I used to like shopping at Jumbo, probably because it does carry just about everything. I can't imagine ever being that easily amused, but I must have been.

I also did some laundry, some random cleaning and other stuff around the house. The rest of my time was spent researching hotels. Booking a hotel is an activity fraught with psychological peril for me, and the bigger the choice, the worse the perils. I'm always afraid that the hotel I choose will suck big fat hairy ones. Not only that, but the hotel located a mere two doors down (and there's always a hotel two doors down), will be more charming, cleaner, nicer, and have bigger rooms. In other words: it will be perfect. We'll get to talking with some of the happy, happy tourists staying at said hotel, and we will find out that they're paying at least $25 less per night than we're paying for our little circle of hell.

It gives me nightmares, even though it's never happened. Yet.

The only hotel I booked that was so horrible we couldn't bear to stay there and moved the next day was in London. It was our first trip to London, six or seven years ago. The hotel was in Bloomsbury, and the lower floored rooms looked OK. But we didn't stay there-- we kept going up and up until we got to our room, in the garret. We'd asked for a double, but they gave us a triple. It looked like the sort of room that a 7 or 8 football hooligans rent for a weekend of drink, debauchery, more drink, maybe the game, and more drink, followed by projectile vomiting and possibly a spot of random urination. It doesn't matter that there's only bed space for three, since most of them will pass out on the floor if they manage to find their way back to the hotel.

In fact, I'm sure it would have been full of football hooligans, had it been football season. Since it wasn't, the owner unloaded it on us. The wallpaper was ugly, yellowed, peeling and looked like it had been ripped off in some spots. (Gotta get rid of those bloodstains somehow!) The floor buckled almost as badly as the beds. The bedspreads were hideous. The bathtub was cracked, and there was black mold growing in it and what was left of the grout. So far, so bad. The kicker, however, was the wardrobe.

I'm pretty sure somebody had been storing a corpse in the wardrobe, at sometime in the not too distant past. I made the mistake of opening it up, and the smell that rolled out stayed with us until we left the next morning. It makes me queasy just to think of it.

Unfortunately, there wasn't a wonderful hotel two doors down. There weren't any hotels nearby, but we found one eventually, wasting an entire moring of precious first-time-in-London time finding it.

Later in the week, we were telling someone our tale of woe in some pub or another. (There's always some pub or another: that's why I like London.) He asked us how much we had been paying for it, and that's when my outrage kicked up a gear. They were charging over $100 per night for that cesspit.

"£70?" says the local bloke, obviously playing Spot-the-Moron. "Well, what did you expect?"

A lot more than that, to be honest. Not perfection on a plate-- London's expensive and I'm not that stupid-- but definitely something habitable.

I've gotten over that sentiment, by the way. Time and more travel have cured me of that one.

Which is probably why I obsess over hotel selection.

The hotel we ended up with charged us around $140, and the only reason they gave it to us that cheap was because they were renovating that wing and workmen tend to make a lot of noise. It was, once again, in a garret, but a nice garret. It was minuscule and peach and very nice. They put a paper outside our door every morning, and the bathroom had a door like you'd find on a ferry or boat of some sort-- it was an oval cut out of the wall, so that you had to step over the bottom bit to get in. I stubbed my toe on it approximately 17 times the week we were there, fell out of the bathroom once, and fell into the bathroom twice. I really wish they hadn't put the sink where they did.

Still, it was infinitely better than Hotel Hell.

We're going karting tomorrow, so tonight will be an early one. We're thinking about seeing a movie. I'm not sure what we've gotten ourselves into, exactly. The track is huge, and the go-karts are Formula One type vehicles that, apparently, go really fast, which should be fun. The information and waiver forms actually tell you to "keep your eyes on the road, and your hands upon the wheel", although it sounds a bit less melodic in Portuguese. On the other hand, it also asked for your blood type, and that has made me a wee bit nervous.