#5- Tallahasse's Holiday Inn!

Hotel Nostalgia

This is my last entry about long ago, before the blog switches focus to the quirky places Don and I discovered recently!  This memory is a silly one from my teen years.

In 1970, a 12-story Holiday Inn opened on Tennessee Street in Tallahassee. I was in 8th grade, a time when most girls were focusing on boys, makeup and popularity.  But my good friend Ginnie and I were busy trying to figure out how to convince our parents (and the hotel) that two 13 year old girls should be allowed to rent a hotel room... for the fun of it. The fact that our parents said yes, tells a lot about how tame or nerdy we were. So one sunny day, Ginnie and I checked into our 11th floor room and unloaded our bags filled with snacks, teen magazines, games, candy cigarettes (for photo ops) plus formalwear for our buffet dinner in the rooftop lounge. I guess the windows must have opened because we spent a lot of time yelling out them to surprise the people on the sidewalks below.  At one point, a group of "boys" hollered back that they had our room number, which meant Ginnie and I freaked and moved our supply of entertainment into the bathroom where we stayed put, until the knocking stopped. The next morning we ordered room service for breakfast and perfected a few gymnastic stunts using the two double beds as trampolines.  In the elevator heading down to check out, we did one more "jump test" to see if we could detect the floor "falling".  

This fine postcard (with an X on our window) is a good reminder of when I first started to enjoy the adventure of hotel/motel living! I drove through Tallahassee a couple years ago and was sad to see the old Inn has not held up well. And I'm pretty sure they never "grew" those mountains that are depicted in the postcard image!

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