Sheraton Annapolis II

I had a return visit to the Sheraton Annapolis. When I checked in, the people welcoming me were very kind & solicitous. I actually felt a little guilty about dissing the place during an earlier stay.

Part of my unusually forgiving frame of mind was that I'd just finished reading a really wonderful travel book, Shadow of the Silk Road, by the eminent British travel writer, Colin Thubron. Like all the books I've read of his, they're perspicacious, illuminating and instructive, as well as being beautifully written. En route from Xian, in western China, through Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, Afghanistan, Northern Iran, and Turkey to the Mediterranean, Mr. Thubron had to lodge in some dodgy places - without running water, with clogged lavatories, etc. etc. So how could I have complained about the Sheraton Annapolis' missing soda machines, dirt on the floor and creepy Nutcracker statues? (See earlier post, here.)

The lobby looked nice.



And the halls still featured my beloved enormous hound's tooth pattern.



So far, it seemed as if my cranky review from before may have been inaccurate.

With this unusually cheerful and open frame of mind, I entered my room. The first thing I noticed was that the sink stopper was broken.



The paint by the door handle was missing in places.



The ceiling sprinkler flange was misplaced somewhere.



Kind of picayune whining, I know. But then I saw that the floor molding by the closet had been wrenched off.



And for the piece de resistance, someone or thing (termites? beavers?) had removed a large chunk from the dresser drawer. How could no one have noticed this? I actually took two photos, to show off the missing piece to full advantage.




That was one of the weirdest hotel items I've observed yet.

Aside from my room being tormented by the unceasing sound of the elevator motors, two more peculiarities struck me before I returned home.

One was the odd letter spacing in one of the two elevators, which, in part, reminds me of Chico Marx's "Italian" accent. (I'm sure you'll spot the words to which I'm referring; notto and subjectto).



The final incongruity appears not at the Sheraton, but at BWI, immediately following the TSA examination area in Concourse C.

What appears to be a typical airport seating bench,



Turns out to be (and I'll admit, I've never seen one before) a TSA (read: official) "recomposure" area.



Interestingly, if you google(r) the definition of recomposure, you receive the following query:

"Did you mean: define decompose"?

No, I didn't actually. I had a plane to catch, after all.

The Doubletree, Virginia Beach

I usually go on short business trips (only an overnight stay), so I was looking forward to three nights in a hotel, even if this third night was really only a half-night, since I had to get up at 4:00 am to make my flight home. I was so excited to be able to use the clothing storage facilities, instead of leaving things in my suitcase as I usually do.

The Doubletree has seen better days. The hallway was kind of dim. Not in a romantic, trysting, The Royalton way, but more in a "the carpets used to look better" way.

Here's the hall:



Here are the reasons I think they keep the lights dim. The carpet in the elevator looked a little dodgy. You may be able to see the clean/dirty area in this photo. (Notice the corner)



If you can't see the difference, you'll probably spot the red stain in this photo.



I was worried that the stain was from a guest bleeding out on the way to the lobby. The elevator floor numbering lights weren't functioning. You wouldn't know it from this picture, but I was somewhere between 7 and L when I snapped this. (The dark bar should have some red lights in it.)



Once I got to my room, I noticed the clothes-hanging rod was, well, to be charitable, a little "loose" on one end. That's my diplomatic way of saying it was down considerably at the stern, which caused my clothes hangers to slide down and herd together at one end. I didn't get a photo of the rod, unfortunately, but noticed a similarly not-leveled feature of the room: The tissue box:



I'm no fire-fighting expert, but it seems to me that this hose connection is probably supposed to have a hose on it.



At least the door to the non-hose equipped hose connection was easy to open.

As was one of the two elevator phone doors.

The calling device behind the easy-to-open door was white:



I don't know the color of the other phone, because the door was clearly only accessible to professional elevator phone callers.



Here's one incredibly not nice feature of the hotel. The Doubletree Virginia Beach charges $9.95 for wired internet access in your room. That's pretty standard. What isn't, is that your payment expires at 4:00 pm. That means if you need to sign up for internet access, and it's 3:58 pm, you get 2 minutes of internet for $9.95. If you sign up at 4:01 pm, you get 23 hours and 59 minutes for $9.95. I have went to college, and this seems awfully peculiar to me.

A little card in the room lists all the Hilton Hotel variants (the Doubletree being one of them), and refers to them as "The Hilton Family of Hotels". Oh, come on. Do the powers-that-be at Hilton honestly think anyone believes the executives of these variants are a happy family that spends Thanksgiving and Christmas together, looking at old photos and remembering old times? Come to think of it, any company that believes the internet pricing schedule mentioned above is logical, smart, or likely to create happy customers probably thinks we'd believe they're a happy family, too.


A thoroughly blah hotel. Oh, the people were nice - especially the guys at the front desk at 4:15 am, but I can't really recommend staying there for that reason. If towels are a reason for you to select a hotel, you should consider it. It has nice, fluffy towels. In fact, they're much nicer and thicker than the ones at the Hyatt San Francisco.

Hyatt Regency San Francisco

From the gilded age splendor of the Grand Hotel Tremezzo we now travel to the Gigantor-age style of the Hyatt San Francisco Embarcadero Center.

The Hyatt's sleek, one-sided hallways run rings around the vaguely trapezoidal form of the biggest dang "lobby" you're likely to see in your lifetime.



You immediately feel like an ant. Or an electron circling the giant sculpted ball that fills 1/1000th of the interior space.




That's not all bad, of course. If I were the owner, I'd feel like some 80's master of the universe. But as I'm not, I focused on some smaller items of interest.

1) The feeling-a-little-dated tile floors in the elevators - which from the outside look a lot like they belong to the interior of the Tyrell building in Blade Runner.



2) The not matching the floors of the elevators elevator landing carpet.



3) The button which in most hotels would waft you to the penthouse, but which here promises only a trip to the EQ.



4) The abandoned chat area on the fourth floor. All that was left of what must've been conceived as a little nook for intimate tetes-a-tete was an end table with a phone on it. (Sorry, didn't get a good photo of it.)



5) The sign for the exercise room, which I mistakenly took for a Swastika pointing to a meeting room for the American Nazi Party.



It's a nice hotel. At least my room was nice. A colleague with whom I was traveling claimed her bathtub was ringed with "black mold".

Mine had an exceedingly slow to flush toilet. I don't know if this was an issue with the pipes, or if my unit was an early, inefficient version of a low water usage commode. Either way, one had to be careful or the chamber maid would have an unfortunate surprise.

The Hyatt, being a luxury hotel, charges for wireless internet. (The inverse relationship between room price and internet charge continues!) What made this even more annoying than usual was the glacial pace of the connection. You could enter a url, try to fix the toilet, come back, and it would still be loading. What's worse, when I checked out, I mentioned to the nice lady that the internet was very very slow, and she said, with complete aplomb, "we know, we're trying to fix it". Gee, thanks. How about a warning card in your room before you cough up the dough to "log on"? Something like "Go ahead and pay, sucker, but don't expect anything faster than a 28k dial up modem".

One other thing. The chrome was coming off the drain stopper in the sink. I know the old saying, "the bloom is off the rose". I have a modern replacement: The chrome's off the brass. Doesn't have the same ring, does it?

Grand Hotel Tremezzo

The Grand Hotel Tremezzo would be worth staying in if only for its location on Lake Como. But since this blog isn't about geography, per se, I'm going to stick to covering what the blog name promises. Halls.

Now this is a hallway:

Ground floor:



Our floor:



I don't think you'd find a carpet like this in a Courtyard by Marriott.



Lovely, n'est-ce pas? The Grand Tremezzo is indeed a grand hotel in the old European tradition. The ceilings are as tall as an airport hanger, and the floors would probably cost more to install today than an entire modular "business center" that seems to be too many modern hotels' main attraction.

Here's the tromp d'oeil section.



This is just the plain part.



As befitting its grandness and tradition, it has a number of intriguing features (probably due to its having been erected in 1910).

1) The mystery switch in the bathroom (I don't know what happens when you pull it - maybe it signals your servants to come to your assistance).




2) These faucets weren't connected to anything specific, as far as I could tell.



It's really a wonderful hotel, in the "grand" European tradition. And a spectacular "breakfast buffet". I don't know what else to call it, but under no circumstances should you think of waffles or cereal. It's more like breakfast heaven.

As is the hotel. Go. Vai! Vai! Book a room now!

Four Points by Sheraton Miami Beach

I had a couple nights' stay at the Four Points Miami Beach. It's about 2 miles north of the happening part of town where the Delano is.

The hotel is part of a historical preservation area called MiMo - for Miami Modern. That means whatever renovations the hotel performs must fit with the era. I think this explains why the elevator service was so wanky - there are two elevators plus a service elevator. They're all tiny, and half the non-service elevators weren't functioning, which made the wait excruciatingly long. You could see the broken elevator sulking one floor below the lobby if you looked closely at the elevator doors. And I think they can't build bigger elevators for fear of incurring the wrath of the local do-gooders. As long as you're comfortable smelling burned tourists, you'll be fine.

Anyway, they've attempted to rejuvenate the hotel along its original lines. (By the way, I don't think the lobby conforms to MiMo aesthetics). The halls are pretty ordinary, though they've painted them a kind of frisky green color.



There's a design era tug-of-war with the hall lighting. In this corner, representing the fifties and sixties, this bubble ceiling fixture.



And in the other, the defending champ from some unspecified point in time: the wall fixture.



Since the two style don't seem to agree, I'm not sure which direction the hotel plans to have be its ultimate design statement.

The hallways will not prepare you for the room, which was nice and clean. AND BLUE. One of the walls was like the little photos that accompany dictionary entries - you know, like the one for "snood". It defined blue. (The photo doesn't do it justice, I'm sad to say.)



I must say, this is the first room I've had with a view of a ship container parking lot.



The Four Points has some kind of advertising tie in with Charmin Bathroom tissue. One element is a vinyl sticker near the sink -



The other is a sticker on the toilet paper roll itself.



Maybe the next big ad idea will be to have Lysol sponsor the toilet seat itself.

I do have a question for Mr. & Mrs. Four Points by Sheraton. If your name is Four Points, why does the inlaid compass rose in the lobby have 8 points? Just asking.

Also, how can the 4th floor of the hotel be one floor above the lobby, which is at street level?

Hilton Anaheim

I don't get Hilton Hotels. I can't characterize them in any meaningful way. Nice? Luxurious? Modern? Old fashioned? Good value? Nicer than a Marriott? Not as nice as a Marriott? They're all over the place. Hilton's new slogan doesn't help much. Here it is:



Nothing like a vapid phrase to help focus that brand, Mr. Hilton. "Travel should take you places" is as meaningless as "walking should take you forward or backward", or "a shower should make you wet". Or "furnaces should heat your house". Or "rakes should gather leaves". Maybe I should start my own ad agency.

To give you an idea how flimsy the Hilton brand is, the sign outside the hotel had two logos of equal size. One, of course, was Hilton. The other, Starbucks. I guess that's a pretty good way to tell how weak the Hilton brand is, and how powerful the Starbucks brand continues to be.

The Hilton Anaheim is big. Big big. That makes sense, because it's right next to Disneyland. (The original, not that parvenu Disney "world" in Florida.) The parking structure is monstrous, and almost impossible to navigate. I tried following the arrows pointing to the elevators, but wound up going the wrong way and nearly t-boning an elderly driver. Once I found a space, the path to the elevators themselves was blocked by a neatly stacked block of about 3,000 chairs. Once you get to the lobby, stand back and look at 70's architecture in all its glory.



The halls are big, too. Or, rather, long. No surprise here.



But in the spirit of the maze-like parking lot, the signage to your room is quite perplexing. What the heck happened to room 5.528? Is it haunted?



You'll have plenty of time to admire the flowing movement of the hallway carpet. At least it's a new twist on the puke resisitant patterns to which I've grown so accustomed.



I was assigned a newly-redecorated room. Hilton paid an advertising agency to come up with a snazzy way of saying this, and they responded with this little embarrassment. "New'd". That way, they could put a sign up in the elevators telling you that you can "sleep in the New'd". HAHAHAHA. What a bunch of cards!

The room carpet seemed kind of old-skool to me. I haven't seen sculpted gray/green carpet in a long time. Truth be told, I hadn't missed it.



I also didn't miss the mis-applied wallpaper, though I did neglect to take a good photo of it. The faulty part is over by the thermostat.



All typical, I guess, of modern-giant-chain-hotel-by-a-big-tourist-attraction-lodging.

The water, however, was not. I made a cup of coffee in the morning, and noticed it tasted kind of funky. So I filled the glass in the bathroom, and was horrified to see that it looked like milk.



Now you might say "hang on, Misterarthur, that's because of an aerator in the faucet." Sorry, sharp-eyed reader, it's not. I know this because there was no aerator on the faucet, because the water ran clear if you let it run long enough, and because no one at the meeting I was attending could drink the ice water they served at lunch.

Oh, and they charged for internet access, too.

The Claremont

Oh, Claremont, why hast thou forsaken me? I was at the Claremont, again. I was hoping I'd get the promised 11th-stay upgrade, even though (of course), I'd lost my golden ticket. (See below). I arrived at the hotel very very late (3:30 AM my time), and was again greeted like the stranger I am not. My room did seem a little bigger than usual. The message light was blinking on my phone when I arrived in the room. It turned out there wasn't a voice message, but there was a note for me at the front desk. How exciting! I thought it would be a congratulatory message about my upgrade. Alas, it wasn't so. The next morning, when I retrieved the message (oddly, they couldn't turn off the blinking message light until they had printed it out), it turned out to be nothing but a hotel-wide notice that the hotel was now providing shuttle service to downtown Oakland. What a heart breaker.