Results of Vacay #1 - Part 1

Florida was fan-freaking-tastic. Well. Not exactly. More like, un-fucking-believable. And not necessarily in a good way. Even if everything else had been amazing, the trip can't qualify as bestest ever because our hotel fucking sucked. Not totally, like I-can't-stay-here-another-minute-without-retching-sucked, but enough that I won't be staying there again. Ever.

OK. It was very clean (which is not the case in some other Daytona hotels I've seen).
It was reasonably priced. It was in a decent location. And we had an amazing view of the ocean.
It had a great pool, a cool-ass tiki bar and fun bartenders. (Cindy was my favorite. She got all excited to hear our "jersey accents.")

But. And this is a big huge BUT. . . on our first night, in our first room (yes, that's right, I said our FIRST room) the toilet wouldn't stop running (in the middle of the night no less). It flushed fine but just kept filling up and filling up and filling up without any end in sight. So. . . hubby (who luckily is quite handy) checks to see if he can fix it and he finds that some moron tried to half-ass fix it with, get this, a WASHCLOTH. This fucking moron tried to use a fucking washcloth to tie together the broken pieces of the parts inside the tank that, uh...duh...make the toilet work. And then they rented us the room as if the toilet wasn't held together by some cheap ass cotton cloth. Muthafuckas. Hubby was able to get the toilet to stop running by sticking another towel in there, so there was no flood, but the fucker was broke. Unusable. Can't exactly stay in a room with no toilet. Needless to say, I bitched, hard, and they moved us to another room. Of course I insisted that we get to keep our stuff in the first room (since the risk of flooding was over) until the afternoon of the next day. It was about 5:30 AM at this point and I wasn't about to move my shit in the middle of the night OR get up early and do it. Screw that. We grab a couple of basics and our valuables, and off we go to Room #2.

Which they claimed was an upgrade. Hardly. It was the exact same room but with a worse furniture layout. The upgrade, they said, was the full size fridge and stove in it (as if I was about to cook anything on vacay - duh, I barely fucking cook at home). Whatever. It was clean. And the toilet worked. We checked. After being in the room about 10 minutes, however, we learned the AC didn't work. Well, technically it worked - it did pump out cold air after all - but we couldn't have the AC on and sleep at the same time because the fucking thing was so fucking loud I thought my head would explode. So no AC. Great. But it was late (early actually by this point) and sleep could not be held off another minute. So we cranked the AC and froze the room as best we could. Turned the damn thing off and hit the sheets.

The next morning, seriously lacking of sleep, I bitch again. This time to the manager. Galley. (that's his name, really). Galley is very nice. He apologizes. Profusely. He knocks our rate way down for the rest of our stay and gives me the pick of any available room I want. So Galley & I go off checking rooms. Don't want the first floor, I tell him -- view sucks. Don't need a kitchen suite, I tell him. I don't fucking cook. We end up in what appeared to be a very nice room on the top floor with a simply amazing view of the ocean. I'm so tired, and happy to finally have a place, I don't notice that the phone is broken -- ok, like the AC the phone technically works -- there is a dial tone after all -- but all the little buttons, like "Front Desk" and "Wake-Up Call", they're missing. I guess you could dial "0" for the hotel operator, but whatever. I also didn't notice that the patio had no screen on it and there was no way to turn off the patio light so at night the patio was useless -- you couldn't open the door to hear the ocean. You couldn't sit outside. This is Florida. And it may only be April, but the bugs have already come to play down there. (although to be fair, I think this electrical and architectural disaster was the same for the whole hotel). Oh yeah, and I didn't notice that one faucet on the kitchen sink didn't work (not like I needed it, but still).

Whatever. At this point we're fucking exhausted. The day is half-over by the time we've moved all our shit from our first and second rooms and noticed all the problems in our third room so we decide to just say fuck it. At least the room is clean. And the toilet works. And the AC won't keep us up all night. Besides, all we plan to do here is sleep and fuck. The rest of the time we hope to be out and about. We hoped.

But that is a whole other story best left for another time.

For now, if you ever find yourself traveling to Daytona Beach, do not, I repeat, do not stay the The Bermuda House. Granted they've recently come under new management so hopefully things will improve, and the pool bar really is awesome, but unless you are a risk taker, you'd prolly better stay some place else.