Thursday, November 23, 2017

Travel Blogging XXIII

Afterthoughts: I enjoy displays of cleverness in design. In the otherwise quite ordinary Mercure airport hotel in Sydney, I saw an in room feature I hadn't seen before. A 14" square centered at eye level in the seamless wall-to-wall bathroom mirror that didn't steam up from the shower, while the rest of the mirror became coated with condensate.

Curious as to how this was achieved, I felt the mirror where it fogged, and where it did not. The foggy majority was cool to the touch, while the 14" square was quite warm to the touch and hence unclouded. Clearly this was a design feature when the hotel was built and one I've not seen elsewhere.

If they heat mirrors 24/7 using electrical resistance heating, that is a nontrivial cost item. I wonder if they'd figured a way to use the hot water flowing to the shower to heat the mirror, making it do double duty and heating the glass only when showering. That would be doubly clever.

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After two months of no cooking, no housekeeping, no bed-making, unlimited ice cream and sodas and no-charge live entertainment, returning to workaday reality is something of a shock. We will have to go grocery shopping tomorrow, get our mail, handle medical/dental stuff, and get our RV ready for winter camping in the warm south, all while getting over serious jet lag which I experience as a medium-strength hangover atop the remnants of bronchitis.

On the other hand, I won't miss the ship's limited, expensive WiFi, the occasional rough seas, and the petri dish contagion level. Pluses and minuses ... life is full of tradeoffs.