I wish the hostess was as nice as the garden
By A Yahoo! Contributor, 8/4/08
We thought that the hospitality at a bed and breakfast, particularly at a pricey one, was supposed to make you feel like family. We did feel like family, but family of the wrong sort: poor cousins mooching an uninvited stay, or surly jobless teenagers coming back from college.
Our host Bill was perfectly pleasant, but our hostess Nancy welcomed us with a stern lecture on the rules. No smoking, no bubblebath, no opening the windows (it turned out the AC was broken too) turn off the lights when you leave, doors locked at midnight, and absolutely no smoking (even though we already said we didn't smoke the first time). We asked if there were times she would like us to be out of the room for housekeeping, and she told us to read the rulebook she left. We asked if she could recommend some things to do in the area and she told us to look at their website. We asked about the county fair we had seen advertised and she scoffed at our interest and told us it was already over, even though it still had two days to go. We found pamphlets for a local winery with an out of date calendar of events and asked if she had any that were up to date. She suggested that we call the winery. We apologized after arriving 15 minutes late for breakfast and it was not entirely clear whether she was joking when she suggested that we make up for it by helping to clean the dishes. After asking the host's permission we fed some apples to the cows at the neighboring farm, and when she found out she scolded us because she heard of a cow that died after eating a bushel of apples.
We thought that our age (25) might have had something to do with it, but another pair of retirement age guests described her as "intense" and one guest was annoyed that she would not permit him to smoke a cigar even at the furthest end of the garden.
The facility was very nice, especially the garden, but our hostess's behavior sucked all the romance out of our anniversary weekend. We headed out for our daily adventures tense and fuming and snuck back in anxiously hoping not to be seen. We half expected to hear her knock at the door at night to check that us kids weren't getting up to anything inappropriate in the bridal suite, and the mood was spoiled so effectively that we didn't.
I can imagine a stay at the Inne at Watson's Choice being very pleasant, but ours wasn't.