Four UK Hotels -- Rooms and Bathrooms

A first-hand report on four three-star hotels in three places: Windermere, Carlisle and Edinburgh

We are near the end of a wonderful but dismayingly expensive trip to northern England and Edinburgh, Scotland. We tried to be thrifty, using trains, staying in three-star hotels, going for long walks, rationing our museum admissions and not going overboard for dinners. But with £1 = $1.90, everything is expensive. I think even backpackers' budgets must be strained.

We knew we wanted to spend a few days in the Lake District, but beyond that, we traveled free-form, going where the weather promised to be non-rainy. After the Lake District, when we were deciding whether to go north (English border towns, Scotland), we went north, and when we were deciding between Glasgow (west) and Edinburgh (east), we went east. We lucked out and experienced little rain, despite dreary Britain-wide forecasts, but traveling without much of a plan does carry its financial costs.

Just as a frame of reference for the modest hotel report that follows, five-star hotels are luxurious by international standards, and four-star properties are luxurious by most people's standards. Three-star hotels should be beyond basic and more than merely comfortable.

All our rooms have private bathrooms (called "en suite"). In all four hotels we stayed at, the plumbing was downright bizarre. Sometimes the hot water is on the right, cold on the left -- and sometimes vice versa. In virtually every hotel bathroom, it takes a turn or two of the handles or knobs for any water to come out of the faucet, Speaking of faucet, every sink has one hot and one cold. The British plumbing industry seemingly hasn't figured out that mixing hot and cold in the tap is a good idea so that people can adjust the water temperature on a cold to hot continuum.

Whether firm or semi-firm, every pillow on every bad was flat. Not lumpy, but flat. Some people ike 'em flat; some like 'em fluffy. Flat-pillow fans will be happy in Britain. Bed linens were generally smooth and seem to have a fairly high thread count. Hot-water heat prevailed, with individually adjustable radiators in all rooms we stayed in.

All properties included breakfast, and both English breakfasts and Scottish breakfasts, which are virtually interchangeable, can fuel a tourist well into the day. The whole cooked-to-order meal consists of eggs, bacon (like our Canadian bacon or grilled ham) and sausages, perhaps grilled tomatoes and mushrooms and toast, toast, toast. In addition to (or instead of) these hot breakfasts, every place offered fruit juice, two or three self-serve cereals with milk, sometimes yogurt and usually some kind of cooked, canned or sugared fruit.

Every room had a small television -- often with very few channels but always with good color and crisp picture. Every room comes with a very efficient electric pot for heating water coffee and tea, generally with small cellophane packets of cookies.

Generalities aside, here are some specifics about breakasts, details about our rooms and bathrooms, how much they cost and how we found the four places where we stayed:

The Famous Wild Boar Hotel, Windermere

Rambling country inn full of warmth and charm. Located on more than 70 acres with private walking paths, skeet shooting, pond and other amenities. Access to spa and pool at Low Wood, a sister property, several miles away. Acclaimed on-site restaurant and bar. Not convenient without a car. Several miles from Windermere and Bowness (£10+ and £6+ each respectively by taxi). The bus only runs past the inn two days a week -- at least at this time of year.

Breakfast: Real breakfast menu with good choice of hot items, plus cold buffet with self-serve juices, cereals, stewed fruits, cheese, pastries, sliced meat. Good selection of hot breakfasts, including English breakfast and other dishes. Toast. Coffee ( including espresso drinks) and tea.

Bedroom: Room 24 is a very small room dominated by a very large bed. Pretty garden view.

Bathroom: Long, skinny and windowless with a fan that made a terrible racket. Open the door, and there's the toilet, next to which is the only shelf in the room (that's where the liquid soap, bath gel and shampoo dispensers are inconveniently placed). Separate soaking tub and shower. When water is let out of the tub, however, it bubbles up through the shower drain. It could be worse. The hotel makes commendable efforts to be green and save water -- but requiring three or four flushes to get paper down is going too far. We used a toilet across the hall for anything more than paper. It didn't have such a restricted flush.

Booked through: Visit Cumbria.

Cost: Starting May 1 and running through the summer, rates for a "house room," which is what I think ours was, starts at £34 nightly per person. If ours was a "classic room," the per person nightly rate will soon start at £39. For anyone not on a B&B plan or not a hotel guest, breakfast is £10.75 additional per person.

Contact: Crook, near Windermere, Cumbria LA23 3NF; 08458 509 508 (reservations within the UK) or +44 (0) 1524 844822 (outside the UK).

Lakes Court Hotel, Carlisle

Great location in the center of town, right next to the railroad station. Gracious public spaces. Very expensive (30 minutes, £3) WiFi in lobby and bar only. Also, restaurant in hotel.

Breakfast: Crisply set tables. Self-serve juice, cereal, stewed fruit, packaged pastry. English breakfast. Toast. Coffee and tea.

Bedroom: Room 119 sized like a regular US motel room, but with long vestibule. Simply furnished. Front of hotel, so noisy on Saturday night when all of young Carlisle is out, about and loud. Promotional literature proclaims "romantic" hotel; our room not one of them.

Bathroom: Functional, but bizarre retrofit. Walk into the bathroom at bedroom floor level and step up onto a platform (about 12 inches high) to tub, sink and toilet. Potential booby trap that in the US would be lawsuit waiting to happen.

Booked through: Walked in.

Cost: Sign outside said "Rooms from £90." I asked while my husband waited with the bags and was told we could have a double for £70. We took it.

Contact: Court Square, Carlisle, Cumbria CA1 1QY; +44 (0) 1228 531951.

County Hotel, Carlisle

Old center-city hotel. Great location. Creaky, quirky and kind of shabby, but picturesque.

Breakfast: Self-serve juices, cereals, yogurt, stewed fruit. English breakfast. Coffee and tea.

Bedroom: Smile-enducing Room 112. Enormous and yet sparsely furnished in sort of a bordello style -- red velvet and all. Floors creak. Small distant TV and small refrigerator.

Bathroom: Booby prize. Inside bath room with neither window nor vent fan. Stale swampy-smelling air. Brackets for shelf over sink, but no shelf. Pretentious but ill-fitting mahagony panel fronting tub. Possibly the worst caulking job I have ever seen with thick, wavy line of bright white caulk between tub and dark red tiles. Do they allow kindergartners to caulk tubs in Britain?

Booked through: Walked in.

Cost: Double room, £50.

Contact: 9 Botchergate, Carlisle, CA1 1QP; +44 (0) 1228 531316.

Sonas Guest House, Edinburgh

Charming, whistle-clean B&B on a quiet south-side street, just a few doors from an arterial well served by many buses, including routes directly from the old city and the railroad station. Free WiFi.

Breakfast: Serve-yourself juices, cereals and (hooray!) fresh bananas and apples. White and brown toast. Selection of several hot breakfasts, including Scottish breakfast. Coffee and tea. Fresh flowers on the breakfast table.

Bedroom: Room 4 is lovely, bandbox near but very tiny (about 8x10), plus a small vestibule and a bathroom that is just about 5 feet square.

Bathroom: Tub/shower combination. Nicely tiled. Clean and modern. No window. Good, clearing tilting mirror that accommodates all heights. Vent fan a tad noisy.

Booked through: VisitScotland's Edinburgh tourist information office on Princes Street, above the railroad station.

Cost: "Special rate" of £27 nightly per person in a double. Booking agent said it's normall about £35. Booking fee of £4, but most convenient for afternoon arrival in a large city, where the only hotels near the railroad station are luxury leaders, way beyond our budget.

Contact: 3 East Mayfield, Edinburgh EH9 1SD; +44 (0) 131 667 2781.

Summary

Best Room: Sonas.
Smallest room: Sonas.
Biggest Room: County Hotel.
Best Ambiance: Famous Wild Boar.
Most Convenient: Lakes Court and County Hotels, both in the center of Carlisle, steps from the railroad station.
Least Convenient: Famous Wild Boar -- unless you have a car.

Conclusion

Three-star lodgings bring cost of a trip from the stratospheric to the affordable (with prices, if not plumbing, comparable to a high-end motor inn or even a good hotel booked via priceline.com or other discounter in the US).

Exploring Hadrian's Wall

Note: Because this is a walking as well as a travel topic, I have posted this same item on my Nordic Walking blog.

English prehistory is daunting. After all, it goes back to Neolithic times (from around 4,000 B.C.), Celts (800 B.C.), Romans (around 53 B.C. to 313 A.D.). Teutonic Anglo-Saxons (roughly 5th century to 7th century, by which time they had evolved into Englishmen), Vikings (beginning in 865 A.D.), Norman (beginning in 1066) and on through the reigning families: Plantagenet, Lancaster, York, Tudor, Stuart, Commonwealth & Protectorate, Restoration, Hanover, Saxe-Coburg-Gotha and Windsor – and in the north, the Scots. Of the cathedrals, castles and other landmarks from each era, from the Neolithic stone circles (think Stonehenge) to the Millennium Wheel (erected along the Thames for the Bicentennial), the one that most captivates walkers is Hadrian’s Wall.

The wall, begun in 122 A.D. under the reign of the Emperor Hadrian, was built to secure the northernmost reaches of the empire from the Scots. It runs 73 east-west miles parallel to the A69 highway between Carlisle and Newcastle-upon-Tyne. Much of the wall was dismantled, the stones used by later peoples for other building purposes, but some remains – in various states of decay or restoration. It is a UNESCO World Heritage Site, with public footpaths following much of it, including sections atop the wall itself in several places.

From the center of Carlisle, a border town (a small city, really) in northwestern England, we boarded the bus cleverly number AD122 (see above), also called the Hadrian’s Wall Country Bus that makes several multi-stop runs a day between Carlisle and Hexham plus a couple all the way to Newcastle. The Carlisle-Hexham route, in its entirety, takes more than two hours. You can pay per segment, or buy a £7.50 Day Rover ticket that permits travelers to get on and off at will. The first bus leaves Carlisle at 7:35 a.m. and the last returns 8:01 p.m., which leaves plenty of time for sightseeing and walking. A volunteer interpreter rides a couple of the morning buses to tell Hadrian’s story and point out later historic sites in villages en route.

The bus route passes through countryside that is so improbably green and pastoral that it takes imagination to envision it tromped by legionnaires and Scottish insurgents, sometimes running red with combatants’ blood. Stops are at historic sites (including five Roman ones) and in villages with such archetypically England names as Crosby, Brampton, Birdoswald, Gilsland and Haltwhistle.

The last is especially noteworthy for walkers, because the village is in the throes of the 11th annual Haltwhistle Walking Festival. The 2008 festival began on Saturday, April 26 and lasts through Monday, May 5. It includes nearly 20 guided walks of various lengths (1 ½ to 13 miles, including an assisted one of wheelchair users) and various interests (Hadrian’s Wall, woodland bird walk, renewable energy/energy independence and more). Costs range from £3 to £7.

For independent walkers, the two recommended stretches for walking Hadrian’s Wall are from Birdoswald to Gilsland and from Housesteads Roman Fort to Once Brewed, where the National Park headquarters and a large walker/biker-friendly hostel are located.

We encountered legions of other walkers – with one pole, two or none. These included a group on the Haltwhistle Walking Festival “Behind Hadrian’s Wall in Springtime” itinerary, numerous walkers on a British Heart Association fundraiser and so enormous a group of French students that it seemed like another Norman invasion.

The path itself has lots of steep ups and steep downs where it is close to the wall, but there are often milder options in the in the flatter valleys below. Surfaces include erosion-controlling, user-friendly stepping-stones on some of the longer steep sections, gravel, mud and grass. At one point, we followed a sign marked “Old Roman Road” rather than the main footpath and ended up walking through a cow pasture – complete with disinterested cows.

Interestingly to us, in dry Colorado, land administrators urge hikers to walk single file on narrow trails to avoid widening them. Here where it rains a lot, where there are no marked paths, walkers are asked not to walk single file, because regrowth is easier when there has not been much traffic.

One thing we did find is that the distances on told by the guide and even on the map seem to be crow-flight measures, not taking into account the turns in the route or the extra distance added by the ascents and descents. The Housesteads-Once Brewed is always given as 2½ miles. Both of our pedometers and, more significantly, the GPS calculated it to about 4 miles. Mathematical issues notwithstanding, the day was gray, cool and threatened rain that never came. It was a magical route into history almost two millennia ago.

Another option in this region are the Northern Railroad’s guided walks through the Dales and the Eden Valley several times a month from directly from railroad stations on the Leeds-Settle-Carlisle line.

Denver International Airport Expansion Projected

Reconfigured terminal, readiness for rail and new hotel are on DIA's wish list

Back in the winter of 1995, I departed for (I think) Honduras from Denver's Stapleton International Airport and returned home several days later flying into the newly opened Denver International Airport. That was more than 14 years ago, but people still sometimes call DIA "the new airport." Since then DIA has added a sixth runway, at 16,000 North America's longest commercial precision-instrument runway, which in allows fully loaded jumbo jet to take off at Denver's mile-high elevation even during the summer. With more than 52 million passengers, it is the world's 10th-busiest airport. It has only closed twice because of exceptionally heavy snows, once in March 2003 and again in December 2006.

There have, however, been some missing elements for a modern world-class airport, notably a hotel right at the terminal and a railroad station or lightrail station for intermodal connections. The Denver City Council has been presented with redesign plans that could include remaking the "Great Hall," as I just learned the main terminal under signature white Teflon tented roof is call, so that it is after rather than before TSA checkpoints. Designers recognize that snaking lines of passengers waiting to be screened is not the best use of this grandiose space. Also included would be a FasTracks train station at the airport, rail bridges for the route into the airport and a new Westin hotel adjacent to the terminal.

The price tag? It could be a billion buckaroos or so, some of which would theoretically be paid for from revenues and recaptured from increased business generated by shops and restaurants in the main terminal that connecting passengers could access without have to go through security again. The timetable? Who knows?

I don't know whether any or all of this will come to pass, but an exciting side note is that Santiago Calatrava, an award-winning Spanish architect, is on the "DIA makeover team." He is a European architectural superstar who has designed transportation projects around the world. I have seen two of them, one in Manchester, England, and the other in Barcelona, Spain (above right). I hope we'll have a chance to see his work at DIA.

Marinas or Mangroves?

Ambitious marina plan scaled back, and to those with environmental conserns, that's a good thing

My colleague, Jimm Budd, a Mexico City-based travel journalist who sends out daily reports about Mexican tourism, today reported that "Escalera Nautica today has 8 marinas open with seven more in planning stage according to Raul Lopez, manager at San Blas. Not exactly what had been dreamed of a decade ago, but still something. A decade ago, when the project was announced, goal was to open more than 30 marinas along both coasts of the Baja California peninsula as well as along the west coast of the mainland. The government would provide the basic infrastructure, and it was hoped that private investors would come in with the amenities. Lack of enthusiasm on the part of private investors had apparently almost killed the scheme, although Lopez said laws protecting mangroves on the coast were more to blame. Eventual idea is to attract boaters starved for marinas in their home states to come to Mexico."

A website called BajaQuest had other numbers but quoted an earlier report on the same concept:

"The plan calls for 22 full-service marinas, 10 of them new. Of the 12
existing, seven will be improved and five are judged as already adequate. The 10
new marinas will be located on sites with natural shelter, or bays, a feature
the peninsula has in abundance. Five of these are to be in Baja California,
three in Baja California Sur, and one each in Sonora and Sinaloa."

"Additionally, the plan calls for an 84-mile highway route for towing boats
from one side of the peninsula to the other. This feature will allow boat
travelers quick access to either body of water for those without time or
interest in sailing around the southernmost tip of Baja California Sur. Further,
the plan calls for improving the road between Mexicali and San Felipe to allow
bigger-boat towing rigs crossborder access to the Sea of Cortes."

The map (above right) was released in 2001, showing the ambitious scale of the project then. Some people probably still support it. Along the Sea of Cortes, tourism officials have been calling it "the mega-tourism project of the XXI century." That in itself is scary -- especially if you're a mangrove tree or a critter that lives in the mangroves. Environmental authorities call mangroves "the nursery of the seas." These miraculous trees survive and thrive in brackish coastal waters. Their complex root systems provide safe havens for hatchlings of all sorts, and birds nest in the dense foliage. Insects and everything above them in the food chain thrive in mangroves.

Miraculous Mangroves

Below is a mangrove swamp near Ventanilla in the state of Oaxaca. The top photo shows a shallow-draft boat taking tourists to an alligator sanctuary on an island amid the mangroves.

Below, a large turtle suns itself on a stump.


Below is a mangrove habitat, seemingly serene but full of life.


Researchers Speak

The early stages of the Escalara Nautica were not encouraging vis-a-vis environmental stewardship. Back in April 2003 (more than six years ago), the California-based Algalita Marine Research Foundation published its "Preliminary Coastal Analysis of Escalera Nautica at Bahia Santa Rosaliita." This first marina did not involve mangroves, but if the Mexican government and/or developers didn't begin pay more attention to what it was doing, it must be bad news for mangroves and everything else along the Escalera Nautica. According to the report,

"The new marina is located in the northwest somewhat sheltered corner of
Bahia Santa Rosaliita (also spelled Rosalillita, Rosalilita, Rosalia)....The new
marina is located in the northwest somewhat sheltered corner of Bahia Santa
Rosaliita (also spelled Rosalillita, Rosalilita, Rosalia)....

"A new concrete wall (less than one year old) was observed to be heavily
damaged, with extensive cracking, spalling, and exposed rebar. Likely reasons
for this rapid deterioration are poor materials and construction
methods.

"Due to the short jetty length and ample availability of sediment in the
area, it is expected to be difficult to maintain the entrance depth required for
a navigable entrance.... aves will likely break across the marina entrance
during high wave events. Continuous dredging will be required to maintain the
requisite entrance depth and sufficient basin depth.

"Currently, the east jetty extends landward to approximately 10 meters
landward of the vegetation line. It is reasonable to expect the beach east of
the marina to continue to recede landward, likely resulting in erosion behind
the landward end of the east jetty.

"Extensive downcoast erosion has been measured during the first year after
jetty construction. It is expected that some structures will be lost to the sea
within another year. The historic sandy beach that did exist on the east of the
marina has been replaced by a steep cobble and stone berm with some exposed
bedrock and vertical sandstone beach scarping. The downcoast erosion will likely
reach a dynamic equilibrium within a few years."

"The first marina of the Escalera Nautica system is deeply troubled.
The lack of planning and poor selection of location has resulted in a marina
that will be very expensive to maintain. If it is determined that the marina is
essential, we recommend some improvements that will make the marina useful some of the time....

Future Escalera Nautica projects should consult qualified consultants and
perform adequate studies prior to construction."

I sure hope the government and developers have been doing precisely that, but I'm not taking bets.

English Intermodality

Seamless rail and bus transportation makes UK travel a breeze

Last October, I rented a car when visiting Sussex. Ad I blogged then, I hated almost every moment of driving on the “wrong” side of the road, shifting with the “wrong” hand and attempting to be both navigator and driver. And filling up the tank, even of a small, economical car, was painful. My husband and I took advantage of United’s introductory Denver-London fare to come to the UK. We are current in the Lake District in Cumbria (northwestern England), and we decided to rely on public transportation. We traveled from there to here with a seamless chain of intermodel transportation (plane, train, bus, trains and then a taxi). This is how we got here:

1) Boulder to Denver International Airport by car.
2) DIA to London’s Heathrow Airport via United (nonstop). This flight operates on a wonderful schedule, departing from Denver at 8:30 p.m. and arriving the next day at 1:00 p.m. +/-, the variable being how many times the plane is ordered to circle Heathrow (we went around the air loop twice). In any case, early afternoon is a good time to arrive at LHR’s Terminal 3, because few international flights get in then, meaning there are no lines.
3) Heathrow to Paddington Station by Paddington Express train.
4) Paddington Station to Euston Station via #205 bus. The bus stop is a couple of minutes’ walk from Paddington at one end and directly in front of Euston on the other. The fare is £2.
5) Euston Station to Lancaster by on the West Coast line, operated Virgin Trains, a sister company to Virgin Airlines. Our first-class BritRail passes (good four days out of 60) are good on this train service -- and it is the only splurge we are planning for this trip. Complimentary coffee and tea are served (there I am, at right, bleary-eyed but happy with a comfortable seat and a cuppa). Food is available. And passengers are offered a free newspaper.
6) Lancaster to Windermere in the Lake District via Transpennine Express. We had 40 minutes between trains, so my husband stayed with our luggage and I took a quick walk around Lancaster Castle and the priory next door. They were just a few minutes from the Lancaster railroad station.
7) Windermere rail station to our hotel via taxi.

I can’t compliment the train service enough. Not only are the trains punctual but they are clean, the staff is accommodating and the cars well designed. The train even has lavatories spacious enough to accommodate wheelchair users and operated by push button. One button opens the door; two others close and then lock it. The flushing mechanism works, and the sink is equipped with automatic water tap, soap dispenser and hand dryer. How I wish Amtrak could be turned over to Sir Richard Branson or his American counterpart.

TSA Changes Shoe Rules

No, the Transportation Security Agency has not decided that walking through airport metal detectors while wearing shoes does not constitute a security threat. The agency has just tweaked the procedure again -- at Denver International Airport, anway. When I last flew out of here on April 3, passengers had to remove their shoes (of course) and place them in a plastic bin (presumably the one with the paper liner showing a pair of shoes). Today, passengers were instructed to put the shoes directly on the conveyor rather than in bins. This would have been against the rules just a few weeks ago -- maybe even yesterday. The reason, according to the TSAer, is "sanitation. People put food in the bins."

UNESCO to Inspect a Pair of National Parks

Mining is threatening International Peace Park; UN agency to look into the situation

When it comes to global warming, ice is the canary in the mine. The shore-fast ice along the north coast of Alaska and Canada has been thinner and breaking up earlier every spring. Huge chunks of the Ross Ice Shelf and other tracts of frozen water have been breaking off the Antarctic continent. And glaciers all over the world have been visibly shrinking -- not just measurably in scientific terms but visibly in this lifetime. Glacier National Park in northern Montana, with its shrinking and disappearing glaciers, has been a the poster child for climate change.

But there is another threat to Glacier and its neighbor to the north. Coal mining could be a greter problem for Waterton-Glacier International Peace Park, composed of contiguous Glacier National Park in northern Montana and Waterton National Park (above right) across the Canadian border. National Parks Traveler reported that UNESCO's World Heritage Committee voted unanimously to look into the "threat posed to the two parks by [coal] mining proposals for the headwaters of the Flathead River just to the north of Glacier and just west of Waterton Lakes." A dozen US and Canadian conservation and environmental organizations "asked the World Heritage Committee to declare the two parks a 'World Heritage Site In Danger' due to the mining possibilities that Canadian officials so far seem to have supported," according to National Parks Traveler.

"While U.S. politicians ranging from those in Montana counties all the way up to the U.S. secretary of state's office want Canada to block Cline Mining Corp. from scraping away mountaintops in the headwaters of the Flathead River to reach millions of tons of coal, Canadian officials so far have not been keen on the idea," National Parks Traveler had reported earlier.

The UNESCO report is supposed to be completed in 2010, but pardon me if I note that this issue has been around for several years. U.S. and Canadian officials were supposed to be dealing with the mining proposal since at least 2007. The North Fork Preservation Association has been keeping tabs on the situation, including the appearance of the North Fork of the Flathead on an increasing number of lists of endangered rivers, Check out Toronto-based Cline Mining's website to see images of the kinds of mining infrastructure most of us don't want to see in the backyard of our precious national parks or in pristine river valleys. The Cline map shows two coal projects in southeastern British Columbia, where the Flathead River originates: Sage Creek and Lodgepole. I'm not sure whether one or both are what UNESCO will be studying.

In any case, while the inspection team is in the neighborhood, perhaps they might take a look at the remaining glaciers too.