Hotel Notes

The tour itinerary was:

Chancellor Hotel, San Francisco – 5 nights
Monterey Hotel, Monterey – 4 nights
Ragged Point Inn, near San Simeon – 1 night
Hotel Oceana, Santa Barbara – 2 nights
Doubletree Guest Suites, Santa Monica – 3 nights
Hollywood Roosevelt, Los Angeles – 4 nights

It seemed that each hotel was better than the last, although all of them were good. The Hollywood Roosevelt is desperately trendy, and a place where LA wannabes go to be seen. It was so achingly hip I don’t quite know how they let us in. Poolside (the pool itself has a mural designed by David Hockney) was populated by ‘the beautiful people’, in other words anorexic chain-smokers who ever take their pagers and blackberries into the pool with them.

In the evenings there was always a queue of wannabes trying to get in so that they could hand out at the poolside bar. The velvet rope and a seven-foot bouncer kept the out. People obviously thought I must be famous when I wandered back into the hotel late at night armed with a Starbucks coffee, bypassing the queue with no more than a “alright butt” to the bouncer.