For unexpected reasons – a road closure preventing us from passing time at the coastal town of Jardim do Mar – we turned up at Quinta das Vinhas early, to find the reception was shut for lunch.

It’s a small hotel, it’s unreasonable to expect the same levels of staffing as in larger hotels, and we had arrived early. A member of the kitchen staff, who didn’t want to commit to saying we could leave our bags, sought out the hotel’s owner, and he checked us in … after a brief scare when there was no record of us having booked (and paid).

One of the things we like about small hotels is their flexibility. Despite turning up early, we were shown to our room inside the old farmhouse. First impressions were favourable. It was spacy, bright, tastefully and minimally furnished in rustic farmhouse style, with two windows – one overlooking a small garden, the other the pool (on a lower level). When the first flush of new hotel room love had dissipated, we started to notice some flaws.

No air conditioning

We’re used to old houses with no aircon in Portugal, we stayed in one for four years. Open the windows at night and stick screens up to keep the mossies out. However, there was only one screen for two windows. The path to the farmhouse’s lower level was right outside one of the windows. Not a problem during the night, but early evening when we were getting dressed for dinner, it was a choice of closing the shutters and doing it in a sauna or putting on a show for other guests.

No fridge

For accommodation costing just under £150 a night, I’d expect a mini fridge, especially in hot temperatures. Instead, we had to make do with tepid drinking water for the duration; not ideal when your main reason for being there is walking the levadas.

No wardrobe

At first, I searched the room over and over, looking for a ‘secret’ compartment for hanging clothes. There wasn’t one. The ‘wardrobe’ consisted of three coat hangers on hooks on the wall beside the door.

Ghosts in the machine

As expected, sultry nights made sleeping a hot and sweaty affair. Then the weather changed, and the wind swept through the old farmhouse, rattling our bedroom door like an agitated poltergeist.

The wine bar that isn’t

Fancying a glass of vinho overlooking the vines, we popped up to the Wine Bar mid afternoon and were told it didn’t open till 7 pm, when dinner was served there. Having nowhere to have a drink after a day’s hiking was a wee bit of a disappointment. At least there was a local bar/mini supermarket directly across the road. But that’s not quite the same as the hotel advertising it has a wine bar.

The ‘local produce’ menu

A select (not many dishes on it) menu consisting of dishes using local produce sounded enticing, and the food was good, if more expensive than comparable meals elsewhere on Madeira. I asked how often the menu was changed. Because of the ‘local’ ingredients angle, I expected it to be adjusted every so often to reflect seasonal produce. Nope, staff told me it didn’t change throughout the whole year. Even the fish of the day remained the same during our stay.

Premium wines

It’s a vineyard, so we looked forward to trying some local vinhos. Having lived in a wine-producing area, we know the price of good wines in Portugal. At the previous hotel (similar standard) we stayed, bottles of wine started from €16.50. Having a wine list featuring bottles averaging €28 put the Quinta das Vinhas more on a level with Germany and Austria than Portugal. If you’re going to charge luxury prices, then standards elsewhere should justify this.

Checkout

Reception at Quinta das Vinhas doesn’t open till 9 am, the time we wanted to check out to ensure we got to the airport in time for our flight. And the receptionist wasn’t always on the button. We primed her the previous evening, and she opened up at a couple of minutes after the hour, so we considered that a result. But 9 am is late for a hotel reception to open.

There’s much to like about Quinta das Vinhas – the vineyard setting, the charm of the old buildings, the friendliness of the staff, great gardens, nice pools, loads of al fresco places to relax, good breakfasts. But, compared to comparable small hotels we’ve stayed in around Europe, there were areas where it didn’t come up to scratch, not for the prices charged.

Our lasting impression was of a hotel with bags of potential where it felt as though a few corners were cut, maybe because of the pandemic. Nearly all were things that could be rectified relatively easily.

There’s no village nearby, so where have all the other guests gone?

There’s a hotel in Portugal which gets mixed reviews. It’s nothing fancy, but we like it. The hotel is located inside an 18th century building; the décor is unassuming; the grounds are attractive and large, ending where vineyards begin; the staff are very friendly; and the food is decent, but they don’t serve it in a hurry. The only gripe with we have is they don’t serve fresh orange juice at breakfast. In an area where oranges are so abundant they lie on the ground to rot or are fed to the livestock, that’s a crime. But it’s no reason to go all upside-down smile emoji on social media. For some reason people, mainly some of the handful of Brits that find themselves staying at the hotel, don’t like it. Slow dinner service is one of the common reasons given.

Slow dinner service.

Remind me why that’s a problem?

You know what I hate? Dinner in a hotel that’s over as quickly as a trip to the golden arches for a takeaway Maccie D. I really, really hate that. When I was nineteen I didn’t. Then, dinner was a necessary inconvenience which, if it dragged on too long, ate into pub time. Now, dinner is the evening entertainment. The longer it stretches out, the better … as long as we’re kept lubricated.

I especially hate fast-food dinners if the hotel is in a rural location where there is absolutely nothing else to do – no village pub in which to try the local tipple; no pretty streets to wander; no concerts, plays, cultural events to enjoy. When dinner is done and dusted by 8pm in a tranquil rural spot, what then?

And that’s what puzzles me. All these people who crave dinner to be a ruthlessly speedy affair, what is it they’re desperate to get away to do? What is it that awaits them in their hotel rooms? Over the years I’ve witnessed the Marie Celeste effect in countries across Europe, and it baffles me.

Is desire the magnet – the promise of a hot night of passion on the après dinner menu? Are they reading novels so compelling they’ll risk indigestion just to get back to them? Are they eager to hook into their VPN account on their iPad so they don’t miss a single episode of Corrie? Is it a particularly taxing clue in The Times crossword? Do they turn into pumpkins at 10pm? Is there a party nobody’s told us about?

What is it? What is it people get up to in their rooms which makes them crave quick dinners so they can return to them as soon as possible?

And it’s not just that. There’s an equally bewildering bookend to this early-to-bed, or whatever they get up to, behaviour.

They’re not early risers.

We’re often last to leave the dining room after dinner, yet first into breakfast the following morning.

Couples around our age, and that’s the demographic I’m referring to, don’t need 10 hours sleep, do they?

What is it they do which keeps them locked in those hotel rooms for nearly 12 hours?

If anyone knows, please tell me, and help clear up the mystery of the secret lives of hotel guests.

“People who actually unpack their suitcase and use the dresser in their hotel room are at a level of responsibility that I will simply never attain.”

Seriously?

I’m a logistics person. Even brief trips to the local shop are automatically planned out in my head – deciding the optimum time to go and where’s the best spot to park (this is in a small village where parking really isn’t an issue). What to buy is either written on a post-it or, if items number under a dozen, memorised using a mnemonic device – one gun shoots out beer; two shoe filled with butter; three tree hanging with tomatoes… and so on.

The idea of not unpacking the suitcase in a hotel room just doesn’t make sense to me. It conjures scenes of ugly chaos and inefficiency. Clothes strewn across a room seem no different than litter on the roadside, or a kitchen sink filled with dirty plates, cutlery and pots and pans. Andy’s with me on this, neither of us could feel relaxed if we didn’t get rid of the washing up immediately after dinner was over. On my part I put this partly down to being moulded by a Scottish Protestant upbringing where play only comes after all the hard work is over.

We’re not cleaning-obsessed by a long shot, but we don’t like clutter, or understand illogical disorganisation. We can see our neighbours’ terrace from our kitchen window and it drives us, mildly, mad. It looks perpetually like a laundry. At this moment a bed sheet is strung across two chairs. It has the appearance of one of those ‘dens’ I used to make out of bedsheets when I was eight. It’s been like that for five days. Knowing that fact makes me sound like a curtain-twitcher but, in my defence, it’s in my line of sight every time I wash the dishes (immediately after eating meals off course).
There are a few factors which make their ‘clothes-drying’ system nonsensical. The first is the farm has a huge washing line which is in full sunshine most days. When Andy did a wash in the morning two days ago, the clothes were dry by the afternoon. In this part of Portugal it takes no time to dry clothes outside. But that requires walking a couple of hundred metres to get to the washing line which, I suspect, is the problem. That sheet would have been dry within a couple of hours, yet it remains draped across the terrace; a terrace which is open on two sides. When it rains, the terrace gets wet. Yesterday it rained. The sheet which had been dry for four and a half days is now damp again, and probably dirty as it was sandy rain. It is an illogical practice which makes no sense.

I bet our neighbours don’t unpack their suitcases when they go on holiday.

The other part of my anal-retentiveness I put down to a brief spell in the Royal Marines, where a lack of personal neatness during training resulted in punishment. Subsequently knowing how to fold clothes into perfect, magazine-sized bundles rapidly became ingrained. It was a handy skill I passed on to Andy, along-with how to neatly get back into step when marching. We used it over many years of packing for holidays, until we realised all our clothes, with their crisp lines, looked as though they were fresh out of shirt-boxes from the 1960s. The neat rectangles were easy to unpack though; one scoop and they’d move from suitcase to hotel wardrobe, or dresser drawer. We could be unpacked and in the nearest harbour-side bar in half an hour – work first, play later.

Now we’ve evolved from rectangles to a far more casual approach to packing, folding is no longer regimental. But there’s still a system. We split our clothes between two cases, taking half of each case (on the off-chance one goes AWOL). However, we don’t always unpack. Our work can mean we regularly have hotel one-night-stands. The worst case was twelve in a row in Italy. We don’t unpack for one-nighters, it’s not worth it. Mostly we don’t unpack if it’s two nights either, but there’s an exception to this rule. If we’ve had a run of one-nighters immediately prior to a two-nighter, we unpack in order to take stock and tidy things up again (i.e. make sure all the smelly stuff is tucked away between the lining and the case’s outer shell). With stays of three nights and over we always unpack for the simple reason that, for an initial and small investment of time, it makes transient life smoother in the long run. Beautiful hotel rooms remain beautiful hotel rooms, and don’t turn into claustrophobic tips. It’s easier to find the right clothes. And it feels good. Plus, repacking takes no time at all.

I’ve been on holidays/trips with anti-unpackers, they’re generally the ones getting stressed-out from not being able to find what they’re looking for when us ‘unpackers’ are foot and finger tapping impatiently because we’re being held up from doing something exciting and/or fun.

Okay, sitting in a robust, wooden rocking chair in a conservatory isn’t technically being outside, but it is the next best thing… if anything it’s better. It still feels as though you’re immersed in a constantly changing landscape painting; a sun-dappled forest giving way to the emerald Kier Hills. If the weather changes it doesn’t matter.

The hotel itself is an Edwardian country house, which manages to pull off the trick of being both elegant and cosy; a welcoming place in a rural location in which to rest weary heads. Trigony looks and feels uniquely Scottish but not in a hit-you-over-the-head-with-a-caber sort of way. There are a number of qualities that set it apart from other small, rural hotels we’ve stayed in across Europe. A glass holding a batch of ‘pooch passports’ in the reception area instantly speaks volumes about the people who run Trigony. It has the hallmarks of an exclusive lodge, but one without any fussy airs and graces.

From our conservatory we can step straight into the woods and onto walking trails through the soft and seductive Dumfries and Galloway countryside; an activity which helps work up a healthy appetite. This is essential as the menu at Trigony’s restaurant or nook of a bar with its log fire demands you take to your table in a ravenous state. The menu isn’t extensive but it can still be overwhelming – too many “pick me” choices, ranging from the chef’s take on Scottish flavoured classics (Galloway smoked salmon with Sicilian artichoke salad; wood pigeon with Dingwall haggis) to dishes inspired by travels in other countries (Sri Lankan coconut, sweet potato, and mange tout curry). All are helpfully listed with a suggested wine pairing.

Breakfast is no less of a head-scratching affair (locally smoked kippers, haddock kedgeree, Ayrshire bacon, award-winning black pudding, field mushrooms… ). Thankfully, there are plenty more interesting walks in the area to counter the effects of Trigony’s irresistible hospitality.

The Trigony Country House Hotel stamps its own inimitable personality onto the tick lists of all the things we’d hope for from a small, rural hotel. In many ways it captures the spirit of an inn from bygone days (even if it is the romanticised image of ye olde inns which exists in my head). The food is lap-it-up tasty, the hospitality as warm as a roaring fire, and the lodgings über comfortable.

One could be because the owner, Herr Fehrenbach, didn’t so much as blink an eye when we introduced ourselves on arrival with “We’re Jack and Andy, do you have a hacksaw?”
Longish story, but the request was because I’d locked the padlock keys inside our cases and needed one to saw through the padlocks which separated me from their keys.

Another could be that in a land of wonderfully hearty gastronomic fare, Herr Fehrenbach’s nightly culinary offerings were elegant and surprising, involving an imaginative use of local ingredients – black forest cherries, pumpkins, venison cooked in hay, fir sauces, local hams, willow bark, polenta flavoured by wild rosemary and so on.

But the personality pièce de résistance was the hotel’s Sunday breakfast in the barn.

The hoe down breakfast barn in the Black Forest
Breakfast any day at Waldhotel Fehrenbach tends to be a lavish affair, but on Sundays it careens into OOOOk-lahoma territory as it’s held in the hotel’s vast wooden barn.

Think ideal venue for a hoe down and you might be close to its appearance – wooden rafters, walls consisting of chopped logs, wagon wheels, various farming implements, an industrial sized stove in the centre of the room. The breakfast itself is a spread worthy of champions, and their hungry mates – various King Arthur-esque tables covered in cheeses, warm breads, fruit, an array of cold meats and sausages, homemade jams (rhubarb, strawberry, Pinot Noir), cereals including Bircher muesli – a dish which is a must for me whenever it appears on a breakfast spread.

Although the culinary offerings are first class, it’s the setting which elevates it into a unique and surreal experience. I especially loved watching the expressions on other guests’ faces when they stepped into the barn to be faced with a wonderfully outlandish slice of kitsch. As it’s in the Black Forest, known for it’s famous cherry gateaux, maybe that should be kirsch rather than kitsch.

We absolutely loved it.

We’ve stayed in Lisbon on numerous occasions; in both hotels and apartments in six different districts of the city (it’s straightforward to get to all central areas from the airport using the Metro). We now know which areas suit our city slicker preferences, but like just about everything when it comes to travel, it’s horses for courses. This is our totally biased take on the Lisbon districts where we’ve temporarily laid our hats, starting with the nightlife centre of the city.

Bairro Alto/Chiado
Located on a hill directly to the west of the Lisbon’s grand centre, Bairro Alto and Chiado represents the flamboyant, artistic face of Lisbon. Bairro Alto is known for its bars, located in a maze of narrow side streets, whereas Chiado is good for shopping, including book browsing; there are a couple of labyrinth-like livrarias ignored by most visitors. Like everywhere else in the city there are also historic buildings and curious quirks. To the north of Bairro Alto are independent fashion shops (exemplified by those in the Embaixada shopping emporium, the building itself a fusion of Moorish and Art Nouveau influences) and cool coffee bars around Bohemian Praça Principe Real.

The feel – day and night
We stayed in a sexy loft apartment in the heart of Bairro Alto, above the steep street the Bica funicular trundles up and down. During the day it, and the surrounding streets, were quiet, most visitors sticking to the main drag which links Bairro Alto and Chiado with Baixo. After dark there was a Jeckyll and Hyde transformation; suddenly bars appeared and, by midnight, the street which had been sleepy during the day was filled with people using its cobbled steps as seating. It’s a fun place if diving headlong into a vibrant bar scene is what you’re after, but not if tranquil surroundings are important. We loved the energy of the area but were shattered by the time we left.

Ease of getting around on foot
As long as you’ve no mobility problems (streets can be seriously steep) the central Lisbon districts are all well placed for relatively easy access to the main attractions in the city. There’s plenty to explore without walking too far – Mirador de Sao Pedro; the Santa Justa Elevator; Praça Luís de Camões and the statue of Fernando Pessoa outside Cafe a Brasileira. Drop south towards the Tagus and it’s not far to the waterside and Cais do Sodre. Parts of this area were borderline seedy when we first visited. Now it has a trendy upmarket personality with a load of sleek, chic restaurants to choose from including those in gourmet central, the Time Out Market. We were blown away by the market on initial visits, but it’s become so popular it can be too frantic, especially during busiest holiday periods.

Restaurants
There’s simply masses of choice. I’ve a list of restaurants I want to eat at around Bairro Alto/Chiado. Of the ones we’ve already notched up, there have been hits and misses. The Time Out Market wowed us so much we ate there twice when we stayed in Bairro Alto. Cervejeria de Trindade, an institution set in a former monastery, failed to impress. 1 de Maio is a Tripadvisor favourite which we thought was decent. But now that we’re far more familiar with traditional Portuguese cuisine realise it’s more overpriced than we thought at the time. Favourite was as a result of a local tip, the cosy and eclectic Estrela da Bica where we had an introduction to petiscos (small dishes) with a difference.

Offbeat appeal
There’s still a community feel to Bairro Alto, especially noticeable during early evening between the times visitors head back to their accommodation and the bars hit their stride. One of our favourite ways to while away late afternoon/early evening is with a bottle of Sagres under the grotesque gaze of Camões’ mythical giant Adamastor at the Miradouro de Santa Catalina. The sunset scene there is not one which will suit everyone, maybe too authentically grungy, but it’s one which for us captures the easy feel of the lost afternoons of our youth in places like Hay-on-Wye.

In future we’ll take a closer look at staying in other Lisbon districts, including Alfama, Mouraria, Oriente, Liberdade, and Baixa.

It’s a popular hotel and the merest criticism of it on social media had some regulars bristling. But it made me wonder if the people who championed it had actually stayed in any other hotels since 1985. The way the owners lazily rested on their laurels got me thinking about how much imagination is put into hotels now. Innovation and little touches which put a smile on the face are the norm rather than the exception, even amongst the budget end of the market.

It made me think of the hotels we’ve stayed which surprised in a good way, especially which particular features had us as giddy as children given free reign in a sweet shop (or, to avoid being as as dated as that Tenerife hotel, an Apple store).

The Rat Pack minibar in Salzburg
This is a tough one to start with as there were any number of sassy design features I could have selected from the Hotel Auersperg in Salzburg, so many it could double as an avant-garde furniture store. The one which delighted most was a Rat Pack mini-bar – an über-cool place to store booze in so many ways. Forget exploring the city, pop a cork, take a generous slug and slur your way through Little Old Wine Drinker Me.

We mainly think of hotel rooms as a base, a launching pad from which to explore. But the Aursperg’s was so comfy and chic it was like having your own private style bar… with bed. This is the sort of vibe I want from a hotel room.

I’m going to cheat and mention another top little touch – a retro CD player with a couple of CDs, including Cape Verde’s Cesaria Evora. Her voice had such a haunting impact we sought the album out in Mindelo on São Vicente when we visited Cape Verde islands the following year.

A couple of days earlier we’d been at what had been the first hotel we stayed at which had a bathroom with a glass wall, the Barcelo Santiago in Puerto Santiago, Tenerife. The contrast between the old school personality-less style hotel room and one which featured chic design elements was jarring, making the old fashioned hotel room seem even more out of time, especially when it came to comparing bathrooms.

One was the sort of place in which you spend as little time as possible, barely functional. The other was a bathroom in which to linger, luxuriate and have fun. I’m sure it was meant to be sexy chic, but to me, the first time I saw the frosted glass bathroom wall, about a decade ago, it seemed too good an opportunity for indulging in some silly shadow puppet theatrics.

Since then we’ve stayed in numerous hotel rooms with glass wall bathrooms. Over the years the frosted glass becoming less frosted and more panoramic window – rooms with a view of a quite different kind than that which E.M Forster wrote about.

Some offer the ability for some privacy, with a modesty blind or lattice doors. With others it’s a case of ‘it’s show-time folks’. Our room at the Hotel Relais San Lorenzo in Bergamo, Italy, had a glass cubicle shower in the centre of the room. We liked it. It was imaginative, modern and sexy. But we’ve never had a problem with sharing a bathroom with each other. Plus, anyone who’s travelled a lot will have encountered bathrooms with limited privacy – we’ve washed in external latticed shower cubicles in Jamaica; an outside shower in a jungle campsite in Sri Lanka was basically a reed cubicle with a bucket. On the Isola dei Pescatori on Lake Maggiore, the bath in our room came with dreamy views of the tiny island, whilst at the Mate Alicia in Madrid the bathroom had floor to ceiling windows so you could watch the comings and goings in Plaza Santa Ana from behind a foamy mountain in the bath.

These exposed bathrooms split opinions. Like I said, we’re fans of rooms with individual personalities but not everyone feels comfortable about using transparent bathrooms.

One guest at the Relais in Bergamo commented “The bathroom is a glass cube integrated into the room – opaque, thank Jesus – but still inconducive to private ablutions.”

In a Guardian article about transparent bathrooms, writer Emine Samine admitted to extreme measures in order to maintain dignity – “I had to use the loos in the communal areas. Judging by the queues, I wasn’t the only one who had a problem with the in-room version.”

In a similar feature in the New York Times, an online travel editor said he gave this advice to his wife when confronted with a transparent bathroom- “Look, when you go to the bathroom, let me know, and I’ll look the other way. ”

In a rant about exposed bathrooms, travel blogger Angelina Travels tells how she resorted to “… having to block the window entirely with various objects to ensure privacy.”

To be fair to Angelina Travels, her exposure concerns were as a result of sharing rooms with friends, male and female. The others were quoted were sharing with their partners.

If you’re like us, you won’t be fazed in the slightest by walking into a hotel room which includes a ‘theatre’ of a bathroom.

But if you’re like the guest who found the whole glass bathroom experience traumatic – “there was nowhere in the room I could look where I couldn’t see my wife in the shower, it was awful.” – always check out photographs of hotel room bathrooms before booking.