Oh, I FEEL your pain!
My mom had a condo in a beautiful spot (overlooking a creek at the 6th hole of the Silverado Country Club in Napa, CA, wine country with a HUGE deck) that she rented out, and the family got to use it whenever. Well, sure as the sun rises, every time it was my turn to use it I had to spend a day or more getting repairs done. One time I went up to specifically attend an art fair and had to spend the day cleaning the previous renter's toddler's cheerios off the floor (heck, the whole dang condo...I can tell you the occupants' hair color and lipstick shade) AND wait for the Rotor Rooter guy to tell me that two tampons tied together when flushed caused the plumbing backup. One time I was up there in December and the HOA decided to do major renovations...came back and the whole place was stripped of siding and covered in Tyvek and freezing cold. (It would've been nice if they had stuck to their schedule and begun the rennovations a week later.) Another time the deck was covered with a slick moss/algae that had to be scrubbed off, but not before I did a major banana peel slip-and-fall on it. NEVER did I have a time there that wasn't aggravating. So when she left the condo to me in her will (Mom had a perverse sense of humor), I sold it to my sister because I wanted NADA++++ to do with the cursed place.
Of course, by this time I was pretty fed up with the snooty Napa ambience as well, I grew up in the region (we have a wine country last name and not by coincidence) and just hated when it got all touristy and the hype was all about cachet. Really? Vintners work HARD. Who's there in the off-season buying wines to keep them afloat? The locals. The tourists are the worst bunch of ('scuse me) rich white trash that, honestly, spend their time impressing each other with their wrist watches. It's pretty much a bunch o' hooey. And they are there in THRONGS. Ugh. It will be a long, long time before I *want* to go back.
Sorry for the rant. Guess I needed to vent.
We should start a thread of "The Dumbest Things Tourists...."
