Expectation

Twice in the last couple days, my wife has been caught out due to not reading the fine print.

For the first time since our daughter was born six years ago, we got two nights off in a row. My wife booked a room online through the dedicated website (not an aggregator) at Haikon Kartano and was really looking forward to a romantic few nights, not having to worry about schedules or what our daughter is going to eat. The price was even good.

On arrival, we parked the car and were greeted by a gorgeous old manor with a Rolls Royce parked in front. These kinds of buildings are very, very uncommon in Finland and we were looking forward to having a bit of an alternative couple nights than our normal.

Heading inside to the reception, I wandered around a moment while my wife checked us in with the usual rigmarole, like having to spell the last name, which isn't hard, but isn't Finnish.

I took a couple photos on my phone of the ostentatious and gaudy decoration, which is part and parcel of the manor, which for a short period even housed part of the Romanov family after they had to flee Russia in 1917.

Note: I don't mind a glass of Bolli from time to time...

Plush carpets with intricate patterns, oil paintings on the wall, a lot of polished wooden furniture, golden sconces, chandeliers...

You get the idea.

So, I was thinking how this isn't our style at all and that it will be nice to have such a dramatic change of scenery for a couple days, when I heard the pleasant voice of the person behind the desk saying,

Oh, you are not staying in the manor, you are in the spa hotel. Just go back out the doors that you came through and walk down the hill to the reception.

Reality

This is what greeted us.

A 1970s prefab building that is a "spa and congress center" and smelled like it had been doing both pretty hard for the entire time.

Ok, to be fair, it really wasn't that bad and it was clean and the spa area had recently been renovated, but it was a "slight" difference from what especially my wife was expecting. After we checked-in and went to the room, she found our confirmation email and had a read again and in fine print, it said that we were indeed in the right place. However, nowhere on the website through the booking phase, had there been an image of the building.

Hotels have never been an important factor when we have travelled abroad, because we spend so very little time actually in them, other than sleeping. But for this trip, we weren't abroad, but didn't want to spend any time at the hotel, because of the room. Nothing wrong with it, but we live in a home built in the 60s... we know what it is like to stay in an older place that needs a bit of work.

And yes, we had fun still.

And it has been something to laugh about, especially since when laying in the bed in a room that was more suited for business conference attendees, was a large picture of the manor.

It was almost like being there!

So anyway, that was the first "fine print" mishap of the trip. The second, was with the auction for two old Artek chairs (Finnish design) that my wife won. The chairs she bought were bar stools that would go into our kitchen and would be perfect! She was really happy with the win too, because she only had to bid once - the only bid.

Warning bells?

"Are they fake?" I asked.

No. They were real.

"Nice."

Note: I was actually excited to get these chairs, but I had to play it cool, otherwise this will get to be a weekly event.

After a lot of organizing, we were able to arrange pickup from Helsinki which is not the way we were headed, but not too far out of our path. We checked-out early in order to get there at a specified time, where we were met by the boyfriend of the seller, who brought the barstools down to us.

They were great! In excellent condition, but still showing their age through the changed color of the wood and would match our color scheme brilliantly.

Buuuut...... uuummm.

They look a bit short for barstools.

Yes... while my wife did quickly search and confirm they were the chairs she was looking for, unfortunately, Artek had two versions of the same chair at some stage in its history and these were the variant. They weren't barstools - just stools. They did look like barstools though.

What are these? Barstools for ants!?

It was indeed written in the announcement that the seat height was 50 cm, not the 60 cm of the actual barstool. That ten centimeters makes a very big difference as we are already a short family and after apologizing profusely for wasting everyone's time, we walked out chairless again.

But not empty-handed.

As always, there are lessons in everything and hopefully my wife has learned that she should take a little extra time and double-check the vitals, and I have learned that when my wife does something like this, I might want to double-check the double-check - just in case.

One thing I am glad I managed to learn from past experiences though, was in both circumstances, I just laughed it off and said, it'll be fine, it is part of the experience, don't worry about it, we know better for next time...

"Growth!"

Taraz
[ Gen1: Hive ]