We took a trip to Mississippi with the dogs for a family wedding. This was the first trip like this we’d ever tried, first time with the dogs, first time renting a house through VRBO. Might be the last on the rental portion!
The house had stellar reviews and the pictures were wonderful. The house had a pool and a huge backyard, lots of room inside too. I talked with the owner and she was fine with our dogs, which is a big deal because a lot of places want little dogs only. The rental was expensive for a week but with a pool, hot tub, game room and being just minutes from the beaches and the wedding venue it was worth it. (We didn’t realize at the time the price might have been higher because Crusin’ the Coast was going on.)
Well, we walked in the door and knew we were in trouble. The house smelled awful, I mean like OH MY GOSH OPEN THE FLIPPING WINDOWS! The air conditioning was off and it was also very hot in there, stuffy, humid, dank. Ugh! We unloaded the Jeep and quickly turned on all the ceiling fans, cranked the ac on and high tailed it out back with the dogs. (I ended up going to the store and buying plugins and fabreeze with tide to try and kill some of the stink.)
Reality really smacked us in the face with this one, that beautiful pool was outright gross, full of leaves, not running, low on water and looking pretty cloudy and slimy. The pool deck was littered with deflated vinyl pool toys that were full of water, bottle caps, cigarette butts and other bits of trash. The cushions for most of the chairs were either filthy, wet or ripped. We contacted the owner who said her son was supposed to clean it and such but hadn’t and blah, blah, blah.. She gave us directions on how to use the little robot thing to suck the leaves out. Wait a second, we have to clean it ourselves if we want to use it??? (These pictures were taken AFTER I moved everything I could and swept all around!)
Now I know that fire ants are an issue in MS, so I asked her and she assured me that she’d only seen “a couple” and had treated them. She told me where the poison was and said I was free to treat them again. There were many, many more than a couple and excuse me but I’m not the Orkin man!
We headed back inside to start unpacking, making a stop in the Game room, it was dirty, disorganized and smelled worse than the house, but why? Oh, the “Hot tub” was one of those portable jobs over in the corner, you know the vinyl kind? Upon lifting the lid I felt my stomach get queasy, there was slimy black stuff all in the bottom of the thing. I dropped the lid and told Randy to stay far away! The windows were too gross to open, had no screens and most of the blinds were broken. There was just crap everywhere!!
On to the kitchen we went to unpack what we brought and to figure out what groceries we needed.
The pantry was full of junk, there was no where to put our food. The cabinets must have space then right?
Um, nope not a spot to spare. Every cabinet, every space in the kitchen had junk in it. Opening the drawers was taking your life or at least your feet into your hands because every drawer was full and broken!
Well the refrigerator will be empty of course..
I’d asked about a coffee pot and she said they had one but it was a plain drip kind, well that’s fine except Randy drinks caffeinated and I don’t. So we brought our own pot, no big deal. I have a protein shake every morning for breakfast and she assured me there was a blender there so I didn’t take my Vitamix. When we finally found the blender it was scary old and more than a little gross. I ended up buying a small smoothie maker when I went to the store to get air fresheners.
There were instructions on the refrigerator directing the current guest to clean out the refrigerator if the previous guest had left anything. Um…why do I have to clean up after someone else? We noticed that there were a lot of bulbs burned out around the place including the car port.
That list said extra bulbs were in the cabinet over the microwave and to replace as needed. Okay, wait what, you as the owner couldn’t check to see what bulbs needed to be replaced before the guest arrive??? Ironically, none of the bulbs up there fit anything that was blown.
Our adventure didn’t end there. The bathroom was yet another bundle of surprises, drawers crammed with stuff, a shower head that didn’t work, a rusted shower caddy that I had to put wash cloths on before sitting anything on and oh the bonus came the next morning when there wasn’t enough hot water to make it through one shower, you didn’t even have to turn the cold on at all!!!
There were tv’s all over the place. We first thought we’d watch tv in the den, but found that the remote in there didn’t work with that tv and the other remote didn’t have batteries. We were trying really, really hard to make the best of it. So one night Randy picked a movie for us to watch after we’d had dinner. We tore that house apart looking for the remote to the dvd player, finally I texted the owner and was told that it was usually on the table and if it wasn’t there she didn’t know where it was. The living room had a tv, surround sound and xbox? No not really, the xbox wasn’t there but the controls were, the surround sound was broken and almost all channels were locked on the tv, not just movie channels but like Nat Geo Wild, Animal Planet and TLC. We tried to use the music station on the tv but it didn’t work, it skipped so badly that there were one minute lulls!!
In the description it said to ‘bring your rv we have parking’ well apparently like so much else someone brought one and left it and a bunch of other crap!
There were cats and critters galore in there and it was a nightmare keeping the dogs out of that area!
Lesson learned! We’ve talked at length about what we are going to do for taking vacations and trips..I seriously think an rv is in our future, because I don’t ever want to go through that again!!!
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