hotel distances

[Henry Spencer]

In article <1990Jul9.133059.25973 at DRD.Com> mark at drd.Com (Mark Lawrence) writes:
>} There may be a problem doing this for Dallas:  the Grand Kempinski (sp?)
>} is off by itself, well away from any other hotels.
>
>Last winter Usenix at Dallas, I stayed at the Hampton Inn which is just
>a few blocks from the Kempinski...  You'll need a rental car
>(or know somebody who has one) to get back and forth though...

If you need a car to get back and forth, I think classifying the distance
as "a few blocks" is misleading advertising. :-)

I've grumped to the Usenix folks about this in the past, in fact:  distances
between hotels should be specified in walking minutes unless you really
could (say) throw a rock from one to the other (or unless walking is
inadvisable for reasons more compelling than weather, in which case said
reasons should at least be hinted at).  "Blocks" are not the same from
city to city, and chamber-of-commerce maps with vague blobs for the
hotels and no scale are useless to car-less attendees.

Even relatively short distances can present problems, as witness the
Inn at the Park in Anaheim, which was "across the street" from the
Marriott... except that what was *really* across the street was the
IatP's big dimly-lit parking lot and grounds, with the hotel at the far
end.  Unaccompanied women would have had a better idea of what to expect
if the distance had been given as "five minute walk", which is about what
it was.
-- 
NFS is a wonderful advance:  a Unix    | Henry Spencer at U of Toronto Zoology
filesystem with MSDOS semantics. :-(   |  henry at zoo.toronto.edu   utzoo!henry