Well yesterday was certainly an eventful day. I’ll start mostly with the good stuff since it actually was a very good day for the most part, despite an awful finish.
We were awakened around 6am with a visit from Luke after a poor night’s sleep the night before - partly because it was quite hot and our cramped room had no air-con, fan or ventilation, and partly because the hotel was noisy. The walls were certainly not sound proof and I could hear everything that was going on - and I mean everything!
But anyway, after we’d all woken up and got a shower we hopped on the tube into Covent Garden where we met up with Matt, a good friend of ours who lives in London now. We spent a great day hanging out with Matt and seeing the sites of London from the top of a roofless bus. I’ll post some pictures later.Took the kids to the Tower of London to see lots of cool armour and weapons and the crown jewels, looked into an awesome bookshop, and finished up with dinner at planet Hollywood. Then we bid farewell and caught the tube back to our hotel in Marble Arch.
Arriving at the hotel we discovered that we had been moved from one of the small double rooms that we were in the night before to the triple room we had paid for, although still up several flights of stairs. Reasonably satisfied I went back down the stairs to Jen and my room to use the bathroom - and that’s where things rapidly deteriorated. I had locked the door in the bathroom when I went in there and on trying to leave I discovered the lock was jammed and I could not get out. And I had the key to our room so Jen could not even get into the hotel room itself. After tring for a few minutes to get the lock open I heard Jen knocking on the door outside so I shouted for her to get help. The lady showed up, let Jen into the room with an extra key and then disappeared again, for several minutes. Jen had no luck opening the lock from the outside and after a while had to get the lady back to try and help. She was worse than useless, initally trying to call people to come and help, and then banging around on the door with no idea of what she was doing. Meanwhile I was sweltering in this hot cramped room with this awful banging on the door. The kids had come down and were outside getting stressed about it all. I was just glad it was me and not them locked in there, or Jenni, who has been a bit sick at times the last week or so. Eventually, after more than half an hour of me being locked in this tiny hot room, they basically ended up kicking the door in and breaking it up, with me cowering in the corner of the tiny shower, worried about the door falling on me.
I took a minute or so of silence to recover my composure, had a hug from Owen, and then calmly walked into reception to inform them that we would be checking out immediately and would need a full refund for the next two nights. And this is where things got even more awful. I had got a “cheap” rate on this hotel by booking a non-cancellable or refundable rate, although in retrospect even that rate seems exorbitant for the quality of the room, but nevertheless I was not prepared to stay in such a hell hole any longer and considering my traumatic experience I considered it quite reasonable to expect a refund for our unused two nights. But this woman would not understand. She offered me a 50% refund but said there was no more we could do. I demanded a full refund. She tried to call her manager but he was unavailable in a meeting (late on Sunday night?) so I said she needed to take responsibility. By now it was coming up to 8:30pm and the kids were not in bed after a long tiring day. Anyway to cut a long story short it took over half an hour of arguing with this woman to finally get our refund. And I’m sure the whole hotel would have been aware of what was going on.
Once we finally had our refund I then had the task of trying to find us another place to stay, in London late on a warm rainy Sunday night. So I trapsed around looking for internet access - supposedly Starbucks had it but it wouldn’t work, neither would McDonalds. And no-one in this part of Beirut London seemed to be able to speak a sentence of English or give me any guidance whatsoever. Finally I found an internet cafe and started getting numbers and phoning around, but no-one had any rooms. Meanwhile Jen’s mum was talking to the staff at the hotel and the lady said she would try and find us a room. Eventually she came out saying she had booked us two rooms at a good price at a Travel-Lodge “not far away” and had ordered a taxi to come and pick us up in “5 minutes”
Half an hour later the taxi finally arrived, charged us 10 pounds more than the price we were quoted and started driving to our new lodgings, and driving, and driving, and driving…. After getting lost twice on the way and spending 20 minutes outside the wrong hotel trying to work out if this was the one, we eventually arrived at the travelodge, to find that they had no idea who were were and the lady had not booked us any rooms. Fortunately the guy here was very helpful, found us two rooms for the next two nights (very basic but at least we have room to move and a spacious bathroom with a working lock) and helped get the luggage and two sleepy kids upstairs for a much better night’s sleep.
So that’s about my worst hotel experience ever. I’d better stop this now as we half to walk half a mile to the station to catch a 35 minute train ride back into the city in time for our booking on the London Eye. Today is going to be a good day, no matter what.
London Eye - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
