When we arrived in Edinburgh, we were booked for 10 days at a hotel on Minto Street. We lasted 4 days before we couldn't take it any more.

The hotel seemed nice enough. It's on the main drag that runs down the east side of town, right below Newington. Our room was facing the front, right over the doorway. The room itself must have been a decent size back before there were bathrooms in every room. With the bathroom taking up a good chunk, there was barely room left for the desk and bed. Everything was in a cozy B&B pink color, but that wasn't going to matter much with our eyes closed.

By this point, were were tired and jetlagged. It had been a long flight, and we had an exhausting weekend followed by a lot of running around Los Angeles. When we finally tried to go to sleep, we discovered the true evil of the hotel. They called them "functions".

Our room, it turned out, was also above the bar in the front of the hotel. The first night we were there, they had a function down in the bar. We could hear all the music, or at least all of the bass, through the floor and walls, until it stopped around two am. If one believes that you should stay up too late to help recover from jetlag, this would have helped. We just wanted to get a good night's sleep.

It seems that there was a function going on nearly every night, though most were in the back room, and not directly under ours. This spared us the trauma of the disco-beats through the floor, in exchange for hearing everyone leave around two in the morning. Repeat more than one evening, and it spells a recipe for never recovering from jetlag. By sunday, we just slept all afternoon, because it was quiet enough then.

We tried to switch rooms, but that seemed to be quite impossible, as they were booked up, and we were staying so long. (I'd think that long-reservations would make you more important, and not less, but that shows my biases.) We finally got fed up, and move out of there, and into Steve & Diane's for two nights. After four nights of hellish sleep, their back bedroom was like bliss. Nearly no noise at all.

The people at the hotel were certainly nice enough, we just couldn't take not being able to sleep.

When we told the story to a coworker who's an Edinburgh local, he said "That hotel? That's where you go to party when you're 16!"

With some bargaining help from Steve, we got a room booked for the next week at the Caledonian.