What Was He Looking At?

In the past we've stayed at some pretty ~~quaint~~ awful places. I've written about them. You can go back through my archives and find most of them. But after the last fiasco, we decided that we'd only stay in places that have good TripAdvisor ratings. Mark assured me this place had a good TripAdvisor rating.

We really didn't want to stay in a hotel this time. The primary reason is that you don't have as much control over what you eat when you stay at a hotel. You end up eating a mammoth cooked breakfast. And it's the same stuff every day. (Okay, I might eat yogurt and granola almost every day but at least I switch it up with the flavors. You can't do that with bacon and eggs!) Even though there's more choice for lunch and dinner, the food almost certainly has too much fat and too many calories.

Also, the primary purpose of this trip was to attend a funeral. We wanted to have a bit more room so we could go through the boxes of Mark's dad's memorabilia.

A caravan seemed like the ideal solution. It would give us a bit more room and we'd have a kitchen where we could prepare our own meals. Mark found a place in St. Osyth Beach Holiday Park. The Holiday Park concept may be uniquely British. It's similar to a campground except all of the units are static - they don't move. It's really not the same as a mobile home park in the US because most US mobile home parks require skirting, decking, and a certain degree of landscaping. Some of these units have those features, but most do not.

This particular park featured an indoor pool, restaurant, bar, and nightly entertainment. It sort of reminded me of a cruise ship. The "entertainers" wore a number of hats. In addition to singing and dancing, they also conducted trivia quizzes and called out the numbers for Bingo. We wandered over to play trivia a couple of times. The food was the typical pizza, burger, and fries - not really on our diet. Besides the place was heaving with kids because it was a school holiday week. On the plus side, we could step out the door and see the seawall. The beach is just the other side of the seawall. However, it was October and we had no desire to put our toes in the sand. It was a short (3.1 mile walk to Clacton Pier. The negative was that most of that walk was through Jaywick - a topic I discussed a few days ago.

But let's get back to the unit we rented. It was absolutely the worst. If we hadn't paid in advance and been trying to deal with a death in the family, we wouldn't have stayed.

We had to pay extra for bed linens. Towels weren't available at any price. Fortunately, my mother-in-law was kind enough to loan us some towels.

The carpet was 50 shades of gray. Looks like its original color may have been beige. Keep your shoes on! The fabric on the sofa cushions was several shades darker than the same fabric on the base. There was obviously a moisture problem. There were small plastic bowls of salt positioned at the tops of the curtain rods throughout the unit. The bathroom had carpeting in it which I believe retains some of that unwanted moisture. When you stepped out of the shower, you stepped onto a small throw rug that was perpetually cold and damp. The floor beneath it was spongy and gave you the sensation that the next time you stepped on it, you could end up going through the floor. The shower was a bit moldy. You just tried not to touch anything. Fortunately, neither of us has a mold allergy.

There was ~~stuff~~ junk stashed on top of the kitchen cabinets. There were plenty of dishes, but no more than two matching ones. We only had one tea towel so we had to leave the dishes to dry in the rack. The mirror covering the inspection panel also showed signs of moisture damage.

I wanted to run the vacuum cleaner. I found one in the closet but it was being held together by duct tape so I decided against using it. When you plugged in the tea kettle, as you do in England, it would throw the breaker. Mark had to go outside to reset it. One time when he went out to do this, I was in the shower. That's when he noticed that the water from the shower was emptying out onto the concrete pad. It was not going down any pipe. At least this problem didn't extend to the black water.

The bedroom was small. (The two we didn't use were even smaller.) The neighbors were typically up yelling at each other well past midnight. While the oven worked, the broiler did not.

The decor, if you can call it that, appeared to be late 20th century garage sale. The TV did not work at all, which wasn't surprising since it looked like a 1980s model. Big huge thing - not a flat screen.

And it wasn't what I'd call cheap. We could have stayed in a modern hotel for less. I'm not sure what's up with TripAdvisor. I tried to find the reviews for this place so I could see what Mark was looking at when he booked it, but I couldn't find it. In the future, I want to see how many reviews the reviewer has actually written. I suspect the stellar reviews on this place were written by the owners relatives.

Check it out: