16 November 2010

Mountain View

I've never understood why, at fancy resorts in Hawai'i, the ocean-view rooms cost an additional arm and leg more than mountain-view rooms.

As a happy free-loading travel writer in Hawai'i, I was from time to time offered free rooms in resorts and hotels, and usually given a luscious ocean-view room. But sometimes, during busy seasons, when happy free-loading travel writers were barely tolerated, I was put in a room over the air-conditioning fans with a mountain view. Aside from the turbo-blowers, I couldn't have been happier.

The ocean is very beautiful and dramatic and a source of timeless poetic inspiration -- for about five minutes. Then it's just really big and flat and the direction from which the tsunami will come while you're sleeping.

I've always preferred the mountain view. Here there is character and history and solidity for those of us with floaty psyches in need of an anchor.

Which is one more reason I love my new home, Switzerland. Here hotel guests pay a premium for mountain-view rooms, though I suppose if a Swiss hotel ever opens with 700 floors, the ocean-view rooms on top will be fairly pricey.

But you won't find me up there. I still love the mountain view. Like this one from a couple days ago outside our house.

4 comments:

  1. Wow, what a gorgeous view! Looks like a picture....tee hee!

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  2. I think if I were staying in a hotel in Switzerland, I'd be happy to pay less for the rooms with the ocean view rather than the mountain view. Nice picture. Is that Russia from your front porch?

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  3. Mountain view is great as long as it doesn't raise your horizon too much. Rather than tsunamis lots of other trouble can come down your way, and I don't mean the occasional off-piste skier. So a bit of distance wouldn't be bad, which combines well with the first objective.

    So were did you hide the lac I expected to see from where you're at?

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  4. Hey George, yeah, that's Russia -- at least that's what this pretty but stupid American lady told me who was passing through.

    Anon, we hid le lac down the hill behind those trees.

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