I recently stayed at the Pineapple Hill Inn Bed and Breakfast in New Hope, PA. I have previously stayed there a few times while in town for Global Traveler business. While I always enjoy my stay at the Pineapple Hill Inn, I would like to offer a suggestion for B&Bs nationwide.

B&Bs usually have some sort of historic theme, and I can find no real reason for this. I would like to see a B&B break format and go with a different theme. I think the historic decor could be dropped in favor of a sports motif. The quaintness wouldn’t have to be lost either. For instance, in the Boston Celtics room, there could be some old black-and-white photos, some hand-stitched likenesses of famous Celtics and a green and white Celtics color scheme. Men would love this (or at least like it more than the usual historic stuff).

I’m not suggesting having old game films available to watch (although that would be cool). There are plenty of nice sports items which could fill a room nicely.

If you think sports would be too much, maybe you’d like a vacation decor. There could be rooms dedicated to Paris, Rome, New York and maybe even Las Vegas. The rooms could be filled with tasteful souvenirs and lovely artwork from each city.

Other possible themes could be classic TV, the Golden Age of cinema or music. The possibilities are endless. If you’re still stuck on history, you could do rooms in 20th-century decades, filled with things from the specific decade.

The intimacy and romanticism never has to be lost, no matter the decor. What makes history intimate or romantic anyway? Any theme could be utilized, while still maintaining the “feel” of the historic B&B if it is done properly.

Hotels are always trying new things to set themselves apart and ahead. Why must B&Bs be forever stuck in history?

– John Wroblewski, distribution specialist

If you’ve been reading my blog over the last few months, you are aware that my younger daughter, Jenny, has been traveling in Europe the last three weeks with a group of fellow nursing students. They have now settled in the picturesque town of Guildford in Surrey, England, to begin their one-month study of community health issues and some practicum experience. Jenny really enjoyed her whirlwind tour of several cities on the Continent but now seems equally pleased to be somewhat settled for a while in one place with a room to herself. I thought I’d just share a few of her impressions of the places she visited along the way and a few lessons she and her friends learned on this, their first big travel adventure on their own.

It doesn’t take much snow to foul up transportation in London. One inch brought havoc to the rail lines, closed the runways at Gatwick for several hours and caused them to rebook on a later flight to Madrid. The girls from Chicago just couldn’t see what all the fuss was about.

Loved Madrid, the Prado Museum, Plaza del Sol and . . . sangria! Also fell in love with Barcelona (I have yet to talk to anyone who’s gone there and doesn’t) and wants to return. After cold and snowy England, the girls loved the sun in Spain.

Jenny celebrated her 22nd birthday in Paris, preferred the Musee d’Orsay over the Louvre and learned a valuable lesson: Check to be sure the site you want to visit is open before you take the time and expense to go there. The group trekked out to Versailles on a Monday only to learn the palace is closed on Mondays (and the grounds, in January, are rather subdued).

Roman men can be charming at any age. On their first evening in the Eternal City, the ladies enjoyed the chivalrous attentions of their “older” waiter (For all I know, he was only 35. Ah, perspective!), and the bartender bought each one a rose from a roving vendor. St. Peter’s was impressive; but Jenny found the colors in the Sistine Chapel to be much brighter than she expected, and the Creation of Adam to be smaller than she thought it would be (again, perspective!).

Squeezing too many cities into too few days along with certain train schedules can lead to frustration. Upon arriving in Florence, the group found that there were no remaining seats available on the train they planned to take from their next stop, Venice, to Munich. Instead, they would have to take an overnight train north, leaving them less than 10 hours in Venice. They never even took a vaporetto to see St. Mark’s Square — sacrilege!!

Food and transportation expenses gobble up the euros; so do entrance fees (and drinks at the hostel bar??).

The Wombat’s hostels in Munich and Berlin offered great, free (except for the tip for the guide), half-day walking tours of those cities, full of great information. Dachau touched Jenny deeply: “I don’t think it is possible to explain how I felt when we were standing in the gas chamber. The evil that existed is unbelievably horrific.”

Be sure you get on the right train. The trek from Munich to Berlin took all day and five trains to accomplish; it should have been one train and a few hours. At least the snowy countryside was pretty!

Based on all the other things Jen has said or written to us thus far, I would venture to say that her greatest lesson is how much there is yet for her to see and learn, and what a great teacher travel can be.

– Patty Vanikiotis, proofreader

My younger daughter, Jenny, is preparing for study and travel abroad in the new year, and so her focus for the last several months has been on where to go, how long to stay in each place and how to get there. Being a child of the Internet age, she has of course done extensive research, visiting numerous travel websites, plotting various itineraries and comparing fares to get the most out of her time and money. Bright and detail-oriented, she has tackled the task with gusto and not a little pleasure, but one aspect of the trip has made planning it more than a little challenging: she will be traveling with seven other girls.

Last spring Jenny learned she would be one of 12 senior Loyola nursing students to serve her community health clinical experience in Guildford, a small city located in Surrey, southwest of London. Four days a week for over a month she will get a first-hand look at Great Britain’s public health service. On long weekends and before and after that term she plans to get in as much travel on the British Isles and the Continent as possible. For two-plus weeks before her study starts, several of her nursing friends will be visiting a slew of cities. Starting in Madrid, they’ll go on to Barcelona, Paris, Rome, Florence, Venice, Munich and Berlin.

Just hammering out that itinerary took some effort, as you can imagine trying to accomodate the wishes of eight young ladies might. When it seemed no one was moving to start nailing down flights and accomodations as this fall term ticked away, Jenny went into full travel agent mode and spent hours finding the most efficient and economical links between cities and options for overnight stays. Frustration struck when, just days before the girls were to gather, credit cards in hand, to book their intercity flights together after agreeing on the details, one of the group finally decided she wanted to explore other options. What about train travel? (More expensive than flying, overall, Jen had already found.) Do we really need to worry about reserving hostels in advance when we’ll be traveling in the off-season? (With eight of us? Are you kidding!?) More than anything, Jenny was more than a little upset that at that late date someone had finally decided to jump in after she had spent so much time and effort on behalf of the entire bunch.

Everything was put on hold for another week as a few of the girls went off to a Student Travel Agency office and came back with an alternate plan that added another city and some Eurail travel — and at least $400 to the bill. The benefits were that the agent would be able to book and reserve all their travel and accomodations at once and bill each traveler separately. Jenny graciously (well, okay, I heard some grumbling) decided she’d just go along with the new plan. She did warn me, however, that if there was any complaining during their travels from the others about not having any money to spend on food or shopping, she might find it difficult to bite her tongue.

Her dad and I have mostly sat back and observed this process, offering a sympathetic ear and only a little advice. We know that all of this is part of learning to be a world traveler, and although Jen has been fortunate to travel abroad twice already, this is her first experience at taking the reins herself. My hope is that once all the bother of nailing down the mundane but necessary details of the trip is done, she and her friends will be able to really enjoy each destination and each other as they explore these new places together.

– Patty Vanikiotis, proofreader

The five tiny towns and their surrounding vineyards of Cinque Terre became an Italian national park and a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1997. The region was recognized, in large part, for “representing the harmonious interaction between people and nature to produce a landscape of exceptional scenic quality that illustrates a traditional way of life that has existed for a thousand years and continues to play an important socio-economic role in the life of the community.” Those words don’t begin to do justice to the beauty of the place, but they do hint at what makes this bit of coastland unique in all the world. The two major industries which provided sustenance to the people who eked out their livings here all those centuries — fishing and winemaking — have, in the last twenty years or so, been joined by a third: tourism.

Certainly now there are more rooms to let, B & Bs, restaurants and cafes in the towns here. However, the physical landscape has prevented widescale changes and overwhelming growth. Whatever semi-flat land suitable for construction that exists here has long since been built upon, so the ranks of tower-like homes and stone churches and towers have not been defiled by modern hotels and storefronts. It is ironic, however, that where some of the terraced vineyards have been abandoned as their owners find less labor-intensive ways to make a living in catering to the tourist trade, the dry-stone walls which contribute to the unique character of the place are beginning to crumble and erosion occur, threatening that very landscape.

Fear not, there are still plenty of vineyards in production, and we were fortunate enough to taste a sample of the local wines over lunch at Ristorante Gambero Russo in the town of Vernazza. The first was a crisp, fresh white, perfectly chilled and fruity without too much sweetness or acidity. One sip and I could feel myself relaxing as we sat at the side of the town’s tiny cove at the edge of the square, listening to the water softly lapping at the curve of sand just below us. Later our charming server, Andrea, brought us a liter of the house white, a smooth, almost buttery wine reminiscent of a luscious Chardonnay. Later I sought out a wine shop and selected one small bottle of one of the region’s renowned late-harvest wines to bring home to share on some special occasion with my oenophile husband. But that was at the end of my day in Cinque Terre, and I have gotten far ahead of myself.

We began our day in Manarola and made our way down to the waterfront. As in all of the towns here, the buildings housing businesses and homes are at least four or five stories tall, packed closely together and stepping down the hillsides along narrow creeks and ravines to the harbor. We were told this was to aid in defending the communities against sea-going marauders of the past, but the balconies, windowsills and doorways decked out with grapevines and flower-filled pots softened what might have remained of more imposing facades.

From Manarola we made our way along the famous Via dell’Amore (Lovers’ Way) to Riomaggiore, the most southerly of the five towns. Today the paved and graveled path is made safe with railings and a widened route, but it is still an impressive passageway literally carved out of the rocky cliffs just above the sea. Here we got an up-close look at those dry-stone walls as well as some of the native vegetation: enormous agave plants and cacti and flowering shrubs and vines. From Riomaggiore we would take a small public ferry boat up the coast to Vernazza, but only if the sea was just right. Even though it was a lovely, sunny day, our guide explained that if the waves were too rough, the ferry would not be able to pull in to the landing to board us. When we got down to the site, we understood what she meant. The “landing” was a slab of concrete that had been poured over the rocks at the water’s edge to create a semi-level surface. The boat pulls up and drops a gangway off the prow onto the pier, and the passengers scuttle across, just above the waves washing over the rocks. It wouldn’t take much of a wind or a rough current to make that maneuver impossible both for the boat and the passengers. Luckily for us the sea cooperated, and we chugged a few miles up the coast, enjoying a fantastic vantage point from which to take in the sweep of the Cinque Terre coast, its villages and terraced mountainsides.

We bypassed Corniglia, another of the villages and the only one lacking an actual harbor at sea level; it is accessible only by foot or via the small railway line that links the villages with the outside world. Our visit this day would also omit a stop in the northernmost town of the five — Monterossa — and the one with the most accessible beaches. In Vernazza we were given at least two-and-a-half hours on our own to eat, shop and explore, and my sisters and I used most of that time for our leisurely lunch harborside. Soon enough we had to meet the rest of our group to board the train for a return trip to La Spezia to meet our motor coach for the rest of the trek back to Livorno.

My brief sojourn in this lovely, remote region left me with the desire to return to spend more time there, for I never got the chance to really climb above the coastline and explore each town more thoroughly. It is a place I would enthusiastically recommend to anyone traveling to this corner of the Mediterranean; just be sure to give yourself plenty of time to enjoy all of it!

– Patty Vanikiotis, proofreader

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Last week our return flight from our New York trip brought us into Seattle close to midnight Friday. After a full day of rediscovering the Metropolitan Museum of Art, a late transcontinental flight and a three-hour time change, we were exhausted and looking forward to a good night’s sleep. My husband, Harry, had found a place new to us, on Expedia, that was only a five-minute drive from the airport and promised to be atypical of the ubiquitous airport hotel. Let me tell you, the Cedarbrook Center did not disappoint. In fact, we could not have been more delighted with our stay.

Washington Mutual built Cedarbrook six years ago as its corporate conference center, and the property adjoins a protected wetlands in a residential neighborhood. Although situated perhaps only a mile as the crow flies from SeaTac and the usual line-up of airport hotels and convention centers along International Boulevard, Cedarbrook provides an oasis of peace. When JPMorgan Chase took over WaMu, the company’s leadership centers on the East Coast made this location superfluous for their corporate events, and the management looked for ways to fill up the gaps in its booking calendar. With some careful wording and an amendment to its use agreement with the local municipality, Cedarbrook is permitted a certain amount of “overnight lodging”, along with meetings, conferences, reunions, receptions and the like. My first-hand experience there tells me it would be ideal for any of those purposes.

The site is made up of three main buildings, no more than three stories high and featuring a Northwest lodge style which blends beautifully into the naturally landscaped grounds and neighboring preserve. The main building houses an assortment of meeting rooms equipped with all the latest audiovisual gear and high-speed Internet connections, in addition to a large central “great room” with enormous stone fireplace, soaring ceilings and clusters of overstuffed sofas and chairs. Adjoining this space is a cozy bar/library and the Stuffed Mushroom Restaurant. Included in our room fare was a generous buffet breakfast here, and even at the end of the service time, we found the food to be well-prepared and a step above what one usually finds at such offerings.

The guestrooms and a sizable, well-furnished fitness center occupy the other two buildings. Each room offers a floor-to-ceiling view, TV, plenty of storage space, a very sizable workspace with good lighting and free Internet access (and, yes, a coffeemaker and Starbucks coffee). It was hard to pick out the best feature of the bathroom: the spacious counter surrounding the sink; the deep, wide soaking tub and shower with adjustable, hand-held faucet fixture; or the plush towels, cozy robe and Thyme bath products.  Cedarbrook offers one more feature, though, which really sets it apart.

Each guest floor has a “parlor” where one can grab a book from the shelves and sit by a gas fire; watch programming or movies on the large TV; or raid the oversized ‘frig for a variety of sandwiches, beverages, yogurt and frozen treats. Fruits and snacks, tea and coffee are always on hand, too. For those just arriving late at night from an Asian or transcontinental trip (like us) whose internal clocks are in some other time zone, such choices are welcome–if not absolutely necessary!

Of course, all the amenities in the world can’t carry a property without the backing of great service. Here again, Cedarbrook came through. Even with our late arrival, check-in was prompt, and queries from our room were handled promptly and cheerfully. I arrived at almost the last possible minute for breakfast the next morning, but I received gracious service and did not feel resented or rushed to finish. Later, General Manager John Murphy was kind enough to give me a tour of the facilities and a sampling of the 102 guestrooms and suites. His obvious pride in this lovely property is certainly justifiable.  Whether you are looking for overnight accomodations for yourself or a location for anything from a wedding reception to a multi-day business conference for 200 or a quiet business lunch for eight, Cedarbrook can fit the bill. My next visit to Seattle, for overseas flights in May, will find me looking forward to another stay there.

Patty Vanikiotis, proofreader