The Victorian Hotel

 

Sadie:  I love them. Old places but especially old big richly storied hotels in western towns. 

Cat:  I worked at an old resort near Denver for a summer. It was memorable but not endearing. I can smell it now - mold and dust. Not entirely unpleasant, or among the least unpleasant things I recall. The work was grueling. It consisted of dragging an old vacuum cleaner to hillside cabins and cleaning all day after serving breakfast, then cleaning ourselves up to serve dinner. We slept in a bunk room under the porch with cheap polyester blankets, no insulation and touching wiring. We got one day off a week, alone, when I would drive to Denver in a borrowed VW Beetle to watch The Rocky Horror Picture Show.

S: It was pretty - that canyon and the trees and the grand old three-story tower. We rattled the bones of that building at that square dance in the lobby. The whole place was alive. Give me an old hotel like that over a new one any day.

C:  Sure, if you like the smell of rotting wood and body odor. The worst place I ever stayed was an old “Victorian” in Texas. Historic, they said. Charming, they said. There were bugs. It was cold. It was windy. The windows whistled and the closest decent restaurant was thirty miles away so we ate peanut butter on stale bread and had bad coffee under dusty stuffed dead things in the morning. 

S: I remember that place. I recommended it to you. The taxidermy display in the dining room was impressive. 

C: There was a grizzly bear behind the table and a mountain lion above it. It felt like I was the meal. And it wasn’t cheap. I’d prefer a new La Quinta or Embassy Suites to fancy crown molding and a piano player in a derby.

S: Dull and anonymous.

C: Just what a hotel should be. I don’t want character. I want to sleep.