Blast From the Past! Hillhurst Tourist Home in Perth
A good traveler has no fixed plans and is not intent upon arriving.
— Lao Tzu
To our vast amusement, my Great Aunties, the Stewart sisters Annie, Catherine and Esme, were clearly ahead of the curve.
The sisters turned the rambling old farmhouse, which they called “Hillhurst” , into a Tourist Home…what we would today identify as an upscale Bed &Breakfast or Country Inn.
The Stewarts, being Scots through and through, never threw anything away, so all the old guest
books & registers are still in the house.
These registers reveal fascinating tidbits of history…even though it was early on in the era of cars and highways, when traveling by car was a pretty rough ride, people traveled for miles on road trip vacations. The guest books reveal signatures from folks from all over North America. There are notes from BC and Alberta, as well as from folks from far down in the USA!
The little Hillhurst brochure was actually pretty sophisticated, I thought. Although I am a bit amazed that people in the 1920’s & 30’s would feel it necessary to get away from it all… I mean, I didn’t think life was exactly hectic back then in that pre WWII Era ….but that is precisely the chord that the Stewart gals promoted to prospective visitors.
Come to Hillhurst, they said, and leave your troubles behind! The rates were only $12.50 per night on the brochures we found, and they included “home cooked meals of the best food”!
A recent article I read was touting the very latest in luxury getaways for those people with more money than brains, I guess.
For a mere $2,500 smackeroos a night one could stay at this exclusive, luxurious hotel that would completely unplug you from TV, the Internet, your cell phone. You wouldn’t be able to hook up, because the whole place was unplugged. It was in Northern California, which maybe explains the rates, but still….it floors me that modern people would pay that kind of money to have someone else make sure that they wouldn’t be disturbed, or watch TV, or surf the internet!
So, apparently these days one needs must be forcibly restrained from electronic connection!
And then I ran across yet another article about how in Korea families were sending their internet addicted children into de-programming camps! These kids are so addicted to their electronic crap that they can no longer relate to actual people. But I witnessed plenty of that here in town when I still had the Pub…kids who wouldn’t look up from whatever electronic gadget they had their faces buried in to tell me what the heck they wanted for their meal!
But then, consider all the people you know who are surgically attached to their cell phones. And I suppose we better have a bit of full disclosure here: I do not personally own a cell phone. Nor have I ever owned one of the things. And, I probably never will.
There’ve been a couple of times when I’ve borrowed one to take on a road trip, for instance, for emergencies, but in general the whole idea of being constantly accessible, 24 hours day, 7 days a week, to whoever has my number simply makes my blood run cold.
At any rate, over here at Chez Stephanie there is no TV and no cell phone, but I doubt anyone would pay me the big bucks to come share my genteel dust bunny infested squalor!
Okay, enough digression. The other photos are of our St John River in 1932. You will note, no doubt, that the river is both beautiful and way, way, way below current after-dam levels.
I am offended and PO’ed that various government agencies are suggesting that the Village of PA is somehow mentally deficient because the village was built on the banks of the river.
Stephanie Kelley
