Hubby and I did a vacation thing!
I arranged for a little house on a vacation park about an hour from here, right near beautiful nature and lots of forests.
Living where we do, there's lots of flat farm land with not that many trees. I grew up in a little village surrounded by forests and call me spoiled, but I get quite sad when I'm not around trees much. So, a tiny vacation towards big forests! As a bonus, I later read that the heather there would be in bloom aswell.
So, off we went on our little vacation. The car was packed and seeing as we weren't able to get the keys to our little house until late in the afternoon, I planned a pre-vacation schedule aswell. First stop was a diner for lunch, after which we headed into the forest for our first walk. This walk was about an hour long and took us a little longer, because I had to take pictures.
Gosh, picture-taking sure is an artform in which you need to hone your skills!
My pictures turned out to be simple vacation pictures, because I neglected that particular skill for many, many years. No matter though, I did enjoy the walk! It took us through a nice variety of scenes with forests, blooming heather and anything inbetween.
After this, we went to the vacation park and gathered the keys to our little home. It was at the edge of the park, right next to the forest, so I was excited!
My excitement quickly faded when we saw the state of the house. The toilet and bathtub were very dirty and not the "Oops, we forgot to clean this time" kinda dirty, but the "This stuff is very old and hasn't been cleaned properly for many, many years, so now there is no way these stains are ever getting out and you just need to burn this crap!".
I was not pleased, but like the good, conflict-avoiding people we are, we decided to just give it a shot. I just couldn't stop thinking about what else might not have been cleaned properly? And how crappy it is of them to rent out this house in this poor state. It was quite expensive too!
So, I was filled with stress and slept horribly and the next day, we headed over the the reception desk. Time for some personal growth! I complained and they offered to send a cleaning lady. I said it would probably not do much, couldn't they just assign us a new home? But no, there wasn't any available.
Cleaning lady it is! But, as I figured, she couldn't do anything. We packed up our stuff and headed back to the reception desk to hand in our keys and I told them we're not staying in that house, so we'll just head home and I want my money back. Apparently, that's when they decided to magically produce some other kind of team which would have no problem getting rid of those stains in the bathtub and toilet. Not to worry, they would send them right over! Except that I didn't agree with that and I asked why they didn't have them clean this place up before renting it out in the first place. I said I didn't feel comfortable in that home, so that wasn't a solution for us.
This is where I guess the manager's super powers came in handy, because now there were other homes available. So they handed back the keys, saying one of the other, bigger homes would get cleaned and we could pick up the keys later that day.
Fine! We headed off for a little walk, grabbed some lunch and headed back to the crappy, little home until we got the call.
This time, we got a home for 8 people, instead of 4, which was a nice upgrade, space-wise. Loved that we had a big couch now. The place was fine and clean enough, although the bathroom upstairs had various problems. We decided to just live downstairs. We headed out for dinner and decided to skip the heather for golden hour, because there wasn't much goldness about that particular hour. The sky was just plain grey.
We headed back to our new and improved home and basically decided to hang on the couch for the rest of the evening. Hubby watched tv and I faded in and out of half-sleep, because I had had a crappy night. We went to bed and I tried earplugs, because ofcourse, people were outside, talking and laughing and 'making merry'. They kept at it until 1:30 am and by that time, I was pretty annoyed, because I still hadn't slept. Earplugs and side sleepers are not a good match, no matter what kinda earplugs you wear (I tried them all!). While visiting the toilet, I also noticed a few nasty little pests in the home. Yeah, great, that makes me feel so much better about the cleanliness of this park...
By the time the noise stopped, both of my ears hurt, so no more earplugs. I was wide awake and super tired at the same time. The house kept creaking and if the house wasn't creaking, hubby was tossing and turning in his bed. He wasn't having a good night either. So in the end, I had no sleep.
We decided to go home the next morning. Our health and quality of sleep was more important than stubbornly trying to get what we still could out of this big waste of money.
Never will I ever return to that vacation park and I gotta say, this is not what I was used to from this particular chain (for the Dutchies: Landal). This chain of vacation parks for me used to stand for good quality homes.
Not anymore.
Well, atleast we got a few good walks out of this tiny trip which was supposed to last twice as long. I got to spend time in forests, which is always a positive thing. Oh, and I also saw a bunny and a squirrel! But hey, for now, I think I'll stay away from vacations for a while. It's not worth the stress!
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