All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy

I found The Shining so frightening when I first saw it that it made me jump up and down on the arm of the sofa. I couldn't sit still to watch it, couldn't look, had to look, couldn't listen. Nicholson's axe splintering the bathroom door; the sound of the son's tricycle in the hotel's coridoors, rolling on wood, then rug, then wood; the snow storm and the chase through the maze; the freaky girl twins in their matching frocks at the top of the stairs, The Overlook Hotel, isolated, grand and sick at heart, the source and guardian of all the misery that Jack unlocks as he tries to write his novel.

Imagine how spooky, then, to find yourself sleeping in The Overlook Hotel. Not the original, that's in Colorado, but a similarly grand and isolated place on the edge of the massive Megalong Valley in the Blue Mountains. A friend of Rachel's, a lovely, tipsy girl called Lauren, had raved about the place on New Year's Eve, and shown a picture of its belle epoque lounge. After weeks of low rent guesthouses with their bedbugs, condemned air conditioning units and dust drifts under the bed, this posh hotel called to us. All work and no play makes Dan and Fran a dull boy and girl. We'll skip the obvious inappropriateness of this quote for our situation and cut to the underlying message which is: Live a little! Spend your precious pennies on a night at the Grand Mercure Hydro Electric! Lastminute.com sealed the deal. We got three nights with breakfast for a bargain 180 pounds. how easily you adjust to suit your wants. 180 would get us ten night accomodation in Asia, at the very least.

So this is how we came to be wandering the near-empty corridors of the Hydro Majestic, perched on the edge of a great chasm of forest and bush. We took pictures of the spooky bath chairs, remnants of the hotel's spa past.
We played pool in the deserted lounge, laughter echoing, Fran losing, Dan winning and texting at the same time. We looked over the crumbling hotel balustrades into the forest and thought of the bush fires that tore through the area several years ago, and that were tearing through forest only a few kilometres up the road a few weeks before our visit. We had high tea in a neat parlour, where all the guests whispered to one another, afraid to break the rather atmostpheric silence that accompanied the stunning blue views. We shook along with everyone and everything else when the train came through the town, blowing its horn to scare beasts of the imagination off the tracks. We thought of all the scary movies this place brought to mind, and tried not to think of them when we turned the lights off at night. It was shabby, you couldn't get a beer in the bar after 8.30pm as all the staff had gone home, and much of the building was closed, but it was a place full of character. Hard to find in these parts, it seems, where every other guesthouse in Katoomba resembles The Bates Motel. Not sure my love of movies could induce me to spend the night in one of these places.