Now that the Coast Guard has called off the search for 11 workers missing since the Deepwater Horizon oil rig exploded Tuesday, and no oil appears to be leaking from the well head, JadedTraveler thinks its time to rethink oil drilling offshore, despite President Obama’s green light for drilling off the East Coast. With several thousand oil rigs to be decommissioned in the next century, Morris architects have come up with a plan to convert some of them into hotels. Wind- and wave-powered, these rigs will also come with an in-built reef already attached to their underwater legs. As for a beach, there will be a man-made one on the roof. (So far, none are under development, but it’s an interesting adaptive reuse of these oil rigs.)
The Best Western will differentiate among its 4,000 properties by calling them Best Western, Best Western Plus, and Best Western Premier. It’s the dumbing down of hotel management to think that we can’t tell the difference between them just by looking at their facilities and price (and TripAdvisor of course.) At least they didn’t call them Best Western, Better Best Western, and Best Best Western.
If you’re heading to Mexico’s Playa del Carmen to take advantage of post-April 15 price drops, and you don’t want to make the overhyped scene at Deseo, head down a couple blocks to Mosquito Blue. It’s had quite a few years to settle into its location, is blissfully free of flaunting fashionistas, and is the perfect melding of Italian chic and Mexican design, including two small but nourishing courtyards. Okay, there’s no beach, but that’s part its hideaway appeal. A standard room tonight goes for $119.
While earlier in the week a Florida motel guest was smacked in the face by a python wielded by another guest, here we have a woman who found a python in the toilet of her room at the Hampton Inn in La Vista, Nebraska. We know plumbers use snakes, but live ones?
In Long Beach, Washington, the owner of the Moby Dick Hotel is threatening to sell his property to the Aryan Nations if county officials do not stop spraying weed killer on seven acres of oyster beds on Willapa Bay, the last major estuary on the West Coast that remains largely undeveloped. (The poison kills native shrimp, who make oyster farming a whole lot harder.) Owner Fritzi Cohen has had a $3 million offer from the white supremacist group. (Their motto: Stop the Hate, Segregate.) Why Long Beach? Well, its drizzly wet weather does result in some of the whitest people we’ve ever seen.
Did you know that some Online Travel Agents (OTAs) are collecting room taxes from you when booking online, but are keeping a chunk of it for themselves? While they tax you for the full retail price, they pay tax only on the rate negotiated directly with the hotel, which is considerably less. (After all, that’s how they make their money.) What happens to the tax you have paid, but which isn’t remitted to the city and state government? They keep it as profit, despite the misrepresentation.
Moreau town officials in New York state are trying to change the town’s zoning code definitions in order to force out sex offenders who have taken up lodging in motels, many of which also host a number of families with children who have been placed there by social service agencies. It’s a situation that is cropping up all over the country: motels being used as a dumping ground for problem cases that should be under the purview of governmental agencies.
Every Sunday is now car-free in Guadalajara, Mexico’s second largest city. If you’ve ever walked around it’s historic downtown, you’ll know what a polluted maze it has become. Kudos to city officials for six hours every Sunday for car-free travel along 15 kilometers of city center streets. Also in the works: a plan to make the city’s Centro Historico a completely car-free zone.
The Moab Tailings Pile, a legacy hump of radioactive debris leftover from the uranium heyday of the 1950s, has for years been left alone, a sleeping monster. But its location on the shores of the Colorado River — the spigot of the American West — demanded it removal. In a move eerily reminscent of sweeping dust under the rug, the pile is being moved, truck-load by truck-load, thirty miles away. Once disturbed from its decades-long slumber, does it pose a risk to those of us living closeby? I didn’t think so, until one windy day…
