This bed and breakfast is located on the busy main street and although the room has individual air conditioners if you leave the windows open, you're going to hear traffic. The red brick structure houses at least five bedrooms but it's hard to tell for sure because the host lives with her two boys and they must have rooms as well. The boys are teens, but we heard little from them. The younger was on the computer in the front room most of the time. There is wifi, but the host didn't know this. The son told me.
The house itself is exquisitely decorated with lots and lots of little, I don't know what you call it, decorative period touches, I guess. Little boxes filled with little things and little lamps with fringe and little pictures and mirrors hanging. It's a bit much for my tastes, but it clearly all goes together and I think some people would find it very attractive. the rooms tend to be more brocade then laura Ashley. There are little white fridges in each room though which kind of ruin the effect. There is a beautiful deck on the second floor overlooking a beautiful river view.
Despite what is clearly a nice house, we aren't very fond of this bed and breakfast. Like the lodge the last two nights, when we showed up the host just kind of pointed us to our room and then was gone. There was little introduction to the house or even the host's name. She did point out the bathroom (giving us a choice of ensuite or shared--we were the only guests so we could have our pick). We selected the shared because the bedroom had two beds which is a bit nicer for us. however, later we discovered you couldn't even lock the shared bathroom. This was okay for us because no one else was here. The lock had been broken off but the host didn't know it.
At breakfast, we discovered there was another guest. It was by far the worse bb breakfast. The omelet tasted and looked like it came from a Costco package. Do omelets come already made? It had no taste. Even Asha agreed. Potatoes were greasy and the bagel was yucky. Felt guilty not eating and feel guilty complaining about it; it’s like you are complaining about eating at someone’s house. But, not really because we’re paying for this food so it should be decent.
Asha and my general feeling about the bb’s faults were that the host was just a frantic person and seemed stressed out or chaotic and that made us feel a bit stressed in her house. It really matters what the demeanor of the host is.
But our fellow guest was a commercial real estate guy from Toronto and I picked his brain about the Canadian market. He said that it wasn’t that bad. Toronto’s prices had only dropped maybe 5% and western Canada where the biggest price increases were (I guess Western Canada follows the US market more) had 20% drops. He said, their biggest worry was that if American’s stop buying that will really effect all the markets so he hopes that Americans start buying soon but he also indicated that in Canada they think American’s buy way too much without thinking about the consequences and he wishes we’d stop doing that. He said, in Canada you don’t buy houses with no money down. Banks would not give loans for that. And that unless you have at least 10%, the fees are huge. I have no idea how accurate and how generalizable about the entire country his comments are, but it is interesting to realize how different two cultures can be when they seem so similar. He also mentioned that you don’t see huge mansions or large million dollar homes filling whole neighborhoods like you do in the US.
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