 In the mornings there were free muffins and pastries you could finish with several bites, of which my brother would procure four or six, two each for whoever wanted something to jam up the passage between his or her stomach and intestines before work, community college, or Literature English 22 class.  There was a maid service that disrupted your thoughts and required you to stand outside for half an hour while they cleaned your room.  There was an elevator displaying graffiti the hotel wouldn’t or couldn’t remove, with a floor that sagged as disturbingly as my imaginary perception of the fourth floor.  There was a pool and sauna I never tried. 
Outside the hotel was the end of Hotel Circle, a street that carries cars past a view of the Marriot across the highway, the Holiday Inn, and the mighty Red Lion Inn with it’s towering sign board that itself seemed almost as big as the motel we stayed in.  A sign that displays the weekend’s brunch and during Easter displayed an incomplete message that read “Young Rabbits and Ducklings”.  Above our room’s bed was a painting, the only piece of conventional decoration, done in four shades of dark red-brown with sharp curving lines depicting several cranes in flight.  
Outside the window I claimed as my portion of the room was a view of the arrow straight San Diego River that gurgles into existence in the mountains east of the city, it’s dark surface sliding west through what was once the farmland of Mission Valley, at it’s end gently disappearing into the ocean’s chameleon sky.  Along the river’s edge for miles in both directions thousands of dead leafless trees covered the embankments, their bare branches intertwined, grasping each other, extending into the air.  So many trees so close together that, even though only a few hundred feet wide at the thickest point, the forest’s interior was an impenetrable wall to the eye at even a dozen feet.  
A dozen feet or so is as close as one can get to the interior of that forested area.   There, a few hundred feet from the water, the steel wiring and metal poles that constitute a fence block entry to the area.  One sign states the area is a wild animal preserve, no trespassing allowed.  From our window I often saw flights of birds that resembled cranes, near the fence in the motel parking lot we saw brown furred rabbits.  Twice we saw kayakers skimming over the waters in their long, slim, pointy nosed, yellow boats.   
The park itself thrived, even in the dead of winter when the trees wore only their grey brown skin.  It grew so well that for two weeks during our stay a huge work crew, equipped with a machine that lifted chainsaw wielding workers into the sky, was employed to cut down trees and branches, and to pull up stumps that encroached on commercial properties. 