Chelsea wrote a pretty good review below, under the best of circumstances, this place has issues. My experience - however - has to be an anomaly, because it was just too weird.
It's a beautifully isolated place, with a serial killer vibe that screams "transients definitely live at this motel." It was the weirdest, most ominous, and Kafka-esque Motel 6 I've ever stayed at, which is crazy, because I'm a Motel 6 aficionado. David Lynch couldn't imagine this place in his wildest imagination. I tell people that about 80% of Motel 6's are fine, %10 are great, and %10 are slightly apocalyptic. Baker City Oregon however, is something completely different.
So we picked up our son from a summer internship in Portland, and wanted to get a head start on our way home. We stopped here around 6pm, and it was empty, the front desk receptionist Nancy was doing laundry, so we waited, no biggie.
Our room was very clean, and I was optimistic about getting a good nights sleep before the long drive the next day. We went into Baker City to eat, and found it charmingly historic, with a bit of an artistic vibe.
Get to sleep around ten and everything is going well. Then the "evening" arrivals starting - the first being a loud diesel truck driven by a man who looks like he was in a homeless version of a ZZ Top cover band. Again, super normal. It's Motel 6. But he will be back - very intoxicated - later in our story.
Then more guests, and it starts getting weird. On top of our room, a "family" of at least 8 people arrived, and started to unpack. For at least 45 minutes they were up and down, moving their stuff, talking loudly, super jovial. It's 11:30, but still not too crazy. I'm up, but I'm assuming it will quiet down after midnight. It doesn't. There is this weird "stomping" sound, like they are doing some sort of dance. It's relentless, along with a few of them on the porch above smoking, and throwing their butts down near our door. We are a non-smoking room. It's coming in through the AC.
We are all up at this point, and I'm thinking this is surreal. I go to the front desk, where the attendant Nancy is still doing laundry. I wait. I have no idea how much laundry this Motel 6 produces, but there are only 5 vehicles in the lot. I reintroduce myself to Nancy, because she acts like she's never seen me before. I ask her if she could politely ask the guests above us if they could try to be a little more considerate.
She tells me no, because "they just checked in". I said that was weird, because my family has been awake, listening to them, for at least an hour and a half. Nancy informs me it was just ten minutes ago. I'm like - huh - this Motel 6 is in some kind of time warp. So I go back and verify with my wife and son that I'm not completely insane, and hallucinating the monster people above, stomping on the cheap laminate floors in steel tip construction boots. They agreed it was very loud, for very long.
Then I ask our nice neighbors above if they could keep it down. They say "keep what down", and laugh at me. Then Nancy calls the police on my family for being "belligerent". We leave, it's 1 AM, and we have to drive another two hours to find another place to stay.
As we are leaving, the weird ZZ Top trucker dude is hurling obscenities at us. I'm assuming he was either a friend of Nancy's or the stomping people, but don't really care. They seem to live there, while we were obviously unwanted interlopers disrupting whatever weird scene was going on there.
Strangest Motel 6 experience ever, which is really saying something, because I realize it's not the Mandarin Oriental. Time to move on up in the world and use the Super 8 I guess. read more