Rating Our Pet-Friendly Hotels, Motels & Rentals After 39 Nights

Preparing to bounce again!

Emily Binx Hawthorne & the HMS Beagle.

Good morning.

Tucson, our longest stop, arrived early this year. Our visit to the Sonoran Desert is always eagerly awaited, yet it’s also the quietest part of the journey. Soon, the pace of travel will quicken, and I look forward to it.

After we leave our rental this week, we’ll have stops of seven nights, one night, two nights, one night, two nights, one night, fourteen nights, seven nights, eight nights, four nights, and one night. It is a good mixture of rest and excitement.

Up to this point, we have stayed mainly at Hiltons. I like their predictability, phone app, and the fact that we don’t usually have to pay a pet fee. (More on that in a subsequent post.) However, we only have reservations for seven nights at three stops at a Hilton in the coming months.

Other than next week, where we are staying at a My Place Hotel (we’ve never stayed in one), all the others are mom-and-pop places, which excites me. The off-season rates are mostly fabulous ($210 for two nights at the Grand Canyon is crazy good).

There’s something to be said for the familiar, but I get excited about the character of small, family-owned hotels and motels. It’s a feel of Americana, more charming, at times quirky, while at the same time staying where we are safe and comfortable. Oh, and in most cases, unlike the chains, the windows open.

Total paid in pet fees to this point is $295.

We were booked at a Hilton in Moab, but I changed it to a better setting for Samwise and Emily. We’ll stay at a family-owned establishment with more walking space on the edge of town, closer to Arches National Park. It will be our least expensive rate at $64 per night! The same room will cost four times as much in the summer.

I will share information on our upcoming lodgings after we leave them, but this morning, I’ll fill you in on where we have stayed. I meant to keep up with listing and rating the dog-friendly places on our trip, but the fast pace of the first three weeks was a bit hectic.

Dec 5: Hampton Inn Berkshires-Lenox, Massachusetts. It was disappointing. It was more tomb-like than welcoming. The bed sheets came undone as soon as we lay down. Rating: 2.5/5. You may wish to skip this one.

Dec 6: Hilton Garden Inn, Melville, Long Island. This was the worst place we stayed at. It was overpriced, and the Hilton app did not allow us to avoid a 30-minute wait for check-in. The deadbolt in the room didn't work, there were no USB ports, and the heat ran continuously and couldn’t be adjusted. Rating: 2/5. We will never stay there again, not that we plan on returning to Long Island. Did I forget to mention the dried blood on the sheets?