T A B L E_T A L K What are your favorite wilderness and park areas? Rhapsodize on the topic of their splendor in the Wanderlust area of Table Talk R E C E N T L Y The Deep Fried Potato Bug By Richard Sterling An American challenges a Frenchman to a culinary duel (09/02/98) Camel Trophy's grand finale By Melanie D. Goldman Haircuts and kissing games at the end of the world (09/01/98) When tempers fly By Dawn MacKeen How should airlines deal with unruly passengers? British Airways is going to "yellow card" them (08/31/98) Burning love By Gale Walden Elvis devotees and wannabes gather in Memphis (08/28/98) Angela, the Upside-Down Girl By Emily Hiestand First encounters with Boston -- and with a stripper extraordinaire named Angela (08/27/98) Browse the Wanderlust Feature archives Wanderlust's Official Travel Book Partner		CONFESSIONS OF A HOTELOHOLIC | PAGE 1, 2 - - - - - - - - - - The other day in Chicago I walked out of a hotel without paying my bill. "Of course we never dreamed it was anything but a mistake," said the manager when I called to apologize, but he was lying. The seductively familial feeling of expensive hotels is all a sham. Hoteliers and guests love, hate and distrust each other in about equal proportions. This gives an irresistible tang to my addiction -- a delectable craving for sweet, sour and deceptive. For example, I detest the sort of hotel that carefully calls itself an Inn, often An Historic Inn, where Mine Host (formerly a chartered accountant) envelops me in bonhomie and asks half a dozen times in the course of dinner whether Everything Is All Right. I detest it, but I love it. I relish the exquisite pretension of it all, and actually look forward to meeting the Innkeeper on the stairs to endure another dose of his traditional hospitality. I even -- almost -- like the potpourri smells, like the smells of touristy Gifte Shoppes, with which Historic Inns like to perfume their low-beamed, quilt-eiderdowned, four-posted and traditionally uncomfortable bedrooms. In a way, you see, I make up my own hotels as I go along -- it is part of my disorder -- but then they are seldom quite what they seem anyway. Hotels are arcane and secret places. Next time you walk down a hotel corridor, look through the open door of the next room, and then through the bedroom window beyond, and what will you see? Not the view that you have from your own window, oh dear me no. You will see a landscape totally unfamiliar to you, a magic landscape specific to other peoples' hotel rooms. Only hoteliers know how this is done, and if you ask them they will disclaim all knowledge. It is part of their grand craft and mystery. Myriad hidden passages lie beyond the guest quarters of a great hotel, leading who knows where and patrolled by security men with beepers. All night long there is rustling movement through them, and the elevators -- you must have heard them? -- rise and fall with muffled whirrs. If by chance you run into the concierge in the street one day, dressed in T-shirt, jeans and trainers, it is like seeing through a disguise -- and his response to your greeting will be strangely sidelong and reluctant, as though he is disconcerted to be recognized. I love these esoteric suggestions, for the hotel addiction is not unlike an obsession with conspiracy theories, or mystic convictions about UFOs. There are aversion treatments for my condition, and for a time they work. Prolonged and repeated residence in airport hotels is one temporary cure. A long weekend in an Historic Inn can help. A drastic device called a Hotel Chain Reactor consists of a cassette that you put under your pillow at night that plays over and over again, in a false and artificial voice, "Good evening, how may I assist you? Good evening, how may I assist you? Good evening, how may I ..." But the effect even of this appalling mechanism does not last. Before long I find myself pining once again for that inexplicable view through the next room's window, for the whiff of dried rosemary and lavender across the patchwork quilt, for dear Giovanni bounding over the lobby floor with his card in his hand. It is then that I go to my secret cache in the bookcase, hidden behind Gibbon's "Decline and Fall," and pull out my hoard of brochures. Ah, as I thumb through their shiny pages, all the romance of the old addiction bewitches me once more, the Spacious and Comfortable Guest Rooms, the Ideal Facilities for Executive Conferences, the Cafe Polo for Less Formal Buffet Meals, the Elegant and Historic Inn Offering the Perfect Escape from the Pressures of Modern Life. I am ensnared again by the temptations of Health Spa With State-of-the-Art Equipment! The wicked promise of Remote Control CD in Every Room once again has me in its spell! Hang about, Giovanni, I'm on my way. SALON | Sept. 3, 1998 Wanderlust Contributing Editor Jan Morris is the author of some two dozen works of travel, history and reflection. Her most recent book is "Fifty Years of Europe." - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - T A B L E _.T A L K Are you a hoteloholic? What's your favorite place to indulge your hotel passion? Share your tales in Table Talk.