Category Archives: Hotels

Home not away from home

July 29, 2015 6:31 AM , Leave a Comment ,

Bizarre situations hold no terror for me anymore.  I just accept them as fact and roll merrily along with them.  I mean if you find yourself in a weird or off-putting situation why work yourself up over it?  Just look at it as matter of fact and get on with your day.

I decided to finish the remodeling project on my house.  It has taken 3 years to get the floors done but finally it will be finished.   Don’t even ask how much it cost me but finally it’ll be done.

Part of the problem is that in order to do it I had to abandon my bedroom and my home office to let the men work.  One gets used to having things just so and to have your daily routine suddenly totally wrecked can be disconcerting.  Still we need to soldier on, don’t we?

So after a week of cramming things into plastic storage bins and shuttling up and down the stairs I finally got moved out.  My plan was to work from the dining room and sleep on the rough finished bedroom upstairs but those plans went to hell almost immediately.

The men had to bring in lumber supplies and nearly squeezed me out of my dining room office.  They took apart the bed and stuffed it into a corner and said they might be done in 3 days.

The office dilemma was easy to cope with.  By crawling over my boxes I could get into my office chair and work.

The sleeping arrangement however was unexpected.  So I found myself having to leave the house and sleep at a nearby hotel.  Walking distance from my house.

It’s bizarre to see the neighborhood from a different perspective.  The same area but from a different angle.  The spatial relationships are off for me. The local main street is much closer and the supermarket is farther away.

I wouldn’t call it a cheap motel.  But it’s definitely…. lived in?  It’s one of those places with a kitchenette in the room and the hallway alternates smells of tobacco where someone has surreptitiously smoked or the pungent aroma of someone that’s made up a curry on the little stove.  Mostly inhabited by out of towners that came in for a seminar or training session at the hotel or families traveling the country or just people displaced for one reason or another.

Jogging in the morning takes a different perspective.  The relative distances have to all be recalculated.  And of course I have to go home to work every morning.

Bizarre.

But I can look upstairs each evening and I can see the work progress.  I hope to have some pictures up soon of what I think will be a major improvement in my living condition..

 

Posted in: hotels, Houston, life in general

Making the most out of your travel experience the online way

May 26, 2015 6:40 AM , Leave a Comment ,

Travel can be a nightmare sometimes.  Whether it’s for relaxation or for business, at best travel is a chore that you have to get through in order to get on with your plans.  At worse it can be a nightmare that never seems to end.

But it doesn’t have to be that way. I get the fact that years ago when you had to rely on travel agents and paper tickets and possibly misbooked hotel rooms that things could often go awry but nowadays we have robust and well-developed and refined travel systems out there.  You really have almost no excuse not to have a good trip.

Let’s start with booking the trip.  If you just watch an hour’s worth of TV or listen to radio or read a magazine you will come across advertising for some sort of online travel agent.  I’m not saying you need to book through them but you can at the very least get online and compare prices for days and days and find those cheap tickets to almost anywhere.

You can take advantage of government security programs that let you minimize your time at security checkpoints in airports.  You can do a lot of the annoying paperwork that you had to do at the kiosks online and just drop your bags off and walk calmly to your plane with plenty of time.

Once you get to where you’re going you can arrange ground transport by taxi or über or airport shuttle.  You can tell people where to pick you up and if you’ll be late.

With hotels you can look at the actual properties where you’ll be staying and see how well you like it.  You can find online reviews or ask other people if they’ve stayed there before.

The most exciting thing about our new online life is that we can look at a location and see if there are attractions, restaurants, and other things that we can do besides what we expected.  We are no longer bound to be stuck in a hotel or an attraction.  We can now explore all the possibilities that a location can offer.

Weather of course is so obvious that it’s almost not worth mentioning but any little advantage can help.

So look at where you currently live and think about all the possibilities around you.  If you were a stranger what things would you like to know about your location?  Make up a list and then apply that to wherever it is you want to go and find out that information.

 

Posted in: activities, advice, hotels, travel, vacations, work

Vacation 2013 part II: Mohonk mountain magic

October 17, 2013 7:40 PM , 3 Comments ,

I should back up slightly in my narrative and go back to Monday morning.  I took a cab to the car rental place but got dropped about a block away.  A parade was in progress so off I went on foot, dragging my luggage.  The car I wanted (a Dodge Challenger) was not available so I had to grudgingly settle for a Camaro RS.  Big deal, right?  well it did turn out that way.  About an hour later, a hands free phone rings as I’m driving down the road.  The rental agent had left her cell phone in the car and I had to drive all the way back to return it.  2 Hours of my vacation wasted.  I finally got on with my trip North.  I went through Sleepy Hollow and was somewhat disappointed to find it nothing more than a suburb of New York.
Finally I crossed the Tappan Zee bridge and was away from the city’s influence.  As I entered the Hudson river Valley the theme song from “last of the Mohicans” began to play endlessly in my head.  After a bit, I got to wondering and parked the car by the side of the road.  I looked behind a small boulder and found a tiny speaker playing the song.  “There must be millions of these” I thought to myself and kept driving up I-87.

A note on I-87.  As a tax payer I am a little peeved that a piece of the US interstate system is a toll road.  They spent the money on wonderful toll road service stations, but still.  The Camaro had a navigation system second to none and got me to New Paltz.  From there I climbed up and up a mountain till I reached the main gate.  They were serious about keeping out unwanted visitors and I had to prove my identity.  I drove round more twisting turns and reached the main house.  Mohonk mountain house is one of those old-time resorts that people like the Rockefellers and Carnegies would visit all the time.  They really played up the natural and rustic charm of the place and the world-class service.

Up close and far the building is an impressive sight.  But not as impressive as the service.  The main gate had called ahead and told them I was coming.  I was greeted by name and entered in to the reception area while my car and bags were similarly taken care of.  I arrived in time for afternoon tea and cookies and in less than five minutes after arriving I was on the back porch overlooking the lake with a ginger green tea and raspberry cookie rocking in a chair.  Until I saw the watchtower hill.  Perched on the opposite shore on a steep rocky precipice was a stone watchtower.  I tossed the cookies and tea and just about ran all the way up the hill.  I then just about tossed my cookies from running all that way up a steep hill but I made it and climbed up the tower.  I then proceeded to take pictures of everything from up there.  As I walked down the hill I reflected on the nature of the place.  I imagined generations of wealthy New Yorkers spending their summers here and bringing their kids.  Those kids would explore the house and grounds and get into all sorts of adventures.  They would form little “lord of the flies” like tribes and impose tests of courage on each other like swimming the lake at night or swearing blood brotherhood and at the end of the summer they would all swear eternal friendship, even the spoiled jock and the nerdy kid with glasses would become the closest of companions.  They would all bring their kids back years later to start the cycle again.

But I’m drifting off the story.  Dinner was a formal affair.  Coats and jackets at the very least and held in a dining hall with more wood paneling than a small national forest.  I thought the soup they served would be bland and dull but the butternut squash soup was to die for and so were the lamb shanks and the creme brulee afterwards.  I took a stroll afterwards around the grounds.  I started to get a creepy “Shining” feel about the place at this time.  The hallways were slightly dark and the grounds outside pitch black.  They had no TV service so guests made do with community movies in a lounge or conversation or reading in the library.  If you’re not into any of that the solitude of the area can be a bit creepy.  I was too tired to entertain that line of thought too long and went to bed.

Next day I was up and took an unguided hike around the grounds.  In 4 hours I had wandered most of the flat paths so I decided to take on the rough paths.  These are mainly straight down the hillsides over and under boulders.  Not extremely difficult but still somewhat dangerous.  Not for everyone, but I got this wonderful feeling of accomplishment afterwards and I suppose that is the main point of the exercise.

In the afternoon came more tea and cookies and a stroll on the main grounds.  Dinner was again, more amazing than words can describe.  I would have liked to stay another night but the place was so popular that I was only able to book 2 nights.  I packed and prepared to make my way north to Sagamore.

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