A note on cabin rentals

We have found two categories of places that take pets, and, as the old joke goes, one is swell and the other is lousy.

We have been spoiled by places like Collins Rentals on St George Island, where the rental homes are immaculate.

http://www.sgirentals.com/index.cfm

Likewise Bend of the River Cabins in Georgia. Pets are allowed in a good number of units and they sparkle.

http://www.bendoftheriver.net/

As far as chains go, we are sold on La Quinta. 99% of their properties allow pets. (I counted!) and they are sparkling clean and good quality. Holiday Inn Express, Belmont and Americinn are all good quality when they allow pets, but not all of them do. Depending on the location, they may also have absurd restrictions like, the dogs can’t be left in the room, so you can’t go out.

Then there is the flip side of the coin. They allow pets, and they’re dives: Super/“Stupor” 8, “Quality” Inn, “Comfort” Inn, Days/“Daze” Inn, Ramada Limited. These are all very poorly maintained and managed. In addition to being noisy, they are often dirty. They have bugs, wet paint, slimy pools and dirty breakfast areas. The staff is poorly-trained and/or indifferent. And it’s all a crapshoot. I know there are hotel review sites, but I checked the one for one Super 8 and everyone loved it. It was a hellhole. And you can look at pictures, but they won’t show dirt or bad attitudes.

Even when you arrive in a dive, and you know it, you are usually too tired to start hunting for someplace else, and if it’s only a night, you tolerate it and complain in person and on-line, but that’s not fun. This is why I want to contact the good chains I mentioned above with my list of requirements for the ideal, pet-loving motel. They all have a lot of the things we want already. Just a couple of tweaks and they could gather ALL the pet family business and wipe the others out.

Finally, the issue of rental cabins. Many of these are mom and pop enterprises and it’s an extremely tiring business. Think of your own house and multiply by ten or so. All these people are in your face for their needs, and they mess it up, and they break things. The weather doesn’t always cooperate. Your hired staff, if any, are not necessarily rocket scientists or ethics professors. If you can’t personally clean every unit, there will be problems. You don’t always make enough money to fix or replace everything, and you have to make choices. So you add on new decks and let the raggedy towels go till next year, when, of course, the water heaters explode.

Bottom line: just clean them, and a cracked plate or torn window shade won’t bother me. But then the whole thing is run down and dirty, I won’t be back, and I’ll tell my friends.

Fireflies at the “Resort and Marina”

Now, this could have been a beautiful setting. We even saw fireflies every night! But it looked like a survivalist camp. The “Resort and Marina” consists of seven “lodges” or “cabins” for rent. Then there’s a separate location for RVs. In a third area, there are some kind of permanent RVs that seem to be privately owned and don’t go anywhere. The owners of the property must have some sort of mutual easement with other homeowners there because the cabins are cheek by jowl with large private homes and contraptions built out of connected sheds and immobilized RVs and cinder-block buildings. Everyone has one or more golf carts. And it’s mostly gravel, and all day long good old boys and cracker-women and muddy kids ride back and forth hauling stuff all over. Although our dogs had to be leashed, theirs didn’t. Although we pick up after our dogs, most other people don’t.

All this is on the shore of Kentucky Lake, right on the Tennessee border, and you can see the Land Between the Lakes from it. Oh, and the marina itself. This is a collection of covered docks and open slips that all but obscures any decent view of the lake, so you kind of have to hunch down and bend over to see it.



From this marina they rent out pontoon boats and we really considered renting one, except guess what happened. Yup. On day three, it rained. Rained on and off for two days, and we decided we were just sick of being trapped in Big Crappie, and we quit. We were also thinking of trying to get my arm looked at, which we couldn’t seem to do in Kentucky, but would have to move on to Tennessee, or else backtrack a long way. But more about that failed odyssey later.

Finally, I want to describe the Big Crappie “Lodge” as it says on the oar, pictured in the entry below. It’s a shack, okay?



It has a screened porch, a TV, air conditioning and furniture, but it’s a shack. Everything in it is worn out. The bathroom floor had a rotten spot I was nervous about stepping on. I know they have internet access because that’s how we found them and got in touch, but it must be dial-up. I managed to get on (off someone else’s wifi, perhaps) and post one blog from there, but that was all. Given the isolation, the weather and the decrepitude of the place, we thought it best to move on. And as soon as the tornados in Tennessee stopped, that’s what we did.

Wisconsin Dells, or “Why are we here?” Oh, deer!

Guess what happens every mile or so in Wisconsin. Someone kills a deer. It was so regular, and so continuous, it looked deliberate. Jim says it isn’t. It's a big deer hunting state, but they don't go that far. Apparently deer are just very foolish and seeing it happen doesn't prevent others from doing it. These deer were apparently very unlike those we saw in South Dakota, who look both ways before crossing. But we didn’t go there to learn that. We could have lived without seeing it at all. In fact, it’s kind of odd how we did end up there, because it didn’t originally have anything to do with Laura Ingalls; that came later.

Originally, we were going to South Dakota and back, but there were no stipulations about the “and back” part, except Joyce wanted to see some states she'd never been to before. Joyce left the rest up to me, and I decided it would be fun to visit our friend Jim in Wisconsin. And then, there’s the simple fact that, no matter which way you go back to Florida from South Dakota, there’s a lot of miles of not very spectacular farmland to cover and we would already have seen it.

So I asked Jim about the most interesting things to see in Wisconsin, and cities don’t count. We do everything we can to avoid those. He said either Wisconsin Dells or Door County, and the Dells seemed more accessible. Besides I’d been there about half a century ago with my mom. I looked it up, it seemed like fun, AND I found a cabin for rent that allowed dogs.

Joyce had never been to Wisconsin and knew nothing about it. She was agreeable to seeing Jim, too, so we decided to meet there, and Jim could sleep on the pull-out sofa! It was only after we decided to go to Wisconsin Dells that someone in my royalty group mentioned we would be near a lot of Laura Ingalls sites. I had read the books as a kid, but Joyce hadn’t, and she hated the TV show. I talked her into trying the books and got them, and we read them all before we left, learning there were lots more books by other people. So we decided to visit the sites and get more books. That’s what decided some of our daily routes and day trips.

Did I mention how much it’s been raining on this trip? Well, it has been, and in the upper Midwest, it’s been cold besides, so our arrival in Wisconsin Dells was greeted by cold rain. At that point, we didn’t much care. We decided to just settle in for the night and stay put the next day. There’s never a bad time on a long trip for a day off.