BTW, I was just sitting here thinking that I posed a set of questions earlier about "bad vacation experiences", and while Soccermom handled the "worst dining" one, I never posted our worst location and rudest people ones. So, here goes:
Worst location: The Barbican Hotel in London. A few years back, I was scheduled to be a keynote speaker at a conference held at the Barbican Centre, and we managed to get the Soccergrandparents to come down and take the kids so that Soccermom could come along and hang out (translation: shop
) in London while I did my presentation thingy. The hotel we were booked in was the one especially chosen by the conference coordinators to house their "esteemed" speakers
. Well, when we checked in and went to the room, it was almost beyond belief. In the the room, there was one double bed that managed to fill the entire room, except for about 8 inches on the sides, and about 18 inches at the foot of the bed, where a TV set with a screen of a whopping 9 inches in diameter was located (size does matter in this context). There was no room to walk, nor was there a hope in hell of doing anything with our luggage except stacking it on-end. We ended up staying one night only because it was late in the day and we'd travelled all the way from California and didn't want to deal with it. Needless to say, the next morning while I was doing my thing at the conference, Soccermom booked us into a much finer establishment which, to this day, is the only hotel I stay in when I go to London (only 3 minutes walk to Harrod's, which is one reason why Soccermom is rarely given the opportunity to accompany me when I go to London!!).
Rudest people? We were at the Hilton Waikoloa on the Big Island in Hawaii. Unbeknown to us when we booked, there was a large Tony Robbins conference scheduled during the week we were there, where the man himself was the featured speaker. I don't know the man (though I once sat behind him on a flight from NY to SD), and I also don't really know much about what philosophy he teaches his followers, so I'm not going to say anything negative about him or his organization. What I DO know is that his followers, if the people that week are representative, are some of the rudest people on earth!!! We called them the "Shiny Happy People" (after an R.E.M. song that was popular at the time), because they all seemed to laugh loudly at any remark made by any of the other "shiny happy people", whether funny or not, and seemed to take great pleasure in asserting themselves into your private space. We'd be laying on lounge chairs by the pool, and three or four of them would just walk up, sit down on the ends of the lounge chairs we were on, and start a loud giggly conversation among themselves, with total disregard that we we not particularly wanting of company on our lounge chairs. To this day, I can not hear the name "Tony Robbins" and not immediately think of rude "shiny happy people"!!!
OK, that's now been taken care of.
Chris
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