I love a good Wiebe Motel zinger as much as the next guy.
“As our tour continues, on your right, we have the motel used as a backdrop in nearly every hitchhiker movie since the mid-1970s.”
That’s not to say the Wiebe—with its timeless charm along a dark, straightaway stretch of highway on the town’s relatively barren outskirts—isn’t good for Hollister. Small cities such as Hollister need functional, relatively cheap motels with basic amenities, such as beds.
Outside of featuring Showtime and an impressive-looking garden on the motel website, though, the Wiebe now has another distinction: It’s one of the last few places in San Benito County where the public can enjoy a leisurely swim in an outdoor pool.
With the closure of Hollister Recreation’s summer swim program at San Benito High School, the Wiebe, Bestwestern and Motel Cinderella are the current options for local families hoping to cool off in a community pool—unless parents feel like laying out beach towels inside Rovella’s gym while Uncle Dale swims his six incredibly slow laps.
Among local families, the following conversation now seems plausible:
“The outside thermometer just hit 90, kids. Pack the bags. We’re heading on down to the Wiebe.”
Kids: “Aww, but why not the Cinderella?”
Local families are destined for many of these kind-of-sort-of-special moments because we live in what’s called a Mediterranean climate with “hot, dry summers and cool, wet winters,” according to Encyclopedia Britannica.
That means we’re Greece without the gyros. We’re France without the snobbery and sauces made specifically for frog legs. We’re Gibraltar without the rock, unless you count the locally famous boulder around that curve on northbound 101 coming from Monterey. And we’re Slovenia without awful-sounding techno music and people like Davo Karnicar, widely recognized as the only person to ever ski down Mount Everest (confirmed on Wikipedia and Igluski.com.)
People from Slovenia—our climate cousins—actually seem to love water parks. If you Google Slovenia water parks, you’ll find a bunch of referrals to fun-looking people and aquatic places described in a language I can neither pronounce nor understand, so the research is limiting. Scroll down on Google Images with a Slovenia water parks search, and it looks like an endless collage of Slovenian pool goers promoting the concept of happiness or a new anti-depressant.
Slovenia’s fascination with water amusement brings us back to Hollister, where the sun shines about 400 days a year, where the average temperature of 72 would make Hawaiians jealous, and where there is not a single realistic public place to swim—or even dip a few toes—in a body of water.
Not even in the summer. Not even in September when our Mediterranean climate feels more like the Arabian Peninsula. Considering the public pool options here, you’d think we live in Truckee, Fargo, N.D. or Hell, Norway.
Unfortunately, we’re a little worse off than Hell, at least in the pool department. About 25 miles from the ice-cold Norwegian village is a place called Pirbadet, Norway’s largest indoor water park that touts having a wave pool, sauna and 100-meter water slide. If you’re looking for a pool in Hollister, Hell sounds kind of like Heaven.
At some point, I’m sure there’s a curmudgeon locally who has muttered the following at a small diner or back room somewhere:
“Hollister will have a water park when Hell freezes over.”
We should hold that curmudgeon to his word because Norway’s version freezes over from December through March, according to the Mother Nature Network.
Outside of the local lodging industry, the closest thing Hollister really has to a public water park or pool is the giant sprinkler—possibly made of corrugated sewer pipes—in the shape of a whale at Valley View Park. This is what Hollister’s children are reduced to, running through brightly painted-over sewer pipes—they’re not really from the sewer, I don’t think—with a pair of cartoon eyeballs popping out from its head and one-third of a tail. The fixture looks more like whale fossils than a living one and might lead to serious counseling sessions down the line.
Twisted metal aside, the consistent success of the Valley View Park whale fixture in drawing masses of children and parents accentuates the notion that local families, generally stretched in the wallet or stretched for time after commuting all week, are willing to stay near home for recreation if offered anything remotely decent.
If it’s hot enough, they might even buy a motel room.
