Traveling Light Blog by Travel Writer Colleen Friesen

Glam & Gild

It is when I enter the first hotel room of a trip, like this one here at Seattle’s Fairmont Olympic that I really feel like it’s started…the adventure of living a different life; a life where nothing is known, nothing is familiar and everything, including how to turn on a light is new. 

According to that lovely large tome, The Brain that Changes Itself, it is through travel, learning a new language, learning a new skill, anything that challenges our known world, that we grow and enlarge our synaptic connections. I loved his description about laying down ‘new tracks’, as if we have a myriad of railroads in our brains and the more track we lay, the more likely we’ll find a new path if we find ourselves derailed by a stroke or some other organic catastrophe. 

At one point the author mentions that you should even just switch your cutlery drawer every once in a while to a new drawer, drive a different way to work, whatever you can do to keep your mind fresh and actively engaged in the surrounding environment.

 I’d like to say that I travel strictly for my brain and all those ‘new track’ changes, but it’s not true, because in spite of being in a totally new room tonight, it also has the feel of the familiar, a sweet sort of homecoming, because tonight I am in the Fairmont Olympic and it’s got that whole Fairmont vibe going on.

 Now, I’ve never been here before, but I’ve been in enough Fairmont’s to recognize the ‘coming home’ sense of these places…the thick waxy wrappers on the Harris Miller citron soap, the fat towels tied with the black ribbon with that monogrammed-looking gold “F” festooned in gold script, the swirling “F” on the coasters under my sparkling San Pelligrino bottle.

I profess (perhaps I doth problog too much?) of my love of simple travel, a good hostel, camping under the stars, and it’s true, but man, throw me a king-sized bed, a cloud of a duvet that makes me think heaven might be here on earth and I’m pretty okay with that too.

And like all Fairmonts, this hotel comes with a deep sense of history, starting with the fact that it was built around the former Metropolitan Theatre from 1911. The “new” hotel was wrapped around that theatre and officially opened in 1924, with a one-night stay with bath charged out at a whopping $3.50.

 Flash forward, add in millions and millions of dollars in renovations and sparkle and here I sit, part of history, part of a morphing landscape, part of my changing brain and yet feeling a sense of the familiar Fairmontness of a place; cocooned by gilded mirrors and soft upholstery.

 It is when I’m sitting in a room like this that I can almost imagine what this kind of wealth would feel like…it feels classic and solid, the kind of affluence that is understated and assumed, a wealth of well-built furniture, heavy drapes of cream, gold and chartreuse and carpet with crimson designs cut into the wool and I can even pretend that the monogrammed F on my robe is for Friesen:)

 I wonder if Fairmont needs a permanent ambassador.

 Pick me. I’ll tour all the properties, order endless frosty martinis and shuffle around my room in the mongrammed slippers and robe…Bring it on.