I don’t usually do travel tips but one or two here and there will do no harm.

I do not, generally speaking, like hotels that much. I have spent time in too many and while I have been lucky enough to stay in some really up-market places they are still impersonal and usually without much personality. There have been exceptions here and there but on the whole, I have found that inns or even guest houses suit me best – as long as they are good ones of course.

I have become quite a fan of the town of St. George in the south-western corner of Utah and have spent my visits there at the Seven Wives B&B which is not only a comfortable and friendly place but is also a historic site. To quote shamelessly from their website:

Seven Wives Inn consists of two neighboring homes and a cottage in St. George’s historical district. Edwin G. Woolley, who built the larger house in 1873, hid polygamists in the attic via a secret door, after polygamy was outlawed, by the U.S. government in 1882. One of these polygamists was Benjamin F. Johnson, an ancestor of the innkeepers, who really did have seven wives, hence the name Seven Wives Inn.
The house next door, built by George Whitehead in 1883, is called the President’s House because it hosted some of the early presidents of the LDS (Mormon) Church. Who could blame them for staying there? Esther, George’s wife, was said to be the best cook in town!
Both homes were built out of Adobe in the late 1800’s. The Woolley-Foster home was built in 1873 and is both a historical & federal landmark. The Whitehead home also holds a historical plaque.

It is also a little eccentric. On my last visit in October, I stayed in a different set of rooms than I had seen before that included one containing the Model T Ford shown in the photograph. It is, in fact, a whirlpool bath built into a Model T.

And you don’t get much more eccentric than that.

It started with someone in Minneapolis and we will never know who they were though in all fairness to them, they obviously got it from someone else.

They passed it on to a young lady – a nurse as it happens – who was just about to leave for a long weekend trip to Chicago where she was to meet up with a friend of hers from Nashville and, during the weekend the nurse passed it to her friend.

The young lady from Nashville went home and a week later flew to Los Angeles where she was spending a week with a large group of friends and, during the week, she passed it on to my wife who was one of them.

At the end of that week I rejoined my wife to drive up the Californian coast to San Francisco and at some point over the next few days she passed it on to me.

I have no idea who I have passed it on to but I would like to apologise to whoever got to clean out my hire car at Hertz and to the person who rented it after me; to all the people passing through San Francisco airport last Sunday morning; to the entire planeload of passengers and crew on the Virgin Atlantic flight to Heathrow, especially to Natalie who was so attentive to our needs during the flight; to all the people waiting in baggage claim and passport control; to the friendly team working at the Virgin ‘Revival’ lounge; to the people waiting in line at Hertz as well as the counter staff and finally to whoever dealt with and rented the car I left at Peterborough.

So I am sorry, I really am. Whoever you are, I know you didn’t want it because, believe me, we bloody well didn’t and if you feel half as shitty as I do then you have my sympathy.

I was quite right to be concerned about the clothes I took with me on this vacation. People told me that San Francisco may be chilly but I don’t think even those in the know expected anything quite like the last couple of days.

This vacation started in Las Vegas in temperatures around 35C/95F. When I stopped at Barstow, California to get food the thermometer read 46C/115F and the strong wind felt like you were putting your head in a fan oven. Los Angeles hovered around 43C/110F.

San Francisco? I think it maybe made about 14C/58F today. As for the sun – well – it was up there somewhere!

The photo on the left I took at Bryce Canyon, Utah on a cloudless, hot day. Wall to wall blue. The one on the right is San Francisco city taken from Sausalito. I didn’t actually take this one but believe me – this is basically what it looked like today from the island of Alcatraz. And it was bloody cold!

And yes – I had a great tan. Once.

One of the plans for this vacation I am currently enjoying was to drive up the coast road between Los Angeles and San Francisco. We booked a couple of overnights for the journey (Solvang and Carmel) and I was looking forward enormously to seeing the Big Sur area.

Sadly it was not to be. We got up as far as Cambria only to discover that the road was closed some 70 miles north due to sudden fires in the mountains that were caused by a fierce electrical storm the day before. It was estimated that some 800 fires had been started by the lightning.

Still – I did get some enjoyment out of the Cambria hat shop. Well – it wasn’t really a hat shop but it had a large hat section just part of which can be seen in the photo. There were a couple more shelves like this one plus a notice that said if I wished they would open up the ‘hat room’!

But no – I didn’t buy one this time. I probably have enough hats and anyway – I have no suitcase space available this time around.

Down on Hollywood Boulevard in Los Angeles stands the famed Roosevelt Hotel. This is a hotel with history and was, in fact, the host of the very first Academy Award ceremony back in 1929. It has quite obviously seen a lot of Hollywood movie life since then and been changed, modified and butchered over the years in an attempt to retain the Hollywood mystique and to remain part of the centre of Hollywood life.

Take a tip from me – don’t ever stay there.

Perhaps I ought to own up to a few simple facts to qualify this tip. While I have always been a huge fan of movies and movie history I have never been a fan of Los Angeles. This was also my first foray into the Hollywood area and it will almost certainly be my last. It is plain old ugly just like any ageing actress who has had one too many facelifts. It is noisy, crowded and seems filled at all hours with hundreds of young people wearing too much makeup and too little clothing just ‘hanging out’ along with a constant crawl of cars filling the streets with engine noise and horns full of people desperate to get somewhere.

The Roosevelt which, I might add, does not give up it’s rooms cheaply, plays a central role in this and it’s lobby, bars, entrances and corridors seem to be teeming at all hours with the young and beautiful who seem to believe that the way to get noticed is to make a lot of noise. Strike one for getting a good nights sleep.

Two of the first things you notice when you get into the bowels of this hotel are the dark, foreboding brown that everything seems to be painted in along with the low light levels that make it look even worse – and the heat. The long winding corridors are not air conditioned and the rooms, when you finally find yours, just have one of those wall mounted gadgets that can’t cope on a hot day. But the real shock is the decor that they seem so proud of. Wedged somewhere between the 1950’s and the 1970’s and missing out the 1960’s altogether. Witness the basin in the bathroom which is about 10 inches square most of which is taken up by the tap.

If you are a young, hopeful Hollywood poseur who believes that the night time is just for ‘being there’ then the Roosevelt is for you. If you are an ordinary guy who wants a hotel to be a hotel, expects a certain level of service, tends to want to sleep at night and understands what the word ’sophistication’ means then stay clear of this hell hole.

One good thing though. Excellent WiFi internet access (see previous item). There again there was no desk to work at. Not that it mattered as there was no chair either. Obviously the trendy room designers steeped in their retro style and brown paint believe that people in the 1950’s just didn’t sit down. A bit like the hordes of people constantly roaming the corridors at night.