I’ve been traveling, and writing about travel, since 1998. This blog is made up of reviews, narrative, and essays based on my trips. Where I’m republishing old material, I have sometimes had to guess at the date, but nothing should be filed more than about a month from the right time. I’ve also not edited those earlier essays too heavily, even where my perspective might have changed a bit.
The content covers a lot of different things — transportation; practical travel issues; encounters with local people and fellow travelers; museums and sights; restaurants and cooking in foreign countries — but if there’s one special focus, it’s hotels. I’m a hotel junkie. I enjoy looking at pictures of properties I may never visit; reading articles on the latest experimental trend in minibar stocking; hearing about where Ian Schrager is opening a hotel next. I enjoy picking out places to stay. Some of these entries are reviews of guidebooks, pointers to interesting websites, and so on, in case you, too, want to indulge in hotel-junkie-dom.
I’ve also become a bit of a snob, I’m horrified to say — not that I can’t or won’t stay in downmarket places, and in quite recent memory I’ve paid $19 for a hostel bed as well as $350 for a king single. But I dislike being bored by hotels; I dislike beige places, places whose main aspiration is to have no personality and be unmemorable. And I like to write about hotels that are interesting, too, so even though I have stayed at, e.g., the Canoga Park Ramada Limited (and found it a completely adequate example of the genre to which it aspires), I will not be offering a review of that experience. My hotel reviews are based on the idea that hotel reviews should be like restaurant reviews or maybe even Roger Ebert’s movie reviews — fun to read even if you’re not going, offering a sense of the atmosphere of the place rather than a mere catalog of amenities, and even maybe a little insightful about the art form as a whole.
I’m not the Roger Ebert of hotel reviewing yet, mind you. But that’s my aspiration. I hope you’ll enjoy reading.
