Ferry To The Cliffs Of Dover

We’ve been playing it fast and loose with the schedule, so we’d been fast and loose with the hotel bookings. I’d booked us a place south of Dover as soon as we got off the boat. Often there’s little downside to this when you’re in a touristy region with a lot of churn because rooms spontaneously open up. This time the power of databases failed us.

When I walked into our hotel lobby, a customer was having a heated argument with the guy behind the counter. She said she already paid for a room, but the guy insisted the room didn’t exist: According to him the booking service had been double-booking his rooms.

“People have been arriving all day to take rooms that somebody else is in!” he groused. “I’ve called them and mailed them to make it stop, and they tell me nothing!”

She was unimpressed by this explanation, and said so. Meanwhile, her husband was out on the front steps, looking for another room with his phone. Instead of using some specialized app he was calling hotels, one by one, and asking if they had a vacancy. He was done trusting databases for the night.

Just then, another guy came downstairs in a big hurry, slammed the keys to room number three on the desk and said “I have an urgent call. I need to leave immediately!”

The customer looked at the keys and said “How about if we take that room?”

The manager reluctantly agreed and said “I’ll go up and see if it’s clean.”

While he was upstairs, the customer wandered outside to check in with her husband, who had just finished booking a room at another hotel about a mile away. The three of us complained together about how insane it was that the hotel couldn’t prevent its own double-bookings. I pointed at the bicycles and said, “We came here on bikes! Now we’re going to have to ride all the way up the hill to the campground to find a place to stay.”

The manager came downstairs and declared “The room looks fine.”

Instead of taking it, the customer turned to me and said, “Hey, we have a room booked already and we can get a refund from here. Why don’t you take that room instead?”

And thus was the bacon of Nick and myself saved.

The manager called a taxi for the customer and her husband, and Nick and I moved a bunch of bags up into the room. I had already paid for an adjacent room that was currently occupied, and the cost was the same so there was no additional charge. As I signed the standard paperwork I chatted with the manager, and learned that he had purchased the hotel 51 years ago and rebuilt it from the ground up. He’s from the Canary Islands and has been taking groups of school kids from there on group outings to major cities across Europe for 37 years, with transportation and interpreters, as a way to enrich the community he’s from. He showed me a brochure with pride, and the prices looked very reasonable.

When he heard we were from California he said, “I’ve taken a bunch of vacations to there! It’s one of the most beautiful places in the world!” That’s quite an endorsement from someone who grew up on the Canary Islands.

“Hey, you know what? For the trouble, the next time you come through here you can stay for free.”

“That’s really nice of you! Although, it might not be for a long time. We don’t get to ride much and there’s a lot of amazing country to see here.”

He shrugged and said “I already done 50 years here. I can wait a bit.”