A Tiki Bar with Mermaids, Scorpion Bowls and Vintage Decor

When I was a little girl, my family kept a car at an old self-storage unit in Great Falls, Montana. Our flight into Great Falls would arrive late, so sometimes we’d spend the evening at the nearby O’Haire Motor Inn (home of the world famous Sip’n’Dip Lounge) before picking up our car the next morning to head to the farm. It was a smokey old motel with cheesy western art on the walls and beds that would vibrate if you could convince your parents to give you a quarter to feed the machine affixed to the wall above the nightstand. In the morning, we’d have hash browns and sausages for breakfast at their little diner-like restaurant where men in cowboy hats would line up at the counter on plastic-upholstered swivel stools to drink black coffee out of thick white mugs and discuss things like the price of wheat and trucks and motor oil. I’d always order a hot chocolate, which was served in the same white mug, in hopes of being invited over to the counter to join in the conversation. That never happened. Anyway, I loved this hotel. The best part about the O’Haire Motor Inn was the pool, which was housed in a tiled room with great acoustics but too much humidity. My brother, sister and I always had the pool to ourselves (which, in hindsight, was probably because the pool was gross. But I was like, six, and my parents were exhausted from traveling with three kids all day, so our standards were pretty relaxed all around…) and with nobody to get in our way or tell us to be quiet, we would loudly dare each other to swim to the deep end because the deep end of that pool held a great secret - an underwater window that looked into the Sip’n’Dip Lounge. This meant you could swim up to the window (usually while pretending to be a dolphin or a seal) and wave at the cowboys at the bar and to the old lady who was always there. It was exhilarating. And probably pretty damn weird for the people at the bar. Years later, when the O’Haire Motor Inn and the Sip’n’Dip Lounge were on the brink of closure, they started hiring locals to dress up like mermaids and swim in the pool to entertain bar patrons.  A vintage Tiki bar decor, scorpion bowls, live music from Piano Pat ,and of course the mermaids, turned out to be a better business formula than a bar looking into an empty pool with the occasional elementary school kid swimming by. The Sip’n’Dip was eventually named by GQ magazine as the #1 bar worth traveling to and both it and the O’Haire Motor Inn are still thriving (and weird!) today. What a success!

Namaste,Shelby