Hotel Aficionado

I wouldn't call myself a hotel aficionado, but I do stay in them enough since I began working for Apple. And I've found myself comparing and contrasting. I tend to always go with Marriott because I travel mostly for work and they have a loyalty program that gives me free room stays when I'm NOT traveling for work. Hotel room costs are usually the largest of a trip, so it's nice to have free stays periodically.

Right now we are staying in a Springhill Suites in Flagstaff. We chose this hotel because it has two queen beds for Kris, me and the kids, as well as a living room area with a couch for Sam. The room itself is amazingly nice. There is a nice roomy closet for all of our snow gear, a desk area for laptops, free WIFI throughout and a microwave/fridge setup. There are even little mounted booklights above the bed so Kris and I can stay up reading while the kids sleep peacefully next to us.

There is some strangeness though. The pool is indoor and heated, which is sort of a requirement for Flagstaff, but the temperature of the pool is at the bare minimum to be comfortable. My kids have barely any fat on their skinny little bodies, so they got cold quickly. There is no hot tub to thaw out in. It seems odd to have a heated pool that is just on the cusp of being too cold to swim in.

After swimming we came back up to the room to rinse off the kids in a bath. With the water as hot as it would go it was at a temperature that I would use in the heat of summer in Tucson. Once again, not so cold as to make you not bathe, but cold enough that you wish you could turn it hotter.

Lastly, I plugged in our portable DVD player so the kids could watch a movie cuddling in bed together. Kris' Grandmother gave Elias a movie for his birthday so he was itching to watch it anyway, and after a romp in the snow they are physically beat. With this portable DVD player, either my cable or the AV out is not so premium, because whenever I plug it into a TV I have to turn the volume up really high to get it to a normal decibel level. Following this hotel room's tradition of minimums, the TV only turns up to 25, which in the case of my DVD player means it's JUST barely loud enough to hear. Luckily I'm not a big fan of loud noise, especially in a hotel room.

None of these things are enough to make me say "I would never stay here again!", they're just unusual given how nice the place is and how new it is. Maybe all this traveling for work is turning me into a hotel snob.