Expectations management and culture shock

I had in many ways a lovely weekend in the Blue Mountains, but I came home a night early. The purpose of the weekend was to revel in luxury and creature comforts for a little while, and the hotel just didn't measure up. I don't know if it is a product of Australia not having the critical mass of the filthy rich (a mass in the US that just got a bit smaller--when will people (yes, Bear Sterns, I am talking to you) learn to diversify their labor and capital?), but the hotel was adequate but not luxurious. In other words, the bed was uncomfortable (pillow-tops have yet to make it up the Great Western Highway?), the water pressure bad, the breakfast unappetizing and cold, no comfortable chair to sit in in the room, convoys of trucks carrying industrial raw materials going by under the window of my room with a view (the view was beautiful).

So I checked out early.

I did go to the spa and had a lovely massage et al, but it too had been oversold. I think I would have enjoyed it much more if my expectations had been set properly: the pink clay milk bath was a bubble bath in a spa tub designed for an in-home spa to fit in your normal domestic bathroom--so not really enough room to stretch out in, nor really deep enough. And details were missing--no hook on the bathroom door for the robe they gave you, bad music choices for the piped in music (who wants a beat at a spa????).

Having said all that, the Blue Mountains are gorgeous and dramatic. I'm sorry not to have taken the family there when they visited (y'all will just have to come back, you hear?) and I had a wonderful, long dusky bushwalk the first day. I'll be posting pictures of it later.

I suspect, though, that bushwalk set me up for my bad attitude later--I was exhausted and sore and hungry when I got back to the hotel and it was unable to properly minister to any of my needs....