Naturally, I did not want to trespass on his solitude, so my wife and I booked a room at a spa hotel distant enough from his cottage for good manners, but close enough to enable us to drop by unannounced.
It has 2,000 hotel rooms, enough to house about a third of the expected participants.
Besides space constraints, the Los Angeles center lacks a nearby hotel large enough to accommodate a big convention.
It's best, we were told, to dress modestly and leave jewelry at the hotel; carry enough cash for immediate needs.
But finding a hotel with enough rooms for 101 musicians, 25 color guard members, a drum major and parent chaperones proved difficult.
Zoelee Worsley, 34, who lives in London and does online marketing for nightclubs, said that on a recent trip to Los Angeles she and her husband could not find a hotel close enough to the sights they wanted to see.
AMENITIES This hotel offers enough amenities — the Exhale spa; the Cutler Salon; the Lacoste store; an Italian restaurant, Asellina, helmed by Marco Porceddu — that its guests may be tempted never to leave the premises.
The décor was generic upscale hotel, nice enough and spanking clean with a newly upholstered couch, two queen-sized beds and padded hangers in the closet, but we could have been in Milwaukee.
There isn't much night life at Big Sky, but after a long day of skiing, a soak in the hot tub, dinner and perhaps an old movie at the hotel were enough.
Villa rentals have been the way to go if you wanted to stay on the island but in June, a hotel sharp enough to suit the crowd drawn to Naoussa opened just down the road from the center of town.
