Newsroom Notes: Family trip reveals tourist's view of hometown

Most times, when spring break strikes, I line up childcare for my school-age boys, and my husband and I work through the week as usual, sprinkling in some fun trips to Incredible Pizza or the local movie theaters.

Not so this year, as I promised the boys – and their preschool-aged sister – that the whole family would take the week off together.

We decided to line up a few tasks on the front end of the break – deep-cleaning the house, taking in a couple of movies and some serious family fun courtesy of Nintendo Wii. We then spent the latter half leading up to Easter in Nevada, a small town (population 8,607, according to the 2000 census). Just off U.S. Highway 71, roughly two hours to the north, it’s where my husband and I grew up and where much of our extended family still lives.

Family is a beautiful thing, but because having five extra people under foot for three nights can feel like a really long time, we decided to book a hotel room, with an indoor pool as a bonus.

We rolled into town early on a Thursday, and not surprisingly, the parking lot at the Country Inn & Suites, our destination, was pretty empty. The desk clerk had told me via phone that weekends filled up pretty quickly, and I thought at the time she was just angling for me to go ahead and book the room and pay the bill. I was wrong.

The first evening was pretty quiet. We had the pool to ourselves for a big chunk of the afternoon and the lot was fairly empty after we returned from watching a movie at Nevada’s six-screen theater, which just happens to be run by my mother.

Then the weekend hit. On Friday and Saturday, the parking lot was far from empty, with vehicles from Arkansas, Oklahoma, Texas, Wisconsin and Iowa, just to name a few. Also filling out the roster were members of the National Guard, as Nevada is home to Camp Clark.

It was clear that the folks who worked at the hotel weren’t exactly used to having people stay for more than a night or so. I say that because by the evening of Day 2, they all would greet the kids, asking what we’d been up to on our most recent outing, and when we checked out on Easter, they wanted to hear all about the Easter bunny’s visit. As we left, another worker said, “Well, there they go,” and waved at the kids.

I tried to figure out what brought all of these people to this particular hotel in Small Town America.

The answer, it turns out, was right outside.

Nevada isn’t as blessed as Springfield, with a zoo, a ballpark or Discovery Center. What it does have going for it is its location. With its proximity to Highway 71, travelers frequently pass by Nevada on the way to or from destinations.

I struck up a conversation with one lady as we watched our kids in the pool. Her kids were sunburned, and when I remarked on it, she said her family was returning to Iowa from Houston, and bright and early the next day, they’d head out for a daylong trip. She asked where we were headed, and was a little puzzled when my husband said, “We came here to visit. This is where we’re from.”

I gathered from other travelers that while Nevada isn’t a place where most people would go to stay, many consider it a decent place to stop for a quick travel break. And it seems the demand is growing. Having seen construction under way just outside my window, I learned the hotel is adding 24 rooms.

I agree that Nevada’s a fine place to stop. Besides, there’s nowhere else in this world my family could go that would allow us to have leisurely visits with family, including dyeing Easter eggs with my grandparents and an Easter morning service at my grandpa’s quaint country church.

It was good to go home, even as a tourist.

Maria Hoover is features editor at Springfield Business Journal. She can be reached at mhoover@sbj.net.