a- Night 1 and 2, Capital Hotel, St. John's.
b- Night 3, Bridgeway Hotel, Placentia.
c- Night 4, Harbour Lights Inn, Twillingte.
d- Night 5, 6 and 7, Holiday Inn Express, Deer Lake.
a- Capital Hotel is not to far from the airport. Yet not far from the Downtown, considering the size of the city. Rather than that, it is located on a street with all the restaurants around it. So we had no issue finding something to eat. It has a restaurant on the main floor which serve different meals but we never tried it. The place has nothing to offer in terms of view and it is not very clean. I remember that cigarette buts were everywhere in front of the main entrance. Yet it is an expensive place in my criteria. I find it hard to believe that unless you pay a big chunk of money in Canada, you will not have a nice place to spend your night in.
b- Bridgeway Hotel, as its website indicates, is a new place. Only 2 levels and may be not more than 10 rooms. The owner, I believe, has tried his or her best to bring comfort to the place in this little town. The staff are very friendly and helpful. They helped us to find two places that we had in our plan to visit as well as a local restaurant. The cost of the room comes with a breakfast and you simply go down, open the fridge and get whatever you want. The hotel is basically on the main road in Placentia which could be a bit noisy in the evening but by the time we get to the night, the problem goes away. You have a view of the water and that is not bad. What can you expect in a small town? I guess there is another hotel in the town and that is the one which we had our dinner at. It's bigger but I don't know about their quality. The appliances and furniture there were all new and you have free wireless Internet access.
c- Our forth night stay was a bit of adventure which I have written about it in a separate post. This place was even smaller than the previous one with older furniture and low pressure shower but they had a good breakfast. At least I liked it! They serve you fresh fried egg and they have this magnificent home made muffins and local spreed. I guess I had 4, maybe 5 muffins with my coffee as well as the eggs. The staff are friendly and helpful. They had left the main door open for us so we could get in without a trouble late night. This again must have been an old house turned to the hotel and I guess is open only during summer and early fall.
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| A nice breakfast is part of what you get in Harbour Light Inn in Twillingate |
d- I am generally not comfortable when I have to sleep anywhere rather than my own bed but if I have to with adjustments, I will be able to get a few hours of sleep. Holiday Inn had been always known to me as a high quality hotel, above average, close to luxury but the first experience brought doubts to my mind. This hotel is a new one in the town and many things were still looked like they had been just purchased but there were so many issues: The damn mattresses were both useless. With a big hole on each when lying down you felt that you had slipped and fall into a very small hole, almost the size of your body! The hotel is built on a lot adjacent to Highway No.1 but that is not the main source of noise! The breakfast was just awful! There is precooked egg which is called rolled egg in fast food restaurants and is disgusting. Bread was just average quality in the country which is one of the biggest producer of wheat and other grains. Muffins where the worst I have ever had; even McDonald's muffins are ten times better! Coffee is tolerable and there is nothing else but Kraft jam and so on. Of course the hotel has no restaurant and people are encouraged to go to Deer Lake Motel for a meal as well as the other local food joints, mostly fast food restaurants. The type of tissue available in the room proves the lowest quality available in Canada, I'm saying without shadow of doubt! You just use the tissue buy rubbing it to your hands and it comes off like foam when you are washing your hands! I wanted to make a local call from my room and when I reached the last four digits, the telephone started beeping! I told the problem to the front desk but she just offered dialing the number for me without sending anyone to investigate! The elevators, made by ThyssenKrupp making unbelievable noise when going up and down, even worst than our residence, although it only has been a few months since they have been installed. The only thing I liked about the hotel, rather than its tidiness was paintings of an N. L. artist named Allan Loder, from Clarenville. He has pictured the fishing communities of the province in such a beautiful way. I saw a few of his work priced around $300. If I had owned a house and plenty of money, I would have bought myself at lest one!
(Photo, top: The Holiday Inn in Deer Lake. The building is new and nice but the mattresses, probably the most important thing for the passengers, were disgusting which prevented us from a good sleep. If I'm in Deer Lake area again, I will make sure to stay away unless they do something to their mattresses and breakfast!)
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