Which hotel would you rather stay in?
If you're like me, you pick hotel number two, hands down. It looks woodsy and cabin-y and cozy, where the other one looks like a place where someone might get murdered (especially since there were a couple of murders outside of Yosemite ten years back). Certainly not the sort of place you'd want to take your 70-something mother and one-year-old daughter.
Well, that just goes to show you how pictures can lie, even when it comes to pictures that hotels themselves who should know better, offer as their own marketing material. Hotel number one pictured above is actually a lovely place to stay and the place where my family moved at the last minute when I made an executive decision that hot summer weather + no air conditioning + incomprehensibly, no screens on the windows that opened out to brazen squirrel and bear and who knows what other wild animals territory did not equal a fun or even particularly safe outing for said family.
Now, I can appreciate that Yosemite has a policy of no air conditioning in hotel rooms within the park. I personally don't even mind hot weather, as long as it is not of the humid, east coast variety. And I like to rough it as much as the next person. But there is a reason for family-style lodging: different members of the "family" (think very old and very young) have different standards of comfort. I can't for the life of me understand that a hotel that charges a not-cheap $230 per night can get by not offering screens on its screen doors, that you essentially have to keep open to prevent suffocation. They warn you not to keep food in your cars because of the bears, then they let you pay to sleep in wide open rooms that provide less protection from the elements than a tent!
Some other things that the room at the dreadful Yosemite Lodge at the Falls did not offer:
-- any adequate lighting. I'm thinking there were two 25-watt bulbs in the whole room.
--housekeeping. This room was filthy.
--a view of the falls. Not even close.
(And, don't believe the pictures in that link. They are LIES!
I would have just stuck it out for the one night we were there, had I not been very worried about my mom, who apparently likes humid heat better than dry heat. I made an executive decision to leave that night, even if it meant that we had to drive all the way back to San Francisco. But after a very snarly desk clerk gave us a hard time when we asked for a refund ("we've been in business xx years and no one else has complained..." yeah, right) he referred us to his super-nice manager who somehow got us into a very lovely room in the very lovely (very dingy photo notwithstanding) Yosemite View Lodge.
It's not lovely in a five-star-hotel kind of way, but is just what you want when you've been driving all day with a carload of kids or other family members and need a clean, comfortable, cool place to unload everyone. There's a swimming pool here, and because it's outside of the park limits, the rooms are air conditioned. It's also quite a nice layout that the above photo does not at all capture. Not one building but a series of buildings, almost like a little village, where you can walk around, meet other folks and not feel confided to your room. Somehow, for the same $230, we got a two bedroom suite with TVs in all three rooms. No, I don't ordinarily go to Yosemite to watch TV, but let me tell you, it had been quite a day by that time.
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