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 Great Travels
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Hotels And Resorts: 9. Spas and Health Resorts If there is anything in the encyclopedia of ailments that German spas can't cure or aid it escapes me at the moment. About 25 curative spas are considered specially important along with dozens more that are adequately equipped, and all of them have hotels and resorts and more hotels and resorts. The bigger places are play resorts as well as medical goals for the afflicted. German friends of mine who know what cures what tell me that I should stress Bad Nauheim for the treatment of heart afflictions, Reichenhall, Baden-Baden and Badenweiler, for rheumatic or catarrhal troubles, and Aachen also for rheumatism. For a lively sojourn —and hang your ailments, if any!—Baden-Baden seems to offer everything and Wiesbaden almost everything.
The advice in the above heading is important to heed, in general, only in the high seasons of transatlantic transportation and of tourist inundations of Europe's capitals, tourist towns and pleasure resorts. Your travel agent will know, from long and sometimes frustrating experience, all about these full-tide periods. Depend on him. In periods of middle tide and, especially, in low tide, this last meaning November through March, you'll find Europe half empty except in warm Sicily and in winter-sports resorts from Christmas on, and therefore so eager for your patronage that you play the role of an honored guest, favored with the best of service, instead of a troublesome problem.
I would repeat what I have mentioned before, that the big cities of Europe, most notably including Paris, virtually "disband" in the latter half of the summer, fairly pouring their citizens into the various holiday resorts in an incredible flow. The Frenchmen who leave Paris leave homes, not hotels and resorts, so the city's hotels and resorts are not abandoned. Nevertheless, they are not quite so crowded with tourists as they used to be, for the idea has seeped into some American minds that August is not a good Paris month. But if hotels and resorts in the capital are not drastically overcrowded, those in the cool resorts of France and its neighbor lands are jampacked almost beyond hope. For accommodations at such times in such resorts, book solid reservations far ahead.
If you do plunge into the strong tourist stream of Europe-in-summer without hotel reservations, you may still manage to get yourself under cover in many places by industrious footwork, friendly manners and appropriate pourboires to a few head porters, or even to one of them who seems to give promise of being compassionate, despite his embroilment in the rush period. Throw yourself on his mercy. Tell him you are on a terrible spot, due to a slip-up in arrangements.
hotels and resorts—to use the name generically—vary in size from the 6,000-guest Hotel Russia in Moscow, which in 1969 superseded the 2,500-room Conrad Hilton in Chicago as the largest hotel in the world, to 10- or 12-room inns. In addition, there are exotic varieties of hotels and resorts, such as tree-top hotels and resorts, from which guests can observe wild animals in their native habitat; "boatels," providing the same sort of facilities for boatmen as motels do for motorists; and ocean liners, tied up temporarily or permanently to provide extra hotel accommodations at resorts during the peak season, notably the former Cunard superliner Queen Mary, at Long Beach, Calif.
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