I'm leaving out the address we stayed at for obvious privacy reasons and to protect the guilty
Once upon a time this property may have been "252 yards from the beach" (330 according to Google Maps). From our conversations with neighbors who had rented their houses in previous years, according to the neighbors this hasn't been true for more than a year, the fences were up when they were here the same week last year, and the maintenance guy we met said the fence was put up about 8 months ago. Maybe he meant 18 months. This is where our problem started. We rented this property with the understanding we would have a relatively short walk to the beach and arrived to find a 6 foot tall fence along the backyard with dozens of "No Trespassing: Violators will be prosecuted" signs along the back. These signs very clearly block the path to the beach. The only alternative routes take you North or South a few hundred yards and the routes add up to more than 900 yard walks. The beach accesses all have "No loading or unloading" signs in front of them which means that for folks who rented here expecting a short walk (or drive) to the beach for small children and elderly family we were in for a rude surprise. It seems that if their goal was to make it difficult to get to the beach, they succeeded. We spent the first several days we were here trying to get the rental property to do something about it. They advertised a 252 yard walk, we'd settle for 350. The maintenance guy offered to put a gate in the fence but said he'd need to contact the owner of the adjoining property first, whom I think he made his opinion quite clear with the signs threatening prosecution. When the false advertising lawyers got involved, the rental property stalled on giving us any firm resolution. Halfway through we gave up on getting them to give us any resolution while we were here. I'm sure there will be further follow up, but in the meantime we tried to make the best of our vacation.
Which leads me to the generally poor status and disrepair of this property. I mean, on the surface, this is a beautiful home, the layout is a bit strange and perhaps inefficient. It's rare that you have to spend time exploring and drawing maps to find your way around, but it's a good looking house nonetheless, nicely furnished and very spacious. We found the kitchen to be reasonably stocked with cookware (no waffle maker, but now I'm being picky). By the end of the second day, however; we had a laundry list of broken fixtures and generally dangerous oversights. We sat down in the basement and turned on the TV only to discover someone hard of hearing had been the last person to use it. Fine but it turns out the volume down button on the remote does nothing. Covering our ears and approaching the television with our faces averted we managed to get the volume turned down to a survivable level. It turns out two of the TVs didn't work at all, the equipment was improperly installed and configured. Later that evening we pulled out the trundle bed in the basement and were stopped short. The frame was so warped that the bed didn't even pull out properly. I guess it could work if you like hammocks. That don't move. At all. A maintenance guy came by and spent the afternoon hammering on the thing and got it to pull out and hold the mattress in a mostly flat way, but it was still terribly uncomfortable.
Meanwhile elsewhere in the house, a few of us walked into one of the Queen bedrooms and turn on the light. Or half the lights, as the other half of the bulbs were all dead, one of the end table lamps has a short in it and therefore wouldn't stay on unless you stand in front of it repeatedly shaking the end-table. Not how I want to spend my vacation. I attempted to change one of the bulbs in the ceiling fan only to have the glass fall out of the fixture because the glue had apparently melted and ended up with a shock. By the third night the lights in the downstairs area had stopped turning on altogether. We're doomed to a life of darkness and eyestrain. And I wanted to do some reading!
There is a large shared bathroom between the bedroom with the two twin beds and the one with the bunk bed where the ventilation fan apparently doesn't work. We see the fan, and several switches but nothing turns it on. Remind me to take my constitutionals somewhere else.
We were there in the middle of August and it was, as we expected, hot. The house has Air Conditioning but it only seems to be capable of keeping the top floor cool. This is fine during the day as it's where the majority of the food and socializing happens but at night we quickly realized something was wrong in the bedrooms. Vents are open, we can feel a slight cool breeze, but with two people in these bedrooms were unable to keep them cool. Our first night, with AC on our room got up to 90. The master suite was 65. I'm not an expert but something seems wrong here, maybe there's an obstruction in one of the ducts?
My grandfather who arranged this trip and generously reserved the house for everyone at no cost to us was livid at this point, he spent at least an hour a day on the phone with lawyers or the property managers. As a career politician he's learned to ask nicely in many different ways but he didn't seem to be making any headway. About halfway through our trip he settled down after one such phone call with a newspaper and a beer only to suddenly find himself on the floor. The chair he'd sat on had simply fallen apart, not broken but rapidly disassembled itself underneath him, flinging him backwards into the bay windows and then dropping him on the floor.
And these were just the highlights. Needless to say was not a happy customer and would not buy again.
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