Today, we can only look back and chuckle at my gullibility.

Sierra Inn is a clapboard mistake by the highway, probably built in the early 1900s from tin and saw-board. Unwittingly, I made a reservation the day of, by phone, on Memorial Day Weekend - they said they'd had a cancellation. Planned to drive 4.5 hours to Sequoia Nat'l Park and stay just one night outside the Park.

The room was straight out of a nightmare. It reeked of bathroom cleaner, had no functioning anything. A sagging bed with thread-bare sheets. The AC wall unit in the room, that didn't work, had a cord running to a plug inside the bathroom. Effectively you couldn't close the bathroom door without the cord interfering or unplugging it. The bathroom contained a rusted tin shower stall.

We returned to the BarRoom that serves as their front desk and asked for a room refund - which they provided. I'm thankful because it was 9:00 PM. This place had other wayward travelers trapped there who had looks of abandonment on their face.

We drove 45 miles back to Fresno from the Park Boundaries to try to find a room at 10:00 PM. Every call we made to hotels and motels resulted with "no vacancy". We allowed that we would sleep in the car and still be better off than the pit we had just witnessed an hour earlier.

Eventually we found a refurbished Super 8 Motel, the room was so brand new, there was a layer of construction dust on all the surfaces. Sierra Inn is listed for Sale on a real estate website. The only sensible thing an investor could do would be to 'bulldoze it and start anew."