What in the WORLD!?!

 

Ready for some more stories? (Also, please keep in mind from a couple of days ago that a triple exclamation point signals another of our "are you kidding me???" moments of the trip.)

We arrived at our Airbnb around dusk on Thanksgiving night. We learned pretty quickly that dusk comes EARLY in the central time zone. We were basically straight south of our home, but we were a whole hour earlier, so it got dark at 4:45. That is so early!!

Our plan was as follows: arrive at the Airbnb, carry our things from our car to the condo, go to Cracker Barrel for dinner, and then come back to unpack. 

It's adorable when we make plans, isn't it?

Our condo was on the 7th floor of the building, and thankfully they had luggage carts, because it's possible we needed TWO to haul all our stuff. Embarrassing, but true. (We watched the WORST Lifetime movie later in our trip in which the main character moved into her college dorm for a whole semester with one carry-on suitcase, so clearly we're doing something wrong.) 

I want to pause to say that when we were choosing our Airbnb, we were strategic in our selection. We knew we were going to be there for several days, so we wanted the option of a full home, including a kitchen and laundry so we didn't have to eat out every single meal and so we didn't have to pack so much. Oh. Wait. 

We've always had amazing experiences at Airbnbs, but this one started out a little on the rough side. (!!!) To be fair, we called the property manager the day after we arrived, and he was incredibly apologetic, accommodating, and gave us a partial refund on our stay. We were absolutely satisfied with his offering.

We loved the Airbnb itself. It was as cute in person as it had been online, and it didn't reek of cleaners. Unfortunately, that might be because...the condo just wasn't clean. On our first pass through, we found multiple visible cleanliness issues. We also found that there was zero extra toilet paper. That might be okay for a couple of days, but not for as many days as we planned to stay. (I don't want to be unkind to the owner, so I won't outline everything we found, but suffice it to say that it was not at all acceptable or good. Or even remotely clean.)

We decided to bring everything up from our car, go out to eat, and then come back to deal with cleaning and unpacking. But before I do that...would you like to see where we stayed? 

Here is the living room. It had a huge sliding glass door wall that looked out over the balcony and out toward the water.

The living room was open to a dining area and the kitchen.

The master bedroom also had a sliding glass door out to the balcony!

Master bathroom had a soaker tub!!

There was a second bedroom, which we used for luggage storage. And there was a second bathroom, too.

We had a really great sized balcony, too. 

We ended up really enjoying the Airbnb and would recommend it. Like I said, the issues we had were fairly resolved, and the place was extremely comfortable to stay in for the week. (Not just the condo itself, but the whole property.)

So we left to head to Cracker Barrel for dinner. We should have known from the number of people sitting in rockers on the porch that we were in real trouble. It took us about 10 minutes to even get to the hostess to put our names in, and she told us it would be a two hour wait. (We've never done the eating out thing on Thanksgiving, so clearly we underestimated its popularity.) We decided to just place a takeout order instead, but that's when we learned they only serve Thanksgiving food on Thanksgiving. The whole menu isn't available. (!!!) I don't like Thanksgiving food, so eating out had been the whole draw. Ryan could eat traditional fare, and I had already pre-selected from their menu the food I would choose to avoid Thanksgiving food.

Sigh.

We ditched the Cracker Barrel plan entirely and went to the only other place we could find open that night:

YESSSSSSSSSSSSSSS. We got our food to go, took it back to the condo, and ate while we watched football. 

And then, we unpacked and cleaned. Three loads of laundry, a full dishwasher, and half a container of disinfecting wipes later, we felt pretty good about it.

And that's a wrap on arriving in Florida!