corner and kill the rat, but the room, in the aftermath of the rat hunt, looked a tornado had gone through it. Still, I was grateful we had a Continental breed that wasn’t unwilling to tackle fur.
“I think my buddy said that he woke up because something was walking up his legs, but it was hard to sort out the details because his report was laden with obscenities and delivered at volume levels said to cause hearing loss. When he went to pitch the dead rat out the door, he moved the drapes a bit getting the door open and that’s when he saw two bullet holes in the glass. The holes had been made by a fairly large-caliber weapon fired from inside the room. We speculated that some unfortunate guest had resorted to even more drastic rodent-control measures. It was no surprise that we were on the road before there was so much as a hint of dawn looking to continue our pheasant and quail hunt somewhere a bit less remote.”
On a pheasant hunt, the hunters were grateful they had a Continental breed willing to tackle fur when their motel room included a large rat.
So, what’s the solution? Well, the ultimate solution is to book your hunt at a hunting lodge, but this is an expensive option, and not all these lodges allow you to bring your own dogs. If you are doing your hunt on a tighter budget and prefer to find your own areas to hunt, try to find somewhere close enough to a town within reasonable driving distance of your hunt that has at least two lodging facilities. If there are two, it improves the odds that one is habitable.
The odds of decent quarters also improve considerably if both facilities are listed in the area guidebooks with stars, although that’s not completely infallible, as we discovered with the “country resort.” The inspection that had awarded the facility two stars must have occurred around the end of the second ice age.
The other option, if option number one is unavailable, is to bring your own lodging. Even a tiny trailer, cramped though it might be, would be a big improvement over the ones these hunters experienced. At least then you won’t be sharing quarters with cockroaches and rodents unless you choose to.