A Travellerspoint blog

Harbin - Shanghai - London - Bristol

Home, sweet home.

rain 6 °C
View Ice and Snow Sculpture Festival - Harbin 2014 on Grete Howard's travel map.

My lovely comfortable sleep turned out to be anything but. Although reasonably OK when I was sitting up, as soon as I put my head down, I started to cough. David was the same, so if one of us had managed to get off to the land of slumber, the other would would wake us both up by coughing. This went on all night. I think I had less than an hour sleep in total.

At 01:30 we heard someone try to get in the room using the electronic room card. We'd double locked the door, so they gave up after a few attempts and we could hear them trying a few other doors along the corridor too. We put it down to being on the wrong floor and thought nothing more of it. Some five minutes later, they returned, and went through the whole process again, but like last time, they gave up when they couldn't get in. After a further ten minutes or so, there was a loud knock on the door, and when we opened it, a by now very embarrassed receptionist and a couple of Chinese tourists were standing expectantly outside. We found out later from Sally that due to a staff error when we checked in earlier that day, our room was still showing as being vacant, so it had in effect been double booked and given to some late arrivals. I expect the Chinese were shown to room 507 with the giant orange ball afterwards. Which is probably where we were meant to be.

One of the benefits of not being well, is that both David and I managed to sleep for around 10 hours on the 13 hour flight, which made the journey home seem a lot quicker. We were also very lucky it seems as my dad rang us when we were half way home as he'd seen on the news that the M4 motorway was closed in the westbound direction due to a serious accident. We must have just missed it. As it was, the journey from start to finish took 24.5 hours, adding several more hours travel time being stuck in a traffic jam would not have been welcome, especially as we both felt so unwell.

Posted by Grete Howard 02:56 Archived in England

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I really hope you are getting better now.

by sally

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