Whenever I drive through the village of Flesherton I do an 'eyes left' to acknowledge the former hotel at the main intersection. I usually turn right there and north again up through the Beaver Valley's romantic scenery. That is to avoid the boredom of Highway 10 as it drags on towards Georgian Bay.

Like Owen Sound's former Seldon House hostelry, the Flesherton inn no longer welcomes the travelling public. is a muckle of years since signed the register there. I was en route to attend to some business at a place called Swinton Park, so named by a nostalgic English pioneer for his home which is now part of Greater Manchester. The architecturally undistinguished redbrick pile now stands on the back roads of my memory as the first hotel room of which, at age 20, I was ever the sole occupant. I recall the strange sense of being incarcerated behind a door to which myself held the key. As night fell I was for the first time alone and unknown. Through the floor came the cacophony from the ground floor room that few would dignify with the name "pub".

The hotels I have known improved, necessarily, thereafter. I think that the Royal Connaught in Hamilton provided my next hospitality away from home even though I did think of the tombstone of the late W.C, Fields which is said to read, "All things considered, I would rather be in Philadelphia". To Torontonian, Hamilton suggested Fields's estimate of Philly. Then there was the Spartan room opposite the railway station in Moncton NB where the red neon glow from the station across the road woke me at 3 a.m., afraid that the forest fires through which had driven down through the province had caught up with the city.

If memory serves, the next room was at the Drake Hotel in Chicago. On my way to an academic conference, it was there that I shared a room (dining room in that case) with Louis Armstrong and have ever since known not to call him "Louie". He spoke to us at each table, introducing himself as "Lewis".

This column, then, is about guest rooms I have known, places about which one can say, "Been there". They are not, however, recorded sequentially. When I was a university student in the summertime employ of the Canada Steamship Lines the Mount Royal in Montréal and the Chateau Frontenac in Québec City were familiar stopovers. Now a distant memory is the girl who, in a charming accent, wondered whether I might regret being tout solitaire one evening. Wisely, I said I did not. It was only partly the truth. Foolishly, one remembers another 'first'.

The next time I stayed in a French language hotel my wife, Lois, was with me. The venue was the Ritz in Paris. We would on another occasion be guests in a hotel in the Rue du Bac on the Left Bank, next to the Eglise St-Thomas d'Aquin. When both our room window and one in the church were open we had a bird's eye view of the altar. Then, years later, there would be the Novotel in Bagnolet, the 'New Toronto' of Paris where jet planes rule the air. For the moment, however, as mentioned above, we were at the Ritz and enjoying the services of a chauffeur from the Bank of Montreal, a branch of which was nearby in the Place Vendôme.

The month was June. The chestnut trees along the Seine were in blossom as we browsed the bookstalls, watched a bateau mouche ply the river and the pompiers hose down their fire-fighting boats in the early morning sun. Then it was back from Versailles or Fontainebleau to the Ritz where, in 1997, film would record for ever the comings, but not the goings, of Diana and her paramour through the very doors that had been opened for us.

Part of the charm of European hotels is that they change so slowly. The Waldorf in London's Aldwych was once for me the welcoming 'same old, same old', backing onto Eliza Doolittle's Covent Garden marketplace. That changelessness may not long be the case at the Savoy, formerly the most English of hotels, which opened in the Strand in 1889. My memory is of a room with a balcony overlooking the Victoria Embankment along the busy river. I was part of a Canadian delegation to give the British press a preview of the next year's Expo '67 in Montréal.

The Canadian Fairmont chain has begun more than $200 million worth of renovations at the Savoy. Will Richard D'Oyly Carte's grand hotel, "encrusted with legend and anecdote", ever be the same? Monet painted views of the Thames from there and the theatre in which the Gilbert and Sullivan light operas were first produced is part of the complex, along with that great restaurant, Simpson's in-the- Strand.

London's Regent Palace holds a musical memory. We had arrived there late one afternoon in 1956 and wished, after a quick meal, to attend a West End theatre. We asked at the lobby booking office what might be available. "I have two seats for a new play that is just around the corner", said the attendant, "but you might not like it. It's a religious thing". We took the tickets and saw "The Sound of Music" at the Palladium. We liked it.

Mention should be made of The Empress Hotel in Victoria. It celebrates its centenary this month. And of the Hotel Regina in Venice, across the Grand Canal from the Salute (Our Lady of Health) Church on the steps of which guitars and accordions fill a summer night with melody. One thinks, too, of the Park Hotel in D_sseldorf where a German friend from student days declined to join us for dinner because Adolph Hitler had favoured it when he was in town. And of the Hotel Mediterraneo on the Arno riverfront in Firenze. And there was that intimate place at St. Margaret at Cliffe, Kent, where one could lie in bed and watch ships plying the Channel. And a score of others.

For all that, I still do an 'eyes left' in Flesherton ON.