The Early Bird Gets the En-Suite

"You can drop off your bags here and then you'll have to go over to the public car park. It's just down the street."

No parking was just the beginning. There was also no en-suite bathroom. Something I pointed out to the young man when he showed me to the room.

"There's only a sink in here. That's not an en-suite."

He informed me that it was a private bath. It was just across the hall instead of attached to my room. I still wasn't happy. But, it was a lovely room. Beautiful, soft, seaside blues with snowy white linens. He showed me the nice fluffy robes they provided for that walk across the hall. (That's nice, but not as nice as having an en-suite bathroom.) And look at the height of the mirror! What do you think I can see?

When I still wasn't happy our host and hostess pointed out to me that I HAD booked the cheapest room, which was the only room in the hotel without an en-suite. Okay. Now they're going to try to make this my fault? The fact is, we had NOT booked the cheapest room in the hotel. We booked on hotels.com and we had booked "a" room with a seaview - not a specific room. To be fair, you could see a bit of the sea if you looked over the rooftops and around the corner. The front of the hotel faces the sea and based on the online reviews I read about the seaviews, I believe we booked one of the front rooms - with an en-suite AND a seaview. Mark said we paid more for it. He's the one who made all the reservations this time and he said he requested a seaview in both hotels. This was as close as we got.

Anyway, next they also tried to shift the blame to hotels.com by telling me that hotels.com must have the wrong information because all the rooms are not en-suite and they don't represent that they are (on their own website - which of course I wouldn't have looked at). But here's the sign at the front of the hotel, which for the record is not a hotel but a guest house. You decide, would you expect your bathroom to be across the hall?

We erroneously thought that the hotel/guest house consisted of the entire row of buildings. It didn't. But the odds of finding another room at that late hour were pretty slim. We stayed.

The room was pleasant but small. We had to move bags if we wanted to sit down. Of course, we had the small sink in the corner. But I'd have to rate the lack of parking as a worse problem than the bathroom across the hall.

It didn't start off well. While I was still coming to grips with the lack of a bathroom, Mark was coming to grips with the fact that there was no place to park. You see, in England they don't just have parking lots. They have "short stay" lots where you can't park for more than a few hours, and "long stay" lots where you can park all day. He was trying to park in the "long stay" lot but it was jam-packed. He finally came back to tell the host that he believed he was illegally parked and would need to do something about that when I had to give him the bathroom news.

During our two days there we probably gave up two or more hours shuffling the car back and forth between the short stay and long stay lots or just waiting for someone to vacate a space. Aggravating!  But in the end, our car was damaged in the parking lot. I guess it's to be expected when you have too many cars trying to fit into too few spaces. The damage came to $1100. We're about to find out how good American Express insurance is.

Advise to travelers - check in early. We were the last people to check in that day and it seems that the early bird gets the en-suite.







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