Cheap Motels and a Hot Plate:
An Economist's Travelogue

by Michael D. Yates

"There is a timelessness about things: the river, the rocks, the trees, the animals.  Yet close by there were people -- working, eating, loving.  Struggling, I hope, to understand things.  Like me.  This book speaks to my understanding of  the country.  It is not an ordinary travel book, though readers may be inspired to visit some of the places described in it.  Instead, it is an attempt to combine a travelogue and an economic commentary.  To visit a town or an area and not try to learn how people live, what work they do, what they have done to the land, how they are divided by race, gender, and class, seems inadequate.  The United States is a beautiful country, but its beauty is best understood in its full economic, political, and environmental contexts.  This book tries to provide these but to do so in a personal and concrete way.  Hopefully, readers will find this approach useful and interesting." -- from the Prologue

"Everyone knows about Estes Park, CO, Jackson, WY, Flagstaff, AZ, Moab, UT -- those treasures become fashionable destinations because travel pages sing of their lush beauty and comfort. Never a word about those who work there, those we seldom see. In Michael Yates' book we get the invisible made visible: the stark and powerful truth of the haves and have-nots. Cheap Motels and a Hot Plate is what we are all about." -- STUDS TERKEL

"Armed with a van and hot plate, Michael Yates and Karen Korenoski set off to do what many of us have dreamed. . . . Their journey combines acute observations and politics -- from the pleasure of breathtaking sights to a program for reversing the privatization of our national parks and forests. Yates' travelogue/critique ranges from the political economy of California's agricultural valleys, where migrant workers pick our food, to an account of the job market in Portland. This is a great book -- a road story for radicals. It makes you itch to hit the road." -- DAVID BACON, photographer and author of Communities without Borders

"Here's the travel book the chamber of commerce doesn't want you to have. It shows you the way to places of great beauty, but it also invites you into the parts of real America that other books avoid -- gated communities in small towns, homeless kids in our cites, poor people of color toiling at arduous and poorly-paid labor, burgeoning economic inequality, and environmental destruction in our national parks. Read this book. It might change the way you see our country the next time you travel." -- JIM HIGHTOWER, national radio commentator and author of Thieves in High Places