Receipts reveal 'the good old days'

The Golden Gate Bridge as it flows into San Francisco

In addition to bringing home souvenirs from our travels, I also usually keep nearly all of our receipts.

Not only do they give me an indication of how much was spent, but sometimes they are good to have around in case I can’t remember the name of a certain place or restaurant that  we visited.

A while back, maybe three or four years, wife and I were talking about a restaurant we visited on the California coast south of San Francisco.

We couldn’t name the place, and then I decided to hunt for the file I had on that trip.

Sure enough, there was the receipt.

I have  been keeping our receipts from early on, say the late 1970s. 

But that’s changing.

I am not only not keeping a lot of receipts now, I am throwing away those from years ago. Well, a lot of them, perhaps not all.

It's hard to part with memories.

Last week I started cleaning house on receipts. And of course, there were some reminders of the good old days.

Ever heard of the Hotel Californian in San Francisco? The building remains, but the name was changed a number of years ago.

The hotel is located at 405 Taylor Street in the downtown area. It was one of the places we stayed at on a number of occasions.

Ah, the receipts.

How they reveal how good the “good ole days” were. 

There is was. And I’m going to keep it, at least for now.

On our 1993 trip to the City by the Bay, we had a nice, clean, comfortable room on about the 5th floor for the sum of $47.50 plus a $5.70 room tax. The fee for parking our car was $14 a night.

The Hotel Californian is now the Serrano Hotel which offers rooms from $148 to $260.

The old hotel, as much as we could tell, served foreign travelers, young people traveling light, and of course, our kind, looking for a good deal.

And it was a good deal for us. Twenty-three years later, the $148 price still seems OK although I don’t think I would go for the $260 offering.

Those, seemingly, were the good old days. For people just starting out on their traveling life, today’s prices probably look to be a good deal, and 23 years from now, will look that much better.

Next post: Aug. 2, 2016