Aria

 

This hotel.  It has 4,004 rooms.  A walk from the elevator to the end of the hall is 200 steps.  That’s about 600 feet; two football fields.  The hallway goes both directions from the elevator bank.  Then it splits in two partway down.  There are four hallways on each floor, configured like a flattened rounded X; no straight lines.  I took my walk tonight in the hallways without ever leaving our floor.

 

The rooms are high-tech.  Everything in the room that involves electrons is centrally controlled, either by the television remote and the big flatscreen on the wall, or the iPad on the nightstand.  There are control switches, not anything that resemble conventional light switches, on the walls, but it’s hard to figure out what they do.  When we first got here in the afternoon on Sunday, we were trying to change the lights when Judy inadvertently pushed the “Goodnight” button.  The sheer drapes, then the blackout drapes motored closed across the floor to ceiling windows while all the lights slowly dimmed until they were all the way out, leaving us totally in the dark with no idea how to turn anything back on.  We found our way to the door and let some light in from the hallway.  Luckily for us, a housekeeper came by and helped reboot and start over.

 

That was the end of any trouble we had with the lighting……….until later when I decided to turn the desk lamp on.  I pushed switches I was not familiar with.  Judy pounded on the wall from the shower when all the lights in the bathroom went out leaving her totally in the dark.  If I could have seen what I was doing then, I’d have turned them right back on for her.

 

The adventure continues.