After abandoning the Minto, we now had to find another hotel room. We were traumatized enough by the lack of sleep that we were now only prepared to stay in a real hotel. Unfortunately, there was some show going on, so most hotels were booked already. Summer brings a fair number of tourists to town, and any sort of event means it's more packed than average. We also needed a hotel for at least a week. We should have known better.

We looked and called around, and pretty much nobody had anything for a week at all. All of the standard hotels were too heavily booked. Finally, Kristin stopped by the Caledonian, a pretty posh place in the heart of downtown. To make a long story short, she found they had rooms available, bargained down the price some, I thought it was too expensive. The next evening, after dining with Steve and Diane, we returned, and they were out of the smaller rooms. But, they had a suite available. Of course, it was over 220 pounds a night. With Steve's help, the price magically dropped 30% or 40%, and we said "great". We couldn't check in until the next day, but that was ok for us.

Finally, we checked in. The room was huge. Our room at the Minto could easily have been put in this new room three times over, not including the bathroom. The bathroom actually had water pressure, and an enormous chrome contraption that looked like some sort of phone, but was really just a hand-help spray nozzle.

A couple minutes after we got to the room, the door knocked. "Room Service," rang out the voice. We hadn't ordered anything. It was a "Welcome" gift. Some fruit, a bottle of Australian wine, some cheese, and some crackers. It made us feel much better about switching hotels.

There was more noise than at Steve and Diane's, but otherwise the place was nice. The noise is the price of being right next to a major intersection, I suppose. While we were at the Caledonian, only two peculiar things happened.

We did laundry. Or, rather, we had laundry done at the hotel. We had nearly a week's worth of laundry at this point, and were nearly out of clean clothes. Laundry in a hotel is easy. Call 'em up, they take your dirty laundry away, and bring it back clean. Except we weren't prepared for the return of clean laundry. Packaged. In a fine assortment of boxes and bags. It was mostly a pile of t-shirts, socks, and underwear. There really wasn't any need to have individually bagged t-shirts, pressed underwear, or bagged and boxed socks. It was simply amazing. Especially since we didn't think it needed any packaging at all. Kristin wrote a letter down to the desk complaining that the volume of packaging was quite unnecessary. The next day, a note came back with an apology, explaining how they do this to protect our clothes.

Towards the middle of the week, perhaps it was in response to letting them know our stay would be extending one more day, we got another welcoming gift. Another bottle of wine, another tray of crackers, cheese, and fruit. We still had the first bottle. We didn't really need another. But it came, nonetheless. We never found out why it was sent, but we didn't ask either.

Later in the week, we wound up at Henry's Cellar Bar, for a performance by a local band, Salsa Celtica. While waiting for our accomplices to arrive, a guy near the bar said, "Hi, you're from the hotel, right? The Caledonian?" We said yes, but acted confused. We had no idea who he was, and why he was interested. After he returned to his crowd, we pieced it all together. He was the hotel receptionist who Kristin talked to when extending the stay. I guess he was just amazed that someone staying at a posh hotel would also be hanging out in a cellar bar, listening to a local salsa band.