“Czy masz czajnik?”
Do you have a kettle? My Polish is a bit rusty and I’ve had to look up the word for kettle, but my request is successful and I’m soon back in my hotel room in the mountain town of Jelenia Gora, brewing a herbal tea.
It’s not very rock and roll but not all travel has to be frantic. I sometimes enjoy a period of quiet time in a hotel room, to simply sit and cocoon, appreciating a break between commitments.
I often use the hours before a midday checkout to sit and read, as a relaxing contrast to the usual busy travel day. On this occasion, I have a limited choice of onward trains: departing at either 5.30am or 12.30pm. I’ve already sampled everything this city has to offer in my research for a travel guidebook, but I don’t fancy dragging myself to the railway station before dawn. So I choose the later train, linger over the hotel’s lavish breakfast spread (the Poles do a good buffet breakfast, with lots of breads and meats and cheeses and pickles), then read in my room until checkout over a fruit tea (another excellent Polish specialty).
I’ve never been that fussed about hotel rooms as I’m usually travelling to experience a destination, and I don’t spend much time in my room. I don’t care if it’s big or small or luxurious or plain, it’s just a place to lay my head after I’ve been out and about all day.
Sign up for the Traveller newsletter
The latest travel news, tips and inspiration delivered to your inbox. Sign up now.
However, every so often an editor needs a piece filed quickly to meet a deadline, so I carve out half a day from my on-the-road schedule and hole up in my room. The Do Not Disturb sign is hung over the door handle, the kettle and coffee sachets (if available) are put on standby, and I tap away at a portable keyboard and tablet.
Amid a busy travel schedule, there’s something calming about spending a few hours in one place, focused on a creative task. On my Eurail trek across Europe in 2025, for example, I spent a solid writing session in my pleasant single room with a skylight in Bucharest’s gorgeous Hotel La Boheme, writing an article about coping without my phone weeks earlier in London.
A few years before, while in the US, I shut myself up in a room at the Sheraton Grand Seattle to write a story about Australian food and coffee in Los Angeles, which I’d just visited. On another occasion in Wurzburg, Germany, I took on an urgent rewrite of a piece about Hawaii’s Tiki culture. Sitting in bed at 6am I furiously redrafted it via frenzied finger jabs on an iPad, before emailing it off and heading down to breakfast.
And in 2015, arriving on a different trip to Poland aboard a train from Vienna, I shut myself away in a Katowice hotel. My mission? Writing an urgently needed article about a tour of Sound of Music locations which I’d taken earlier in Salzburg, Austria, to mark the 50th anniversary of the popular movie. Unusually for a Polish hotel, the room had an electric kettle, so hot beverages were the go as I typed away. To paraphrase Maria, the hotel room was alive with the sound of typing; and that was one of my favourite things.
Tim Richards fell into travel writing after living and teaching in Egypt and Poland. He’s a light packing obsessive, and is especially drawn to the former communist countries of Central and Eastern Europe. Follow him on Instagram @aerohaveno
