vacation

Hotel review: Inn on Ferry Street, Detroit, USA

/ Ecossaise / 1 Comment

20141019_110426_HDR

Detroit’s Inn on Ferry Street is a welcoming delight of an overnight address. Or, rather, six addresses. It’s practically an entire street! Comprised of a constellation of six separate century-old homes on a slow, leafy street off main thoroughfare Woodward, you’re sure to be able to find one that suits your colour scheme—and if you’d prefer a whole house and think nothing of nabbing three to nine rooms for the night, you’ve still got plenty of choice. Rooms range from cosy attic perches, placed perfectly for spying on comings and goings, to roomy suites nestled in carriage houses, set back off the street.

We were in a main house room, above check-in and the breakfast room, which saved us from having to brave brisk winds each morning (pleasing!), dashing to and from the extremely generous breakfast spread. Our room was pink. The colour was pretty much what I imagine the innards of a whale must look like. I imagine that sort of thing way more than you’d think. Blame my Bible-heavy Catholic upbringing. Anyway, definitely more “whale innards” than “salmon.” Well, unless you’re someone in the habit of seriously overcooking your fruits de mer or have recently netted a salmon crimson with fury at the prospect of being eaten. Let’s call it “New England Berry Puree” instead. It was a much more appealing room than I have made it sound. Sorry for mentioning whale innards.

I particularly enjoyed that the bathroom soap was a green tea and willow concoction that declared itself the “finest bathing soap.” This description immediately made me want to don a demure Victorian bathing costume and trot off in search of the nearest bathing pavilion. Detroit being a wee bit short on such swimming institutions, I made do with a swift shower and an amble over to the Detroit Institute of Art, conveniently situated about 100 feet from the Inn’s back door.

Spotted at breakfast: a member of seminal Goth band Bauhaus! Wearing shades! Eating granola! Spotted at check-in and at various inconvenient times by the breakfast waffle station: a glowering minivan-load of Ontario lesbians! Including at least two carrying what appeared to be feathered crow costumes! The views from our chamber’s bay window were of the adjacent mansion and the DIA’s and the Inn’s car parks, which allowed excellent spying opportunities as we attempted to work out why a sextet of frowny Canadian ladies were carting crow costumes about with such grave expressions. Were they in town for an ornithology convention, early Halloween hijinks or some feathered flight of fancy? To make a statement about cross-border migratory policies affecting rooks and ravens? Who knows? Alas, our fellow guests were far too frowny to be interrogated about their avian accoutrements.

More perturbing than coinciding with angry ornithologists or Goth demigods on our repeated jaunts down to make the most of the constant supply of coffee and cake in the breakfast room (Cake! 24 hours a day!) was the fact that Google’s first suggested auto-complete for the inn was “Inn on Ferry Street haunted”. I debated whether to tell A or not, but when I did, she was just hugely relieved that I hadn’t told her we were sharing sleeping quarters with any nasty creepy crawlies. While it’s distinctly possible that we simply have the supernatural sensibilities of a brick and so were not in tune with any ethereal inhabitants of the inn, we didn’t encounter anything remotely spooky or suspicious, other than the fact that at least three other breakfast guests leapt to their feet any time we even thought about approaching the waffle maker.

Summary? Go! You’ll like this place. An easy place to overnight and make the most of a first visit to Detroit.

Who would this hotel suit?

*Me!

*The Inn would also win points with my parents, who would have been pleased by the classical music playing gently in the common areas of the inn and by the proximity to the DIA.

*People who travel with their own life-size crow costumes.

*Goth legends.

*Grown-ups, in general, whether solo, couples or friends.

The Summary:

Pros:

*Kaleidoscopic array of clientele. You’ll fit in, no matter how weird you are.

*Plethora of pleasing 1930s/Arts and Crafts-era features, from beds and fireplaces to artworks.

*Tasty local Great Lakes coffee and an array of cake served 24 hours a day. Cake!

*Breakfasts served till 11:30 on weekends—bonus points!— and 10 on weekdays. Tasty scrambled eggs or frittata, plus many berries and many representatives from the muskmelon spectrum.

*Instead of an overpriced in-room minibar that taunts you with treats that will capsize your monthly budget if you dare to even peel off the lid, the Inn has a few demure baskets of cookies and so on ($1 for McClure’s Spicy Pickle Chips! Spicy! Pickly!) downstairs, and a wee selection of wines and beers for less than you’d pay in a corner store.

*Location! Although locals look a bit concerned at the sight of people using their legs to propel themselves, stay at the Inn and you can saunter to the DIA, The Wright Museum of African-American History, Michigan Science Center and Detroit Historical Society. Or you can get dropped anywhere within five miles by the hotel shuttle. The Motown Museum, hip Corktown and the tasty Eastern Market district are within ten minutes drive. Free parking!

*The hotel’s brochure describes it as “aptly accommodating,” which I agree with wholeheartedly. Very apt.

*Every one of the staff I encountered was a fine and entertaining human. If Detroit’s artistic and cultural offerings (and slew of adjacent dive bars) hadn’t been so enticing, I’d have happily stayed in and hung out with the Inn’s desk folks.

Cons:

*The Victorians or whoever built this place in 1886 were maybe better sleepers than us. Voices and coughs carry from the lobby and along corridors.

Hotel review: Echegaray Suites, Malaga, Spain

/ Ecossaise / 1 Comment

June 2014

Are you going to Malaga? Do you like windows? Yes? Well, the Echegaray Suites may be the place for you! It offers a whopping 28 panes of glass in the living room alone! Floor-to-ceiling ones arrayed in a charming bay arrangement on the corner of a historic, pleasingly Spanish street corner! Plus more shutters than you’d find in a particularly sleepy Andalucian village at siesta time. AND the windows have delightful decorative wrought iron railings thoughtfully positioned over the lower bits of window so that you, your cat** or an inadvertently dropped bagel don’t cascade onto the streets below.

And then there are the views! Looking through these 28 panes allows views of quaint marbled streets, bustling restaurants, Malaguenos doing Malagueno things below. And, depending on shutter situations on the other side of the streets, you also sometimes get views into the little old Spanish lady opposite’s apartment, complete with ancient chandeliers and dark, aged, oil paintings of religious scenes. Sounds perfect? Well, it is… unless you are a person even partially partial to sleep.

The variety of noise that will prevent you getting even four consecutive minutes of sleep during the night really is truly amazing. The Spanish may be the most impressively creative noisemakers in the galaxy. And such energy! They think nothing of a rousing chorus of an Enrique Iglesias classic to celebrate it turning quarter past five or an impromptu 6 am drum recital. There’s the general restaurant chatter from the three restaurants opposite, the one below and the two on the side street. There’s the booming gong that echoes through the streets, letting waiters know that it’s time to thunk a plate of overpriced tapas down in front of a baying table of drunken stag lads. There are the whoops and bellows of “Ole” when they do. There are the sporadic whistling competitions, the saxophone versions of The Pink Panther Theme, the flamenco guitar duels, the surprisingly frequent and belligerent piccolo solos. The squeals, the shouts, the singing. My, how the Spanish like to sing! And such a varied repertoire! There’s the nightclub below, which is obviously the most hilarious place to stagger out of in Western Europe. My, how they cackle! And apparently it is necessary to empty all glass recycling bins in the historic centre every 37 minutes all night with a thunderous crash.

And those lovely marbled streets? The Malaguenos love them so much that they despatch armies of tiny marble mopping trucks to clean and polish them on the hour every hour, their tiny wheels squeaking like swarms of terrified piglets throughout the night until 7 am… when the church bells start and the swifts start shrieking their ear-piercing delight at the beginning of a new day.

BUT, despite having detailed these diverse diversions from sleep, it’s such a supremely Spanish cacophony that I was actually happy to stay here for the first night. By the fourth, I was ready to murder myself.

Who would this apartment suit?

*This would be a good apartment for my dad who has excellent eyesight, so would enjoy peering into the darkness of the wee lady opposite’s apartment, trying to identify religious scenes in her paintings. And his abysmal hearing would edit out the worst of the piccolo performances.

*It would also suit someone only wanting to stay on a Sunday night, when restaurants are either closed early or, joy, don’t open at all.

*It would also suit someone with the ability to harness a 747’s worth of white noise and batten it closely to their ears.

The Summary:

Pros:

*Awesome, unbeatable location in the historic centre.

*A truly stunning apartment with soaring high ceilings and gorgeous light streaming in.

*Photos of shoes, plus other perks such as washing machine, TV, microwave, kettle, toaster.

*Pets can come too! (**and are unlikely to cascade out of the windows…)

*This place is so vast that I got different phone network options at one end of the apartment and the other.

*Walking home up atmospheric Calle Echegaray is a splendid experience.

*The ancient original door adds to the awesomeness.

*The soundproofing WITHIN is great… so, um, you won’t be bothered by someone blasting white noise in a desperate attempt to snatch fragments of sleep in the next room.

*Great aerial views of the tops of people’s heads and bird life.

*Excellent opportunities to drop inexplicable things onto plates of people eating below, such as plastic octopii and paper planes featuring poetry about goats.

Cons:

*A tad noisy.