**Friend**
So my friend that recently has gone to the US told me, she found a working hotel, with actual people working it, there was people at the hotel and stuff, but like in the middle of nowhere, there were no cars in sight or any near by buildings it was almost at the end of a street, and it was a pretty big hotel, probably was a home now used hotel is it normal to find stores in the middle of nowhere in the US
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I bet you $1 that there are in fact people living in that area and they are just scattered around on large plots of land
Small hotels like that can be found in lots of places.
To get where people are, often you have to pass where few exist.
I mean if you’re driving cross country you need to sleep, having random hotels scattered about makes sense
The most ignorant map that’s out there, along with the sayings that spawned it, is that one where there are large parts of the US “where no one lives.” That’s a complete lie. People live, work, raise families, and die out there. That hotel is there most likely because there aren’t any others for a significant distance. People have to stop and sleep. I stop at these kinds of hotels often. They’re right off the highway and there’s usually a gas station next to them for some basic food. Most of the ones that I do see like that are just outside of a town where no one was willing to sell the land for it so they just butted up against the highway instead. Remember, not everything that someone describes as in the middle of nowhere is actually such.
I’ve found that people from cities tend to use “the middle of nowhere” differently than country people.
As a town person, though, I can verify that I’ve been to a store that was so far removed from most people (and the only customers tended to be the farmers who lived nearby) that it was just open with no one manning the store. Honor system was at play in the sense that, if you wanted to buy something, leave the money in the spot where they left their note.
But what your friend is describing sounds a little different. I’m guessing it was just a little outside a town, which would not be weird here.
Yes. They’re usually what’s called “mom and pop” stores or motels. Family owned and operated.
They were all over Europe long ago. Small taverns for travelers located between cities on roads used by the horse and carriages.
The U.S. did the same thing. Small places of convenience for travelers. What you described is part of that today.
where did your friend visit that was the “middle of nowhere?”
>but like in the middle of nowhere
That probably strongly depends on what your friend considers “in the middle of nowhere.”
The county in Colorado I grew up in had maybe 1000 people in it and is bigger than Rhode Island. It took half an hour for police to respond if you called the cops where I lived in Montana. I am from the middle of no where.
well, yes, in places. “middle of nowhere” represents a judgment though. We might not see it that way. 🙂
Yeah. We have a hugely low density country. Sometimes rural areas need a hotel or a shop and it’ll be in the middle of nowhere.
My favorite was a restaurant in Iowa with a bar that was on a dead end street that was inexplicably on a dead end road surrounded by a cornfield in the middle of nowhere.
Favorite spot for locals but the two nearby towns had populations of like 1000 and 400.
There are definitely places a long distance from highly populated areas that have a gas station and small shop and maybe a motel. There are probably at least a few people living out of sight (from the road) in the surrounding area, and travelers need places to refuel and sleep and get water and food. In parts of the US you’re easily multiple hours drive from any town, so these places provide valuable services.
It’s closed now, but there was a small store in Clarkston, Montana that had no set employees and worked on the honor system. You’d leave money in a locked slot. Wild.
What did they define as “the middle of nowhere”
Sure it happens, one of my parent’s favorite restaurants was 16 miles out of town. People lived out there but scattered over a wide area, very rural.
Places like you describe sound like they are in the middle of nowhere because that’s the selling point. People want creature comforts but want to be in a quiet and rural setting.
Something like that would usually be right off a highway or a few miles outside of a town.
There are small niche hotels, like bed-and-breakfast type of things, that are in the middle of nowhere. These are typically staffed only by the owners, or maybe by a person or two from the other rural homes in the area. For those kinds of hotels, the hotel itself is usually a big part of the attraction (for example, my favorite is the [Little A’Lie’Inn](https://www.littlealeinn.com/) in Nevada; it’s near Area 51 so it’s a UFO-themed hotel, basically, but if you look at the site you’ll see it only has I think 4-5 rooms).
If it’s a large hotel, there’s a town nearby. It just may be some distance away if the hotel owners wanted to build closer to the highway or something. But it’ll be close enough that the hotel can find the staff they need from it.
It’s similar with shops. You’ll find small “roadside attraction” kind of places in the middle of nowhere, but any kind of large or chain store will be attached to some kind of town even if it’s set apart a little bit.
I mean, it’s a huge country so there might be exceptions here or there, but that’s always been my experience. Tho of course there is always the [Marfa Prada](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prada_Marfa)…
The middle of nowhere is the preferred habitat of the Dollar General store.
As an aside, I was driving through Vermont recently and found a very nice library in the middle of nowhere. The road turned to gravel just a few hundred yards further. Vermont is an interesting place.
Let me introduce you to “Dollar General”
Others have this pretty well covered, but I’ll give you a few examples of where this might come into play:
1) Hotels near highways. We often think of hotels right off of a major interstate highway, but there are big swaths of the country that are hundreds of miles from an interstate. As such, U.S. highways (not part of the Eisenhower Interstate System), or even state highways become pretty important thoroughfares. Your friend might not know about how important a nearby highway is. It might even be fairly low traveled in some parts of the day (or the year), so if might feel deserted but actually is not.
2) Hotels near manufacturing, mining, or other business. There are large mines or big factories way out in the middle of nowhere, sometimes because you have to be near resources (like a mine) or sometimes because you don’t want the factory near people (like nuclear waste disposal), but those places might draw lots of people for short periods of time–supervisors, transient workers, regulators, etc. So there might be lodging either in the “middle of nowhere” or outsized lodging in a very small town.
3) Hotels near major tourist sites (especially national parks). It might not be awesome to live there because, well, many really beautiful places are not very hospitable and are far away from commerce, but there still might be a need to accommodate tourists.
4) Other oddities. Your description is pretty weird — that it was ‘in the middle of nowhere’ but it was on ‘the end of a street’. “Street” seems to imply that it’s within a town, but maybe that was just the wrong word. And you say it was “pretty big” but that it “probably was a home now used hotel.” That sounds like a Bed and Breakfast– a larger mansion, etc., turned into a (small) hotel. Sometimes they’re in cities, but they can also be out in the middle of nowhere with any buildings around. Why would it be there? (a) There was an old mansion / plantation / ranch / estate out somewhere, and the people died or went bankrupt, and now the mansion is available, (b) People like to stay far out away from things, just for peace and quiet or isolation. (See point No. 3 above)
If there is lights, water, businesses, etc. that means theres people out there. If the hotel is still open, it has enough business to keep it open.
This probably wasn’t the middle of nowhere.
With out Interstate Highway system, the purpose of these was for the most part to bypass smaller towns. So what happens is you have smaller towns and their downtown areas often several miles away from the Interstate Highway, but you may have shops and amenities near the Interstate itself. Gas stations, stores with large footprints like a Wal-Mart or IGA, a chain hotel, and chain restaurants. Sometimes its several things, and other times it’ll be very few.
There’s never going to be a hotel without an economic demand for it being there. There’s probably a town nearby, some type of tourist attraction, or the nearby highway just has so many travelers and people need to rest at some point.
Some people consider the entire state of Nebraska the “middle of nowhere”
Yeah to really answer this it would help to know exactly where it was, but there are often large hotels at interstate exits that might look like the middle of nowhere. Often just a couple miles away there is a decent sized town and another interstate.
I once visited my son at Purdue U and stayed in a biggish hotel about 10 miles away that was literally just in the middle of cornfields. But it made sense- they probably got a good deal on the land and just a few miles in any direction was something that would attract steady business.