If you’re anything like me, you’ve probably always thought of motels as a last resort rather than a first choice. I tend to associate them with grim practicality at best—and at worst, with movies like Psycho and No Country for Old Men, in which drab roadside lodgings attract people looking for somewhere to hide. That idea stayed with me until last spring, when I barreled out of Los Angeles on a sunny afternoon and headed north on Highway 101 for a motel-oriented road trip along California’s  Central Coast. In recent years, this stretch of highway has become dotted with restored and renewed properties that transport visitors back to the golden age of car culture while adding a modern twist. It was in this part of California that the motel was born—a concept that, back then, connoted freedom and optimism. In 1925, an architect named Arthur Heineman opened the Milestone Mo-Tel—an elegant, whitewashed structure modeled on an old Spanish mission—in the town of San Luis Obispo .…