Most remote place you've ever stayed

Alice, Texas.

To cover 13- and 14-year-old baseball back in the day.

Believe it or not when that thing was over I was ready to make a run BACK to the border, just skipping the Taco Bell experience along the way.

Also had a flat tire, an unusual interlude (ho-tel, mo-tel, Holiday Inn!!!!) and pretty much an out-of-body experience.

 

Rapid City has more than 50K people, an air force base, Mt. Rushmore, an airport and is located on an Interstate.

Remote?

Not so much.

 

Dixville Notch, NH

But the accommodations very VERY nice

 

\
Vote early.
Vote often.
(Note to non-New Englanders -- Dixville Notch is famous for being the little town that votes first in presidential elections. The West Wing had abit about a fictional DN, as I recall.)

 

Hmmm. Yosemite? The first town over the Nevada-Utah border off of I-80, West Wendover (There's also a Wendover, Utah. The state line is midway through the town, very surreal given the legal and cultural differences between Utah and Nevada). It's right after 40 miles or so of desert when you're traveling west, and there's literally nothing for miles and miles either way you travel.

I spent the night there a few years ago, and I got a better deal on a room in Nevada, so I stayed there. But after seeing some of the local working girls purusing the place, I probably threw away any potential savings on the room by buying and spraying about 2 full cans of Lysol in the room.

 

The Gramaticas are from LaBelle.

Columbia, Va., has a population of about 50 and has five churches.

 

Fairborn, OH

Not remote in the sense that (apparently) a lot of people live there, but when I strolled into town it was fucking dead. I was the only damn car on the road. It was early November, maybe 6 years ago. The first thing I remember is this giant boarded up movie theater. From there I pulled into three different fast food restaurants. All closed. As in empty. Vacant. I ate at the hotel restaurant.
The hotel was a Best Western and Wright State (where I had an event to cover) was down the road. The drive to the arena was the most surreal I've experienced. Didn't see another car. The scenery was the Wright Patterson Airforce Base, but there was simply no activity anywhere to be found. It felt like I was driving past an abandoned Soviet military installation.

 

Slapout, Alabama (slap out in the middle of nowhere, that is)

Some village about 50 clicks west of El Progresso, Honduras

Diego Garcia (now that's remote, folks. 1,500 miles from anywhere.)

 

Fort Stockton bills itself as "Gateway to the Big Bend," but down in the Big Bend, we called it "Gateway to the Shit Country." The "Shit Country" is everything north of I-10 in that part of Texas...the Permian Basin. Amazing contrast...south of Fort Stockton you have the Glass Mountains, Marathon, Black Gap and Big Bend National Park. North of Fort Stockton, you have Monahans, Grandfalls-Royalty and then of course Odessa itself, the yawning, reamed-out anus of Texas.