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August, 2018:

This Hotel Room

I’m on the road again, this time in San Jose for the World Science Fiction Convention!

For those of you who recognize the title of this blog, here’s a version of the Steve Goodman song that goes with it.

I’ve been in a surprising variety of hotels and motels the past few weeks, from the Carolinas to Key West to California. They’ve all been at least decent; the Hyatt in San Jose that I just checked into last night seems to be the best of the lot. It’s *huge* for one – it’s not a hundred-dollar room in a two-hundred dollar neighborhood; the room appears to be worth the money. Which is a pleasant surprise.

The next pleasant surprise is that there’s a free breakfast for hotel guests. My experience in the past has been that there’s this weird thing with hotels and motels and what they give you for the price.

At the low end, you’ve got your fleabags and Motel 6s, etc. In those, you get a small room, and very few amenities. Then there’s the midrange, where you get all this and breakfast too.

On the high end, a lot of places don’t do the free breakfast thing – they figure that if you can afford the room, you can afford an overpriced breakfast. The high-end places are also less likely to put stuff like shampoos, etc. in your rooms; same thing. (The Hyatt has soap and shampoo in the bathroom. 🙂 ) So I’m very happy to see that I don’t have to buy breakfast goodies when I make my run over to Trader Joes later.