Tis the season for some romance! I'm the real deal, the complete package. I know it doesn't seem that way, running all over town with my shirt off and shorts to impress the ladies like a typical jock. Oh, there's so much more to me than the hot bod. To prove this, I figured taking my special lady out for not only a fine dinner, but also a night at a castle would only solidify (at least in my own mind) what a great guy I am. How do you think this fairy tale is going to end?
Before I blur the lines too much with my misty haze of the truth, I'll admit it was CT's idea to simply have dinner at the Castle and not my own. There, I said it, so I need to work on this romance thing. While researching, I decided it would be my surprise to turn our dinner date to a full evening. Why not? We hadn't done anything like this before, why not go for the full experience and treat ourselves to something neither of us had ever done. Thirty seconds after clicking "buy", I got hit with a feeling that I rushed into my decision. Nah, everything will be fine, it feels a little drafty here. Thirty minutes later, curiosity got the better of me and that strange feeling after clicking buy got the better of me and I found myself checking some of the reviews. Knight and Day (like what I did with that?), ugh! For every positive, there was at least one scalding awful review, what had I gotten us into?
Our stay at the Castle remained a secret until the day of, which I was proud of. The beans (not magic ones) were spilled only because I didn't want to be responsible for trying to pack everything we'd need for an overnight stay and thought it would be best to tell CT the plan. She seemed surprised, so either she's a good liar or it kind of worked.
Standing waiting to be checked in, that feeling came back. That same one that I felt purchasing this adventure, something just felt odd. This is an old Castle, ghosts maybe? Our room was nice, not four star hotel big city nice, but it had character. Don't want to overuse odd, so I'll say strange to open the outside door and be in the bathroom, but hey, there are times when bathroom is the first room you want to hit, coming from a runner.
We took in the atmosphere of our room at first. I wouldn't say it felt like a room in a castle, I'd probably say more of a Victorian feel. Do I even know what that is? Who is writing this? The novelty wore off soon enough and we wanted to explore the rest of the castle. We we able to peak in a couple of the rooms that were still left unoccupied. Each had their own them and nitch. Occupied rooms had their doors closed, yet one of the staff opened one of the rooms for us. It smelled weird and both CT and I discovered at the same time this room really was occupied, her by seeing a curling iron in the bathroom and me by seeing a cell phone charging. As if two mice, we scurried out of the room before being discovered, whoops!
This whole time, the staff were busy setting up dinner tables on our level and even the landing of the stairwell, hmmm. With our exploring ending with slight embarrassment, we figured might as well eat dinner. Here is where our first real sign of trouble started. "Oh, we have two Christmas parties we are hosting tonight, so you won't be eating in the dinning room." The Princess and Prince were now banished to eating dinner on the landing of the stairwell. We can "roll" with the punches pretty well and it wasn't a big deal. Many of the reviews were critical of one of the courses of the meal being a roll. That's just kind of funny to us, again only adds to the overall story. It turned out to be a private dinner (in the stairwell), while I'd want to say it was completely reserved for us, I think it may have to do with that latter, more on this in a minute. Either way, it felt odd that nobody else ate dinner.
After dinner, we retired back to our suite. Wanting to relax, this is when we tried the TV only to find it wasn't functioning. This might have been CT's breaking point. She wanted to call the front desk and have it fixed. I explained, we are in a castle, they didn't have TV back then, we can survive without it (meanwhile playing on my tablet). There is another funny story here, but this blog has a rating system and I have to leave out some details to keep the readers guessing.
Anyway, fast forward about an hour and the Christmas parties are in full swing because the noise is a constant cocktail party bantering. Romantic! One of the things I really wanted to experience was the hot tub on the roof overlooking the city. I thought at night, in the winter, it would be something to remember for sure. The thought of walking out the room, through what essentially is dinner tables to get to the roof seemed like bad taste, even for me. Good thing I booked a room with a Jacuzzi tub! CT started the tub and came back to bed and at this point began to feel ill. Remember the latter, well this is it and it is food poising. There went dinner. On her return trip to bed, she reported that the tub was filling very slowly. Hoping she'd feel better after a little nap, I continued to let the tub fill as I continued to play on my tablet, damn castles without TV! About fifteen minutes later, I decided to check the tub, two inches! That's it! At this rate, it will be another hundred years before this thing fills! This may have been by breaking point, but now it was simply a quest to see how long would it take to fill this tub, since my Princess had now fallen into a deep sleep. You ready for this? One and a half hours to fill! At this point, I'd almost call it despair. Room problems, dinner problems, how did it come to this? Here I sit in a Jacuzzi tub, by myself, listening to the commotion of a party, watching my sick wife sleep. Do I know how to have a good time or what?
The story isn't over yet, one last thing. We had made early plans for the next day prior to booking this fiasco. Even though we had those plans, I still felt like we could get breakfast in at the Castle when I saw when the kitchen started. On the dot, we arrive downstairs to hopefully end this adventure on a positive. What did we find? Not even the ghosts were up, the Castle was dead. Figuring we might as well pack the car, then come back and by then there would be activity, nope. At this point, we simply shrugged our shoulders and left the key at the vacant front desk.
If this is how Kings and Queens live, they can have it. We could have ordered pizza and stayed at local hotel and had a much more romantic, quiet, experience. Prior to staying CT had been worried that ghosts might be living in this Castle, but after our experience, I'm convinced any ghosts that had been living there have long since left for better living conditions.
