Eastward Ho!
I'm headed back to Maryland to visit my cousin, taking a different route than last year. The first day was mostly about getting myself out the door and on the road to Cincinnati. I had decided to splurge on my first night accommodations after seeing the description of this Best Western in a part of Cincinnati called Mariemont. The neighborhood feels trendy and affluent, and was originally the vision of Marie Emery, who wanted to establish an English-style country village.
The historic 1929 hotel has been updated with modern fixtures. There are nice little touches like motion-activated floor lights to help with navigating to the bathroom in the dark, interesting key cards with unidentified photographs on them, and the TV is hidden behind a scrolling painting (see photos and video below).
This is the back of the hotel, which was the only part lit well enough on my evening walk to photograph well:
This is one of the motion-activated floor lights. They are really bright, but they only stay on for about a minute unless they detect motion.
After I learned to insert the top of the head into the key card slot, I grew to like these cards quite a lot. Why can't all hotels make it so pleasant to notice which end of the card goes in first?
This is where the TV was hiding:
If you want to see more (and better) photos of the hotel, check out their website: https://mariemontinn.com
However, walking around the neighborhood, I wasn't able to find a backdrop to the fountain that comes close to matching the painting, so if it's a real landscape it's not from this neighborhood.
Driving to the hotel, I was surprised to see an asphalt company -- surprised because I could see huge mounds of dark material from the street. Then I was even more surprised to see a second one. Clearly I was driving through the asphalt district. I decided to see if the Google satellite map of the area looked interesting and found a bit of an anomaly. They must have decided it was getting too dark at just the spot where the asphalt companies were located and came back the next day when it was lighter out:
The historic 1929 hotel has been updated with modern fixtures. There are nice little touches like motion-activated floor lights to help with navigating to the bathroom in the dark, interesting key cards with unidentified photographs on them, and the TV is hidden behind a scrolling painting (see photos and video below).
This is the back of the hotel, which was the only part lit well enough on my evening walk to photograph well:
This is one of the motion-activated floor lights. They are really bright, but they only stay on for about a minute unless they detect motion.
After I learned to insert the top of the head into the key card slot, I grew to like these cards quite a lot. Why can't all hotels make it so pleasant to notice which end of the card goes in first?
This is where the TV was hiding:
This is how I found out where it was hiding:
You can see it in action here: https://youtu.be/En11SdP28xg Sorry for all the camera movement - the switch is so close to the TV and it all happens so fast that either I had to find an assistant, or I had to move around while recording that.
This fountain that I saw on my evening walk reminds me very much of the fountain in the painting that hides the TV:
However, walking around the neighborhood, I wasn't able to find a backdrop to the fountain that comes close to matching the painting, so if it's a real landscape it's not from this neighborhood.
Driving to the hotel, I was surprised to see an asphalt company -- surprised because I could see huge mounds of dark material from the street. Then I was even more surprised to see a second one. Clearly I was driving through the asphalt district. I decided to see if the Google satellite map of the area looked interesting and found a bit of an anomaly. They must have decided it was getting too dark at just the spot where the asphalt companies were located and came back the next day when it was lighter out:
The blue square in this larger view is roughly the area covered in the photo above, and you can see that the shadow effect is even more vivid above that area:
That wraps up what I found interesting about Day One of my trip.
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