Musical Room Hoping
Having a weekend holiday in Wales. Decided to use some of our hotel points and have a free weekend at the Hilton in Cardiff. We had hoped to take the Doctor Who tour over here but they aren’t running it again until Feb. We did walk around the town after getting here and found quite a nice big shopping area, some cool looking pubs, a great castle and animal wall (yes, a bit ambiguous – means there are animal statues on the top of the wall at regular intervals). Had to buy an umbrella which is a great comfort to me as my usual SOP is to buy an umbrella or sweater almost everywhere I go because I have forgotten said item and need it. Have not had to do this in quite some time so it was fun to have to do it again. Of course, as soon as we purchased the umbrella, we returned to the outside where the sun had come out again and it had stopped raining.
Finally getting a bit late so we returned to our hotel room and opted to see a movie. I think I have finally convinced my husband that it is OK to watch movies on demand in your hotel room because in the long run, it’s cheaper than going to the cinema and he doesn’t have to buy me popcorn. As we are watching the movie, we have to adjust the volume because the pipes in our neighbor’s bathroom are whining and vibrating and sounding like a high pitched pipe gone awry. We make it through the movie and head upstairs to the executive lounge for canapés which are almost all gone because we are late to the party. One poor lone hotel lady is there trying to clean up and clear plates from what looked like a stampede. She found us a table and we got some snacks which weren’t wonderful but were fine for substituting for dinner. (We had snacked in the car on the drive).
My hubby says, there’s an owl! I thought he meant a live one but they had one of the big wooden ones sitting on the railing outside our window to scare off the pigeons. Of course there was a big pigeon sitting on the ledge right above it. We did have a nice view of the castle lit up quite nicely from the lounge.
Back to our room and the pipes are groaning so loudly that my husband actually calls downstairs to complain about it and see if anything can be done. He hardly every complains! I didn’t even have to ask him this time so that’s how bad it was. Of course, by the time someone came to see, the pipes had quit but we knew they would start up again. So, they offered to change our room and moved us into a junior suite on the second floor (we had been on the sixth). Luckily, we hadn’t really unpacked anything so we gathered up our bags and coats and trudged down to our room on level 2 which is the same level as the swimming pool and health club and smells heavily like chlorine in the hallways.
When we had arrived at the hotel in the afternoon and entered our room, it was quite hot in there . We had to turn down the heat to about 21C and it was cooling off nicely except for the pipe noise. When we walked into our new room, it was about 10C (50F). I was immediately reminded of our vacation earlier this month in Albania where most of the hotel rooms were around 10C and might get up to 18C if we were lucky. We fiddled with the heater and nothing is happening. We call the front desk again and tell them we have no heat. They send up a nice young man who jumps up to see if he can feel the heat coming out of the vent and it is dead, dead, dead. He opens the ceiling panel to see if he can fix it. He turns off the breaker and turns it back on and nothing. It glows green for a couple of seconds and then goes back to red which means dead, dead, dead.
He apologizes ever so much and says he will find us a new room. In a few minutes he is back with a new rom for us on the fourth floor. Now we are moving into an executive suite room. At our first move, they provided us with some drinks. He moves the free drinks with us and helps us with our bags. This room seems to be ok. The heat is working. The pipes are quiet.
Funny thing, all the rooms have been exactly the same except for the amount of floor space. They all have the same horrid picture hanging over the bed (I suppose it is supposed to be artsy), the bathroom has been quite a generous size in all three rooms but the same in all three rooms. Only the first room did not have a sofa but had just a small table and two chairs. In the junior suite, we gathered a sofa in addition to the chairs and some empty floor space. In our room now, the executive suite, we have the same furniture, the same big bathroom, the same horrid painting, and enough empty floor space that we could put in another king sized bed. What an evening. I have to say though, Hilton was great about accommodating us and moving us and trying to make sure we have a good stay. Love that about them.
The English Years 