I learned in September 2010 that I needed to travel to the Coral Gables area from Oct. 27 through Nov. 5. I have stayed in Coral Gables in the past (twice in the late 1990s), at a nice hotel in the north end, but a bit of research showed that the hotel in question has since changed hands and is now pretty expensive; I lost interest in it quickly.
So, I did a very comprehensive web search for god but relatively inexpensive hotels in the Coral Gables area, and I kept being drawn to the Gables Inn website. Within 12 hours of having completed my research, my gut sense told me to make a reservation only at the Coral Gables for my upcoming stay in the Miami area; I believe, if I remember correctly, that I prepaid for the stay online via the hotel website to get the cheapest rate.
My stay in the hotel turned out to be wonderful. This is definitely not a 5-star hotel, and it it is not priced as one either, but it provided all the basics, plus some nice amenities that I did not expect. The room was large and spacious and meticulously clean, and while the bathroom showed a bit of age, it was clean and very workable. The desk clerks and the owners were very friendly, as were other guests whom I sometimes bumped into in the lobby when I visited the front desk.
Some of the nights during my stay were rather chilly, and the heat pump portion of the window air conditoner/heater was more than adequate to keep my room very warm, despite the fact that I had windows on both sides of the room open a bit all day and all nite.
About the only negative thing that I can think of is that the room, when I first arrived, smelled rather strongly of chlorine bleach, and I assumed at first that this was likely due to the fact that the housecleaning staff perhaps scrubbed the sparkling tile floors with chlorine bleach (I dealt with the smell by opening the windows a bit.) However, I quickly noticed that the chlorine smell grew more intense after each of my morning showers, and a bit of snooping around and sniffing the tap water showed me that the local municipal tap water seemed to be heavily chlorinated, and that my morning showers were releasing sufficient chlorine gas into the room to create the smell. I guess that anyone who lives in a house that uses chlorinated municipal water would already be familiar with ths phenomenon, but it was all new to me, as I live in a pristine wilderness area in the Appalachian mountains in the mid-Atlantic coast, and our water is fresh unprocessed mountain well water, and so I was and am rather unfamiliar with heavily-chlorinated municipal water!
Before closing, I must also note that there is a great little Mexican taco/burrito joint located just a short walk to the north, and just a few yards further north is Don Pan, an excellent Venezualan bakery/breakfast/lunch cafe that is simply amazing. I walked to each of them almost every day for breakfast and lunch, and sometimes dinner as well.
Overall, I really liked this hotel, and I plan to stay here each time that I return to the Coral Gables area on my trips, and I happily informed the very friendly owners of the hotel (who seem to be two Indian brothers, one of them an engineer-turned-hotelier) of that fact as I checked out on my last morning before heading to the airport.
My memories of this hotel and of the immediate area are all positive, and I would recommend this hotel in a second to someone looking for a relatively inexpensive hotel in the Coral Gables area.
- Gables Hotel Coral
