Hotels Again
Homewood Suites, San Diego
So to catch up on the hotels we've been staying in. The Homewood Suites San Diego Airport (Liberty Station) was pretty decent. For a quick overnight stay it has everything the business or leisure traveler can want except a restaurant. And even at that there's a breakfast served in the morning with a hot item or two.
The rooms are pretty spacious, on order with say a Embassy Suites though the living room area has been compressed somewhat and a full kitchen has been shoe horned in. The bedroom is reasonably spacious with lots of room to stretch, if you're inclined that way.
The kitchen is fully equipped so if you're someone who doesn't like eating out, or like us, someone who likes bringing leftovers back from the restaurant, than this should work out pretty well for you. We didn't have any leftovers so we couldn't try out the fittings. No mini-bar, either, so no snacks, though there is a small sundries and snack area down next to the check-in desk if you get the munchies late at night.
In contrast to the size of the suite overall, the bathroom was miniscule. It had all the standard less expensive shampoos and soaps. Bath towels were of less than luxurious standard but acceptable.
Overall, Homewood was a pretty good place to stay. The addition of an exercise room as well as self service laundry was greatly appreciated. We'd stay in one any time we needed someplace to hang for a night while on our way from place to place. One caveat, though. The one we stayed in was brand new. It's even possible that we were the first people to stay in our room. So we can't confirm how well the upkeep and cleaning is performed at this chain overall, though in our experience it is usually dependent on the management of the individual hotel more than anything else.
Four Seasons San Francisco
Every time we've visited San Francisco we've stayed with good friends in the city. For a change of pace we decided this time to stay downtown, and also to splurge a bit (actually a lot). This visit marks the first time I believe that we've ever stayed in a Four Seasons, mainly because they're damned expensive. On the other hand, after staying there it's pretty obvious what you're paying for. The hotel is, as advertised, right downtown about two blocks from Moscone Center.
The hotel interior is frankly, just stunning. The lighting, the décor, the art, it's all understated and quiet and just drips money. There are original and for the most part attractive artworks everywhere you look. The overall color scheme is copper and cream, dark stained wood and marble.
The rooms are just about as attractive as the rest of the hotel with cream and yellow walls and grey blue carpeting, Our room was large and well laid out though the long entry hallway was pretty much just wasted space. Our view had the bay in the distance though a little closer in was a construction site. Oh, well.
We ate lunch and dinner in the main restaurant, Seasons, which was again, as attractive as the rest of the hotel. Lunch was very good though we might have been the only two tourists in the place. Much of the rest of the clientele were people having business lunches and women who a friend of ours termed 'ladies who shop'. Breakfast was also quite good and the proportion of business people was up and ladies down. Still just a minimum of tourists.
Overall service was on a par with the best we've experienced. When we indicated that we wanted a taxi to go to another restaurant a mile away for dinner, they supplied us with the hotel limo to take us, gratis. All of our requests were met with quiet efficiency and charm. There is a spa but Mary didn't have time to check it out. I did check out the gym which was actually a health club on the lower floors of the building. It's a very extensive facility with lots of trainers running around to make you feel a little bit more overweight and old. I did my time on the treadmill and escaped back to the room quickly.
We'd be happy to go back to the Four Seasons anytime we could scrounge up a few spare shekels. Or a few hundred. It really is a wonderful property. The location is central and the hotel, as might be expected considering its cost, seems to cater largely to the business crowd.
Peninsula Hotel Hong Kong
We decided to stay at the Peninsula in Hong Kong because it was an historic property built during the fading years of the Empire and has figured prominently in the city for much of its life. The original hotel has been updated quite effectively and an additional and much newer tower has been added to the original building with magnificent views of the harbor. We didn't stay there. We stayed in the original building and we had a nice view of the YMCA.
Still, the rooms were really quite attractive. White walls and incredibly high ceilings. You could easily play basketball in these rooms. The décor is tasteful and understated. The bathroom was grand, with white marble everywhere.
The hotel public spaces are very appealing. The main lobby is largely taken up by the lobby restaurant, called interestingly enough - The Lobby. Lots of marble floors set off lots of columns which support a very extensive amount of mouldings and plaster or marble fittings.
There is pretty much a whole shopping mall built into the hotel, with three floors of the most expensive retailers one can imagine. Prada, Bulgari and lots of stores for which I recognize the name but am not that familiar with their products, nor to be honest do I ever want to be all that familiar with them. Not my kind of thing, my sartorial tastes pretty much run to Eddie Bauer and.......Eddie Bauer Online. I'm a pretty simple guy though Mary seems to think this statement means something else, 'cause she giggles every time I say it. Weird.
Besides The Lobby there are a plethora of other restaurants and a couple of bars. The main bar is also a smoking and cigar bar. Don't bother going unless your tolerance for tobacco is much, much higher than mine. It still seems a little unusual to me to smell tobacco smoke inside a building. We ate a couple of breakfasts and a lunch at The Veranda which had a very, very nice buffet breakfast and an unusual set lunch with a buffet salad and hors d'oeuvres bar as well as a dessert buffet, along with a plated entrée. Different, and the buffet element was very nice. Even Mary agreed and she doesn't much like buffets.
We also had dim sum one day for lunch in the hotel's Spring Moon restaurant and it was excellent, though expensive. Restaurants we didn't try out included Imasa (Japanese), Gaddi's (Italian), Felix (trendy - it's on top of the tower with views of the harbor. Every description we saw started with person who designed the space and gave no indication on what type of food was served - a bad sign). Finally and most intriguingly, there was Chesa, which offered Swiss cuisine. Not sure why one would pick a Swiss restaurant for a Hong Kong hotel, but it amused us no end. If we had had a little more time I think we probably would have tried it just to say we ate in a Swiss restaurant in Hong Kong.
Service at the Peninsula, as we expected, was superb and unobtrusive. We took an inexpensive local taxi back to the airport. On our arrival and then again when we transferred from the Disney hotel to the Peninsula we also used local taxis, none of which had a trunk big enough for our luggage. And we're not carrying all that much, just one suitcase each plus our carry-ons. So every time we took a taxi they had to bungie cord the trunk closed. Mary didn't notice this when we took the first taxi because it was dark and she was tired. She did notice the second time when she glanced out the rear window while we were tooling down the highway and clutched my arm and announced in a panicked whisper that the trunk had sprung open. I explained that the luggage was secure or mostly so and she was partially relieved. So it came as much of a laugh when we observed another party being helped into one of the signature Rolls Royce limos owned by the Peninsula, to find out that the trunk of the Rolls was very little larger than those of the taxis and had to be bungied closed also.
We did take advantage of a hotel-arranged free cruise of the harbor at twilight. They take you too and from the ferry building on an open vintage double decker bus. Most cool. And there was champagne. Also cool.
We really enjoyed our stay at the Peninsula, but to be honest the jury's still out on whether or not we'd stay there again. It can be breathtakingly expensive if you can't find a deal. The location is wonderful for the harbor view of Kowloon -- well, it is if you get a harbor view room. Our room could have been in any large city in the world for the most part. It's not terribly easy to get to many of the places tourists want to go from the Peninsula, though the ferry building is only a block away. So that's easy. We had no complaints about the hotel whatsoever; I just think we might have liked another location better. On the other hand the historical value of the hotel itself is pretty amazing. We'll be popping back through Hong Kong later during the trip and we're scheduled to spend the night in the Intercontinental Hotel, which is right on the harbor and a block from the Peninsula. We'll see how we like that.
