Hotel DeOro

The DeOro sits at 639 Main Street in the heart of downtown Lillooet, an independently owned hotel with twenty-one rooms, all of them on the second floor and none of them served by an elevator. This is worth knowing before you pack the good suitcase. Consider it the only cardio you will do all weekend, and note that the reward at the top is the cheapest respectable bed in town.

The rooms are plain, clean, and honestly priced, with a little fridge, a coffee maker, a flat screen TV, air conditioning, and a private bathroom that puts the toilet and the shower in separate rooms, a layout Europe has sworn by for a century. There is also a fully equipped shared kitchen, so you can cook dinner instead of buying it, though with Reynolds across the way you probably will not.

Continental breakfast comes included, served in the adjoining ground floor cafe: toast, jam, cereal, fruit, juice, and coffee, which is to say everything you need and nothing you will write home about. Rooms have gone for under a hundred dollars, and the money you save funds a slab of Lillooet jade or a very good dinner. That is the whole DeOro proposition, and it is a sound one.