Nira Caledonia

Last Friday P and I celebrated having spent 6 years together. Six whole years! How the time has flown. Hard to believe it’s gone so quickly but then, I’m sure I’ll be saying the same thing next year, and the year after, and the year after that…

Anyway, usually we’d mark the occasion with dinner somewhere nice but this time we decided to pull out the stops and treat ourselves to an evening in a fancy hotel. Nira Caledonia had recently appeared on my radar for a very simple reason – they have rooms available with hot tubs.

Could I imagine a better way to spend our anniversary than clinking champagne flutes in a hot tub? I could not. The price made me wince a bit, but for just one night, with the cost split between the two of us, we decided it was worth it. We booked.

When we arrived we were greeted, checked in and shown to, and around, our room. Turns out that when you book a room with a hot tub you actually book something more like a suite. We had one small living-room type area, with a sofa, chest of drawers, TV, and a cupboard that seemed to be both for hanging up coats in and the place where they stored the kettle and espresso mugs, plus a minibar with, wait for it, a complimentary half bottle of prosecco! Score!

The second room was the bedroom, complete with a great big bed, bedside tables, a second TV, a digital radio (already set to play Classic FM as we walked in, natch) and a console with the espresso machine and the teacups (as well as the tea). The bedroom led into the normal, ordinary bathroom where they kept normal ordinary things like the shower, as well as very lovely L’Occitane toiletries. It also led into the better, more exciting bathroom. You know, the one with the hot tub.

Sadly, Nira Caledonia’s restaurant was closed when we visited, which meant that we wouldn’t be able to eat breakfast in it. However, we could get a room service breakfast instead, so we filled in forms to indicate what we’d like and when, and left them with reception, along with a request for a wake-up call an hour before breakfast arrived. Then, we got on with filling the hot tub.

These things take about 45 minutes to fill and they need to be well-filled for the jets to work (and otherwise, what’s the point?) That gave us plenty of time to pop another (proper sized) bottle of prosecco in the fridge, use the WiFi to scope out nearby restaurants, flick through the channels and the artsy books and google how much hot tubs cost to try to decide if we’ll ever be able to afford one of our very own.

You know how I said I couldn’t imagine a better way to spend our anniversary than clinking champagne flutes in a hot tub – I still can’t. That was brilliant. We chatted nonsense over a few glasses of fizz before noticing that we were getting hungry (and wrinkly) and decided to wander off for Italian around the corner. Then we came back and refilled the tub. After all, why not?

I admit to having drunk maybe slightly more than I ought to have that night. Needless to say, when the wake-up call came I was less than thrilled, despite having slept like a log in one of the comfiest beds I’ve ever climbed into. I dragged myself to the boring bathroom for a shower, which turned out to be cooler than the average (so many jets! In so many directions! Who comes up with these things?) Still, I was a little wobbly until my breakfast arrived which, to say that their proper kitchen is being renovated, wasn’t bad at all.

Aye, that’ll do nicely. Checkout went smoothly and we wandered off to our boring home that doesn’t have a hot tub. But one day… one day it will be ours.