Back twenty years to... Wednesday, April 5th, 2006. Bright yellow signs: Breakfast at the 'Sonic' in Lubbock, one hundred miles to Clovis, New Mexico, west through Fort Sumner, and the last leg to a shiny 'Super 8' motel in Albuquerque.

"Shiny, bright yellow signage excites and attracts. That's just the way the human psyche works. Where would the world of fast food be, without those iconic 'Golden Arches'. As of late 2025, there were over 41,800 McDonald's locations worldwide, operating in more than one hundred countries. The United States holds the highest number, with over 13,600 locations. So, the same with so many other 'brands of convenience'. The 'Sonic Drive-In' franchise has around three and-a-half thousand outlets across the country, while the 'Super 8' motel chain has close to fourteen hundred such facilities.

I decided long ago, in the planning stages for this mammoth road-trip, that every once-in-a-while, a night away from the RV will be good, and the 'Super 8' is to become my 'Motel of Choice'. A subsidiary of Wyndham Hotels and Resorts, the ‘Super 8 Motel Corporation’ was registered in 1974, with the original room-rate being $8.88 (equivalent to around sixty dollars now), hence the numeric brand name. The first Super 8, with sixty rooms, opened in Aberdeen, South Dakota, built very close to a ‘Holiday Inn’. This was an established procedure for setting-up new locations for years after, the room-rate being always just slightly cheaper than its competitor.

Established in 1862, Fort Sumner, New Mexico, was constructed to protect white settlers, but became the centre of the Bosque Redondo Reservation, where over nine thousand Navajo and Apache Indians were forcibly interned between 1863 and 1868. The 'Bureau of Indian Affairs' recognises over three hundred reservations across the USA still, and there are five hundred and seventy-four 'Federally Recognised' Native American tribes. With a current population of just around nine hundred, the place is now an 'historic village', known primarily as the burial place of outlaw Billy the Kid. All across the Southwest, there are so many such roadside attractions – where the legendary characters of the ‘Old West’ were either born, mowed-down in a hail of bullets – or just simply passed-away peacefully."

In Search of Small-Town America: Volume 1 is a free-of-charge Pdf digital download – available from our shop. A table of contents, the introduction, the route-map – and featuring content on the first two States travelled: New Mexico and Arizona.

Jeremy Hammond I am a British writer and photographer, and have travelled through India, China, Southeast Asia and Australia, but most extensively in North America. In the late seventies and early eighties, I worked as lighting crew, and later designer, for many top-named British bands, on tours through Europe, Japan, and the USA. I’ve worked as a cruise-ship photographer, in office and store design, database design, visual arts book publishing and as a London-based freelance photographer, specialising in interiors and architecture.