Mini Honeymoon Pt. 1 - Hastings Resort

As a bridal shower gift, my Mom bought Tim and I a two-night stay at the Hastings Resort outside of Coe Hill for the Sunday and Monday just after the wedding. She thought we'd need a little break away from everything after the chaos of the move and the wedding day and she was very right.

Main lodge photo from www.hastingsresort.com

Rosy skies at the Hastings Resort after a rainy day.

I believe Mom originally got the deal as part of a Wagjag promotion. The room was really nice, but very small. Just big enough for the bed, but it's not like we needed more space than that. The Sunday night I slept for twelve hours straight - all the sleep deprivation prior to the wedding catching up to me! Tim did not like that there wasn't coffee available in the rooms, or in the resort at all when we got up at 8:00 a.m. He had to go on a search to the restaurant to ask them to bring the coffee maker to the resort. It was just a small setback to the day.

Room photo courtesy of www.hastingsresort.com 

Steakhouse photo courtesy of www.hastingsresort.com

Meals there are all taken at the Steakhouse, which is not cheap. The food is really good, though, and our server for both dinners was really great. Our server's name was Erica-Lyn and she was really funny. I'd love to go back just to hang out with her. On Sunday night Tim and I both had steaks. Tim had the ribeye with mashed potatoes and a brandy mushroom cream for $32.95. He ordered rare, but it was closer to medium. I had the King of Hastings, which is a striploin with a pave potato for $30.95. I ordered medium-rare and my steak was almost perfectly done. The pave potato was yummy - a potato, very thinly sliced on a mandolin, then cooked like scalloped potatoes, but still in the shape of the original potato. Monday during the day we went out for lunch, but were back at the Steakhouse for a late dinner. We decided just to do appetizers so that we could have dessert, but almost didn't make it even then. We had the scallops and brie with vanilla cracker, pineapple jam and Sambuca glaze for $12.95. The vanilla cracker didn't make sense. There wasn't enough savoury to balance it out and it just came off dessert-like. It's too bad, because the rest of the components were all really good. We also had the chef's mussels for $11.95, which were just amazing. They were so tender and flavourful - but definitely ask for extra bread to sop up the broth! There wasn't any grit in any of our mussels. There were three that weren't opened, but I'd rather risk that than have overcooked mussels. Tim ordered the gravlax - cured salmon with herbed cream cheese, capers, red onion, and caviar on crostini for $12.95. I expected not to like it because I'm not a cured/smoked/preserved salmon fan, but it was really good, especially with the capers and shaved red onion. Erica-Lyn pushed us into the dessert we had originally wanted, even though I was close to needing to be rolled out of there. The portion on the drunken brownie with Kawartha Dairy ice cream is VERY generous for $7.50. I didn't really taste any of the kahlua, triple sec, or bourbon that was supposed to be in this dessert, but the brownie was fudgy and the caramel sauce was delicious. Even though we were told that the kitchen was having a few problems with service due to a broken oven, you could not tell in the food or in the dinner service. 

Gravlax photo courtesy of www.hastingsresort.com

Steakhouse interior photo courtesy of www.hastingsresort.com

Drinking part of our wedding gift from Mandy and Ryan!

We didn't have the best weather while we were there. It was mostly overcast and rainy. But we did get out in the canoe on Beaver Creek for a quickish paddle. Beaver Creek is really gorgeous. Meandering and very slow-moving, it's an easy paddle and looks to be great fishing for largemouth bass. Alas, we did not have any of our fishing gear with us, but I was thinking about Mom while we were out there! All in all, we had a very rejuvenating, relaxing stay, until the morning we were supposed to leave!

Paddling Beaver Creek.

Finally relaxing after wedding craziness!

Ahoy, mateys!

We had set our alarm for 6:00 a.m. so that we could drive back to Peterborough for 7:00, since both Tim and I worked Tuesday. Tim said that he was already lying awake when the industrial fire alarm went off at 2:30 a.m. We heard that a few of the other guests were lying awake at that time - maybe the guests that had asthma or more sensitive senses could already smell the smoke. Not me. I was dead to the world until the alarm went off. Even when it did, we didn't really panic - these alarms almost always are someone smoking in their room or something equally dumb. We got dressed, but then the alarm stopped. Since Tim was already dressed and awake (he's a bit of an insomniac to begin with, so this didn't bode well on him going back to sleep), I suggested he go downstairs just to check out what was going on. I stayed in our room with the door open to the hallway. Went on Facebook. Decided to clean up and pack a bit since we had to leave in a few hours anyway. Tim still wasn't back, so I poked my head out into the hallway. A guy we had met earlier in the day was also looking out and asked what I thought was going on. I told him that Tim had gone downstairs to check it out, so he decided to go down too. A few minutes later, the woman across the hall from me came out and said that all she could smell in her room was burning. Sure enough, her room and even the hallway were starting to just reek like burning sugar. She and her mother, in another room, packed up and left the resort. Tim STILL hadn't come back. 

Tim says that when he went downstairs, the first floor was beginning to fill with smoke. The reception attendant had turned off the audible fire alarm, but the system was still showing a fire on the first floor. Tim couldn't stay in the smoke because it was causing his eyes to burn and he couldn't stop coughing. The attendant opened the door to the laundry room and smoke just billowed out. The attendant ran in, found a smouldering bag of cleaning linens, and dragged it through the hallway and out the front door of the resort. Tim and the other guy who had gone downstairs dragged the bag farther away from the resort, still sending off tons of smoke. Something about them dragging it must have exposed it to enough fresh oxygen, because it burst into full flame. The attendant went back into the building and grabbed a bucket (not a fire extinguisher) and filled it up from the sink. He made several more trips this way before they decided that the river was a better option to stay away from what was obviously toxic smoke. They got the fire extinguished, and then Tim went through the hotel opening up all the windows and doors to air things out. Our side of the resort wasn't too bad, but the opposite side was just completely full of chemical smoke.

Tim finally came back into the room about a half hour after he had left - I still had no idea that there was an actual fire - reeking of smoke, tearing out of both eyes, and coughing like a lifelong smoker. He told me what had happened and we decided to leave. It's not like Tim would have been able to sleep in there anyways. While we finished packing up, two of the hotel attendants came around telling people it was perfectly safe for them to go back into their rooms - just to open their windows to air things out. Tim collared them (they were both pretty young and he was into concerned teacher mode) and said that that was chemical smoke and that no one should still be in the hotel. They just kind of shrugged. It was obvious they didn't really know what to do. We said that we'd like to check out and left.

Even the whole way home Tim was coughing and his eyes were so red. I can't believe what a mess it was - who turns off the fire alarm where there's a fire? What hotel doesn't have fire extinguishers handy? Why didn't they call the fire department immediately? How is it that they didn't evacuate the hotel when they knew it had been a chemical fire? Why were they storing chemical soaked rags like that to begin with? My friend Cory used to work for an industrial cleaning company - they should know not to mix cleaning chemicals! When we were talking to some of the senior science teachers at a Lakefield College function the Tuesday night, it was generally thought that the sweet-smelling gas put off from those cloths would have been arsenic or cyanide!

Crazy Rollwagen honeymoon! I hope our other trips aren't quite this exciting!