We booked two rooms for the weekend of the Newport Jazz Festival. The Viking was the only hotel available on this very popular weekend, but we had heard that the Viking had an excellent reputation (no, we didn't check them out here, first, unfortunately!).

BIG mistake! This is, hands down, the worst hotel in which I have ever had the misfortune to stay.

Online, the hotel advertises "spectacular room rates", and they're not kidding! It was "spectacular" all right: $378 per room per night! Here's what we got for this great rate:

Our rooms are incredibly small - about half the size of any other hotel room we had ever stayed in. The bathrooms are miniscule. You can stand in one spot (and one spot is the ONLY place you can stand!) and touch all four walls quite easily with your not-quite outstretched arms.

The view from our windows was less than picturesque. Room 227 looks out across the roof to an expanse of blank wall. Room 210 looks out on the hotel mechanicals.

But inside, the view was worse: there was peeling wallpaper, peeling paint, and exposed pipes 210; peeling wallpaper, peeling paint and a bubbling plaster ceiling in room 227. Both rooms included very small televisions; in room 227 the television was placed precariously atop a tall, skinny chest of drawers, and couldn't be seen from the bed comfortably unless your were sitting on the bed sideways. Room 227 also featured light switches that refused to turn on the lights, and a lamp that sparked when touched.

The tiny bathrooms offered a gas station toilet, no place to put your toiletries, cracked tiles and, in room 210, a cheap plastic tub that flexed alarmingly (several inches!!) beneath your feet along with taps that continued to drip when turned off, and a shower head that would not have been out of place at a long-abandoned summer camp. In room 227's bathroom, we encountered a large, crawling insect.

We asked to be moved as soon as we saw our rooms, but were told nothing else was available. We asked if the hotel would book us somewhere else, but were refused by both the inexperienced desk staff and the unsympathetic evening manager. After a long haggle, we were offered a small credit in the dining room. As the dining room had already closed for the evening, we decided to use the credit the next morning for breakfast.

That evening we went to the pool, which we had nearly to ourselves. The pool is okay, but the deck around it is heavily scarred and pitted, and looked as though it hadn't been cleaned in quite a while.

The breakfast on offer was buffet, or two a la carte choices: pancakes and eggs Benedict. Two of us had the pancakes (quite dry) and two had the eggs Benedict (adequate). With coffee and orange juice, the tab came to $82 (!!!) before tip. (There was no written menu, nor any sign listing prices.)

As we ate breakfast in the dining room, we noticed a baseboard heater with exposed wiring - and a curtain right next to it!

The Viking's literature is very slick, and describes the hotel as a "national treasure" with "the modern amenities today's sophisticated travelers expect." Perhaps this hotel might - might! - have been considered a national treasure in the deepest, darkest days of the Soviet Union, but surely nowhere else.