Let me cheerfully admit that our terrible, horrible, no good, very bad hotel was at least half my fault.

My wife had made a reservation at a Hilton, but I took offense at the cost: $300 for the one night, and that was 19 years ago! The internet was barely in the Paleozoic era at that point but I decided I could find something better online. And I did. Well, if by “better” you mean “cheaper.”

We essentially had a long layover in London: roughly 36 hours. A night to sleep, and a hurried visit to some sights.

We left Heathrow and took the tube into London and emerged in front of the Paddington Hilton – the place my wife had originally made the $300 reservations. As we trudged up the stairs and headed in the direction of the place I’d picked, one of my kids grumbled, “Who dropped the ball and didn’t book us here?”, as she nodded in the direction of the Hilton. In retrospect, that was kind of ominous.

But I am always cheerful about these matters and pointed out that despite the cold, late autumn drizzle, we were in a beautiful neighborhood, and I was sure the other place would be just as nice. And after a short walk, we found our address. It was a pleasant, yellow/gold painted building with a nice entrance.

We entered the lobby as a departing guest was screaming at the manager, “This was the worst night I’ve ever spent in a hotel in my life!”

I didn’t think this was a particularly good omen but I decided not to pass judgement too quickly. After guest number 1 had walked away, I greeted the manager, gave her my name, and said we had reservations. She scowled at a screen for a moment, before snarling at me, “I cannot honor this reservation at this price.”

I breathed deeply and responded, calmly, but firmly: “Yes, you will. You made the reservation, I have paid for it, and you will honor it.”

She scowled again, and responded, “Well, I can only give it to you for one night,” to which I responded, “As you can see, that’s all I’ve made a reservation for.”

This pleasant interlude ended, we got our keys and went to our rooms. When things like this happen, one usually thinks that the manager was having a bad day, or that things certainly couldn’t get any worse.

Wrong.

As we got off the elevator, we walked down a darkened hallway. Apparently the hotel – maybe to save money? – was not turning lights on in the halls. But even with the romantic shadows, we could see the hall decorations. The insulation hanging from the ceilings was a nice touch.

Still, we found our room. It was large. That was about the best that could be said about it. But it was necessary that it be large, because the room contained four single beds, laid out in a row, like something you’d expect in a movie about an orphanage from a Charles Dickens story.

The bedding was dirty. One of my daughters actually laid out some of her own dirty clothes on the bed too sleep. “At least I know it’s my own dirt,” she said hopefully. The bathroom was small, and as you might have expected, likewise dirty. There were towels laid in a neat stack, but the pale white towels were streaked in a way that made us wonder if they had been used to clean motorcycle wheels. A brown liquid of unknown origin leaked from the ceiling above the toilet.

I had a room down the hall. It was pleasant enough, but so small that it was difficult to walk around the bed. I actually wondered how they had managed to get the bed into the room.

We slept well enough that night and I woke to the sound of garbage trucks doing pickup in the little mews outside of my window. We went down to breakfast and met our first pleasant member of the staff. The waiter was a young man, a recent immigrant from Slovakia. He realized we were Americans and asked where we were from and when we told him North Carolina, he surprised us by saying he had worked one summer on the South Carolina coastal area. “I know this isn’t a nice place,”‘ he said softly, and told us how a Slovak company had recently bought the property.

We trudged to the lobby with our bags and checking out, I was greeted by the previous day’s manager. Cheerful customer service apparently wasn’t part of Slovak hotelier schools. She scowled again when I told her we were checking out. I pointed out that the rooms were dirty and that this was unsatisfactory. She cut me off mid sentence: “No refunds!” I realized further discussion was pointless and we left.

When I travel, I basically want a comfortable place to sleep. I have no desire to be in a posh place. I have no need for a concierge, or for the managers to know my name, or to have chocolates placed on my pillows. I have stayed at a lot of places. I’ve slept at a youth hostel when youth had passed long before. I was in a creepy hotel in southern Mongolia, where the manager was so drunk he could barely stand up.

But The Senator in London was the worst, and it has little competition. I was gravely informed by my wife and children that I had lost my hotel picking privileges after that. But the story of that night’s stay has entered into legend status in our family and it’s talked about even by people who were not there that fateful evening in 2003.

I’m traveling to London this summer. The Senator is no longer operating but if it was, I’d probably give it another try, just for old times sake. Because that’s part of the adventure. And maybe, just maybe, that’s why we travel after all.