A series, with more to come.

Due to the staggering of flights (my mother arriving a few days earlier than me and my siblings, and my father arriving a day later), we end up booking a hotel near the Heathrow airport. It is the cheapest one we could find and honestly, there is nothing wrong with it. The beds are comfortable enough and the staff is quite friendly.

We arrive at the airport at 6:30 am, London time, which mean 1:30 am our time, and after a lot of waiting and train-taking and fumbling with luggage, we find ourselves at the hotel where our enthusiastic mother greets us and then immediately drags us to the complimentary breakfast.

The hotel rooms are sparsely decorated and are on the larger end, but only have one full bed and one desk, with lots of empty space on both sides. The walls have few, if any, decorations and the hallway has long white walls and smells faintly of cleaning materials. The lobby has a low ceiling and on the front desk is a water cooler with a broken faucet.

There is a restaurant. The food is not bad. It just isn’t good. It did its job.

We are in the limbo of this hotel for a day and a half and when talking about it later, my sister and I conclude that this hotel reminded us eerily of what purgatory must feel like. There is nothing wrong with it, as I said before. But due to its complicit averageness and our jet-lagged, sleep-deprived selves, our time in the Heathrow Travelodge at Terminal 5 passes in a fog.

(Still, 5/5 stars for sheer convenience and being a thoroughly adequate hotel for its price).