A Grand Adventure

A few weekends ago (is it that long already?) Daniel and I decided to treat ourselves to a night away.  Not only had we been hanging around the house for too long, but the end-of-winter blues had finally worn us down, and - the ultimate decision-maker - it was our anniversary the Thursday before.  We decided to spend a night in Baker City, Oregon, which is about two hours' drive west of here.

We'd been there before (stopped off for icecream on a day trip we'd taken with our friends Keith and Amy), and had seen a lovely old hotel we thought might be fun to stay in.

Introducing the Geiser Grand Hotel:

Daniel booked us the fancypants room (the Cupola Suite on the left-hand corner of the second storey), and we were getting all excited... then Daniel read some of the online reviews.  People either loved it, or they hated it.  And when I say "hated it", I mean they absolutely LOATHED the place. Yikes! 

It wasn't without a little trepidation that we set off on Saturday afternoon - after leaving food and water for the furry ones and telling them to behave themselves (fat chance).

There are a lot of towns around here that are inhabited by the fabulously wealthy who, it seems, only know how to build big and ugly things that they spend the occasional weekend in. Baker City isn't like that at all, for which I am very grateful.

It was founded during the goldrush years (1874) and these days it's a gently decaying rural town with a population of about 10,000.    The advantage of being a gently decaying rural town is that greedy, stupid developers do not come in and raize all of your old buildings to the ground (as happened in Boise and Perth).  Although a lot of the buildings are unfortunately empty, they're by and large very elegant, and the streetscape is quite lovely.

(There's supposed to be a photo here, but I couldn't get the stupid thing to load.  If you do a Google Images search for Baker City Oregon, you'll see what we saw.)

As are some of the architectural details... you know, if I'd been any better at maths, I'd probably be a restoration architect:

But back to the hotel.  It was built in the late 1800's and was apparently quite the place to be seen in its day.  It stood vacant for about 30 years, until some very generous soul (or souls, probably) decided to put seven million dollars into its restoration.  They had a lot to contend with:  the roof was gone, there was one lone original light fitting remaining, and I can only imagine what a mess the birds and rats had made of the place.  Not only that, but they had to reconfigure the rooms to suit today's tastes - everyone wants a private bathroom these days, so they went from 70 rooms down to 35.

A feature of the original hotel had been an enormous lead panel skylight in the central atrium area.  This is what they came up with as a replacement:

And here it is in context:

That's the view from the second floor, where the rooms and library are, and down below is the restaurant.  There was also a dining room and bar downstairs.  I don't know how much of the wood is original, but when the hotel was built it was built with mahogany, and the balustrading was made with brass from a local foundry:

And here are some details from the room we stayed in:

I've come to the conclusion that all the people who gave this hotel negative reviews were quite probably idiots.  I don't know what they were expecting - butlers and obsequiousness, perhaps? - but we found the service and people friendly, the food edible (maybe a little too edible), and the bed was outrageously comfy.  What more can one ask for?

After a leisurely breakfast on Sunday, we spent a few hours wandering around the downtown area looking at all the commercial buildings and lusting after some lovely old homes that we'll probably never be able to afford.  I had wanted to poke around in some junk shops, but most of them are closed on Sunday - this came as a bit of a surprise; the US is a such a 24-hour place that it was a shock to find there are still places that respect the idea of a whole day off.

Oh, we did go to a book store on Saturday.  What a delight to find an independent book store!  I can't think of a single one in Boise, they're all chains.  We decided that we should buy a book to support them, and wound up with one on sausage making.

I was also surprised to find some music books in the second-hand section in the back of the store... remember A Dozen A Day, anyone?

We spent the rest of Sunday going for a drive.  We went through a wee little  former gold mining town called Sumpter (past all the spring calves that seemed to be popping up - or out - all over the place), and then up past a "town" called Granite.  I use that term loosely, because, apart from a few shacks, and a small store with a petrol pump, it seemed there was only an abandoned dance hall and the tiniest church I've ever seen.  It couldn't have been more than five metres square:

We had hoped to keep going up over a mountain pass to a place called Anderson Dam, which is a ski area, and back to Boise, but we were approaching from the back way and the road was still closed due to snow.  We backtracked through Sumpter and Baker City, and then returned to Boise.

It was a lovely getaway, all in all, and a very good cure for the winter blues.  Fortunately, looking at my garden and listening to the birds in the trees,  I can now safely say that spring is here.... Hurray!