Friday Apr. 7th, 2000 Edinburgh - London

13C/55F sunny and warm

Len


View From Our Window Had breakfast this morning, but not the full Scottish, just scrambled eggs, toast and cold ceral. Packed and gathered our laundry up. Our landlady let us store our bags in the lounge after we checked out, so we ran our laundry over to the laundrette. 2 loads. While it washed, we popped over to the Internet cafe. I ran back to move it to the dryer.... longer distance than I thought! Back to the cafe, then right back to pick up all our nice clean clothes. Grabbed our luggage from the B&B, and our hostess called us a cab. Cab came fast and dropped us off at Waverly Station. We caught the noon train to King's Cross, due to arrive at 4:43. We amused ourselves by reading and watching the countryside speed by. Pulled into the station right on time. You know the routine by now: Lugged our bags through the station to the tube, then took said tube to Paddington, where we then man-handled them a couple of blocks away to the Pavilion:"The Rock & Roll Fashion" Hotel.

Rock & Roll Hotel Of all the places we stayed on this trip, I believe we agree that this was the most disappointing. It wasn't "bad" per se, it was just that we expected a bit more, from reading reviews and for the price we paid. Upon arrival we found the lobby locked. We had rung the bell several times when finally someone came and let us in. [Geek alert] the guy was the spitting image of the character Zathras on Bab5.. even talked like him! Our first impression of the place was that it was gorgeously decorated in an eccentric "we have too many googaws" sort of way. Stylish clutter I guess you could call it. We waited in a front room which served as the lobby for the manager to arrive to check us in. The guy who let us in told us she was a former decorator who had personally decorated each of the themed rooms. We looked forward to getting to ours! I should probably mention here, if we haven't before, that the whole reason we were staying here for a single night was because we screwed up when booking rooms originally. Calendar problems. We noticed, about a week before our trip, that we had no place to stay on our day back from Scotland. We found the Pavilion while planning our last trip to the UK but decided we couldn't afford it. It's easily twice the rate of the other hotels we were looking at, but it looked so cool! So anyway, the manager arrived shortly and she was really nice. She booked us into her "best room" the "White Days, Soul Nights" room... guess where? Yup top floor, up 3 narrow flights!

The room was nicely decorated and small. The TV was horribly mis-tuned so I had to dick with it for an hour in order to get the standard 5 channels. It had lots of white frilly stuff, drapes, bedspread etc. Bed was kinda small but a bigger one would not have fit. We were allowed to smoke but were provided no ashtrays.

After settling in, we went out in search of foodstuff. Found a pub but realized too late it was geared toward tourists. The food was fine (I had a lamb burger, Kel the Yorkshire pud). A very loud obnoxious 4-pack of American teenage girls were seated at the table behind us which caused much eye-rolling. One got spaghetti with vegetarian sauce... sigh. They quite loudly explained to the nearby Germans that Yorkshire Pudding ISN'T REALLY PUDDING!!! They wanted to make sure they didn't make the same mistake!!! I think I heard the Germans groan and I KNOW I heard our waiter guffaw back in the kitchen. I tipped our poor waiter double for putting up with them :)

After dinner we went ticky-tacky shopping, then headed back to the hotel. Watched the semi-finals on Robot Wars on ch 4. Chaos II from Ipswich vs. a yellow one. [Addendum 12-2000] Since returning Comedy Central has started showing there own version of Robot Wars, called BattleBots. Nowhere near as good, but some of the same contestants have shown up!

Called it a day and found the bed to be a bit stiff and lumpy. Tomorrow we'd be switching to our next hotel. Yes we were disappointed with this hotel but it would have been worse to have had to spend the night at Paddington!

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