My son and I stayed at the Waimea Country Lodge for a night last month. It is a small, laid-back, budget type of place. I liked it, but then, I’m easy. Be sure to feed me and give me a quiet place to sleep and I’m ecstatic. Anyone who wants elegance and views should just skip staying in Waimea altogether – go for the Kohala Coast or Kona instead.
The Lodge is a motel-style accomodation, where most of the rooms are lined along the parking lot so you can drive right up to your room. I actually liked that – I haven’t stayed at a place like that since I lived on the mainland. We wanted a kitchenette but only a superior was available, so that’s what we got.
The room was clean and fairly large with a vaulted ceiling. The beds were very soft – so soft that I actually slept half the night on the floor because I had a cold and my coughs shook the bed so hard I was afraid I would wake my son up. Luckily the floor and under the beds was clean because the other queen size bed was covered with all our stuff and I didn’t feel like cleaning it off to sleep on. The TV had hundreds of channels – literally twice as many as I have ever seen at any other hotel. I think the receptionist said it was Oceanic Digital Cable. There was free coffee in the morning in the office. There was no air conditioning, but none was needed – it gets quite chilly in Waimea at night.
Waimea is small, and we could have walked to wherever we wanted to go from this location. We did walk to the great castle-type wooden playground twice, and we also walked to the Paniolo Restaurant (which actually shares a parking lot with the Lodge, so it wasn’t far) and we could have easily walked to the shopping center with Subway or Starbucks or the grocery store.
