USA ’24 – Day 8 – Lucky?

We awoke this morning to find that the hotel had had a power cut at 6 am due to strong winds overnight. We made our way down pitch black corridors to the lobby where they had laid on coffee and doughnuts in lieu of breakfast. At this point we were told that the power company had said that the power should be on again within an hour. We needed to be elsewhere as we had a booking for the Cog Railway so we set off for there.

Lucky, Lucky, Lucky

There were a couple of routes from our hotel to the base station of Mount Washington and so we chose the quickest. However, it turned out that this road was blocked by a fallen tree but it was too late to turn around and go the other route so we sat in a queue of traffic waiting for something to happen. Eventually I walked up the road to find out what was going on. Turned out that the tree had come down and was resting on a power line and so they needed to wait until the power was turned off before the tree could be dealt with. All this took an hour and we could see from the satnav that we were going to arrive at our destination at just after 11 when our train was due to leave. We pushed on regardless.

At Cog Railway base station our train had already left and so we went to the ticket desk to find out what our options were. We were incredibly lucky as the woman at the ticket desk managed to get us the last two seats on the midday train – I could have kissed her! Even better when we got on the train others hadn’t turned up so we were able to move to better seats. Not that it really mattered as you could move around the carriage relatively easily.

Because the weather was so bad at the top of the mountain (winds were 80-90mph on summit) the train only went up 2/3rds of the way to the skyline. At a top speed of five mph it took quite a while to reach the 5,500 ft elevation of skyline. There’s nothing there and you couldn’t get out of the carriage but we were allowed to take pictures from the open end of the car before we returned back down. It was a good trip that we both enjoyed.

Maybe not?

We drove back down and in the afternoon went to Conway where we did some sightseeing and shopping at an outlet. We didn’t want to return to the hotel too early and even considered having dinner in Conway but didn’t want to wait so drove back to the hotel intending to have dinner there.

When we got to the hotel at gone six the car park was oddly empty and we entered the lobby to find it still in the dark and with a large hand written sign saying it was closed as they had no power. Uh oh…

If you like staff who really couldn’t care about their guests when something goes wrong then I throughly recommend Eagle Mountain House. While I accept that this wasn’t a problem of their making the staff were awful and disinterested in helping us find somewhere else for the night. All the local hotels were fully booked although we could have gone to a Quality Inn for over £1,000 (yes £ not $) for the night. We refused and found a Ramada about 90 minutes from where we were. We drove back to Conway initially intending to get some dinner but everywhere was full so we grabbed something from Subway and I drove eating with the sandwhich on my lap.

Not a great end to what had otherwise been a great day but at least we didn’t have to sleep in the car!