Friday, November 11, 2022
Staycation day 14 of 16 and vacation day 5 of 5. Illy espresso for Patrick and me from a machine in our room. We needed variety in breakfast, so we chose to forego our included breakfast in the room. Breakfast at Calistoga Roastery: Patrick had a bacon breakfast sandwich and chocolate croissant with a mocha; I had a bacon breakfast sandwich and Bob's Red Mill cranberry-orange oatmeal with milk with decaf coffee with milk. We walked around other parts of Calistoga we hadn't seen then returned to Mount View Hotel. Packed and checked out. Drove to and visited Culinary Institute of America (CIA), including the culinary garden, the Marketplace shop, and the Chuck Williams Culinary Arts Museum. Classes and events related to Napa Valley Film Festival were in progress. Afterwards we visited Oxbow Public Market (610 First Street, Napa) and lunched at Milestone Provisions: Patrick had a fried chicken sandwich with fries; I had chicken tenders with fries and ketchup and honey dijon dipping sauce. The fried chicken was perfect—very hot temperature, crispy outside, juicy and tender inside. The chicken, the honey dijon, and the fries all seemed to be slightly spicy, but I was able to tolerate them. Unsweetened iced tea for both. We bought some non-perishable groceries at Hudson Greens and Goods. Drove home, unpacked. Here's my review of Mount View Hotel. We stayed in luxury room 226 with windows facing south-southwest. Overall we enjoyed our stay. Check-in was friendly, welcoming, and easy. We were told that we could park in the 3-hour zone on the street in front of the hotel for the entirety of our stay since no one from the city was ticketing, and that turned out to be true. There is no elevator. Our room was up one flight of stairs with a turn, which we did not mind managing by ourselves. In the room the bathroom has a very noisy fan which I thought was too loud but which some might think is a feature. The large, ornate wardrobe contained an extra blanket, which I needed since Patrick prefers to keep the room temperature cool while we sleep. They accommodated my request for no down or feather bedding, and many bed pillows of various firmnesses were available in the room. A small living room leads into the bedroom, and there is no door or partition to permit one to sleep while the other is awake. A television is mounted strategically so that it can be viewed either from the living room couch or the bedroom bed. It at first seems like a horrible design decision, but upon use it's quite practical. We were told at check-in that there was no traditional housekeeping service due to the drought and COVID, and that you could call the front desk for any services needed, and this did not bother us. A programmable safe in the room was problematic because it had a manual lock mechanism rather than a motorized one. The safe door was closed when we arrived, so I was unable to open it to give it a new code. We called the front desk and they arrived and opened it, but I didn't know I needed to set the code before I closed the door, and the door had closed, so we had to go through the front desk unlock process again. It took a few tries to understand how the mechanism worked, but it eventually did work. We visited the hot tub once at night for 15 minutes, and it was enjoyable. Looking outside room 226's windows, in the distance are hills covered with evergreen trees, then closer in town the trees are deciduous and brightly colored in yellows and reds this time of year. Looking directly down we saw outdoor storage for the hotel, which was not pleasant to look at. The room had one heater in the ceiling, and it seemed modern and worked pretty well and struggled to heat only the furthest bedroom end of the room and the bathroom. The room included complimentary glasses of wine each evening, of which we did not make use since we have not been consuming a lot of wine lately. The room included complimentary light breakfast each day, which we used and enjoyed on two mornings. The room included an Illy automatic espresso machine which we used and enjoyed except that the amount it delivered was tiny, even for espresso. We successfully worked around this by simply running each pod twice. During our visit we encountered very few other guests. For example, we had the hot tub entirely to ourselves, and we rarely had to wait for help at the front desk. One evening I tried to reach the front desk by telephone and got no answer then tried a few minutes later with the same result, but it wasn't a problem since we simply resolved the issue in the morning. The room had power outlets but not always in a convenient place, e.g., there were none available near the bedside nightstands. I had brought an extension cord in anticipation of this situation. To use a laptop in the living room, we had to temporarily move the couch to plug in the extension cord, which prevented us from using one lamp, and this did not bother us since there was otherwise adequate lighting. Wifi was surprisingly good for a hotel—about 25 Mbps down and up—but on several occasions my session would time out and I would have to log in again, and this is what I think caused me to receive "conflicted copy" errors with using Standard Notes in a web browser. We were able to easily walk to almost everything in Calistoga we wanted to visit. Calistoga also has a free, on-demand-by-phone-call shuttle within a specific service area, but we did not use it. We did not make use of the pool, which I was surprised to learn was heated, and both the pool and hot tub were open 24/7. In all, Mount View Hotel is a fine place to stay. For our next visit to Calistoga we might stay here but we might also consider Embrace. Dinner at home with Patrick: Del Popolo frozen pizza, water. Afterwards we watched Andor s1:e10 on Disney+. Patrick went to bed. I washed dishes.