California Monkey House

On our trip to California in December we stayed in a Vacation rental. We went on a well known website for rentals, did some research, read the reviews and chose a house in Newport Beach. I will refer to his house as the "Monkey House".

View from the front of the house

The house was in a great location and had a garage for parking. The reason the garage was such a big deal, is there are so many houses where you have to park on the street, and there are just not that many places available by your house. We lived on 2nd street in Long Beach over 30 years ago, and it was a pain in the neck to find a place to park in the evenings after work. If you did find a great spot near your home you never wanted to leave.

The rental house was one floor, upper unit, long and thin and had the old stale palm tree decor`. We didn't start out on a great foot when we arrived and there was scaffolding in between the rental and the house next door. When we went into the house and walked down the hall to the master bedroom in back, we saw a worker's head right outside the bathroom window. The windows had no covers on them, and when I sent a text to the owner he suggested we try to cover them. So, we bought some tape and used a roll of paper towels to make curtains. Tacky but effective!

This was our view inside our bathroom. The bathroom sink area was open to the bedroom.

Our paper towel curtains in the second bathroom. As you can see after a few days of steam the tape was coming loose.

What, no ironing board? When was this iron made, the 60's?  I iron my clothes on vacation, there I said it. When I look for a place to stay I always check to make sure they have an iron and a board. This rental said it had both. WRONG. The iron was a very old Oreck cordless iron that sat on a base that never heated it up past warm, and the water leaked out of the iron all over my clothes. When I texted the owner asking where the ironing board was stored he said, "We use a towel on the kitchen counter." OY! The next day we stopped at Target and bought them an iron and board.

The house was very oddly decorated for Christmas and it had family photos all around, so we felt like we were staying in a strangers home, instead of a vacation rental. For me that was not a positive

point.

This was one of the bedrooms that had personal pictures in it. It was very strange having pictures of complete strangers in the room where you would sleep. It would be like having pictures of a Hotel Manager's kids in your hotel room.

One of the things I looked for in the reviews for this rental was its cleanliness. From the review of this house it sounded as if this would not be an issue. WRONG AGAIN! There were crumbs and hairs in the kitchen drawers, dirty napkins and old chips in a serving bowl, a huge stain on the sofa, saliva stains on the pillow shams, urine stains on the mattress pad, used bars of soap in the showers, and opened food and milk in the refrigerator. I was glad that we mostly just slept there and were gone most of the day.

This was just one of the drawers in the kitchen. The silverware drawer looked the same.

Big stain on the couch.

I found these stains when I stripped the beds before we left. If we had seen them at the beginning of our stay I am not sure we would have slept in the bed.

So, have you been wondering why I called this rental the Monkey House? The master bedroom was decorated in the creepiest monkeys. Monkey pictures, Monkey plates on the wall and a monkey rug on the floor. All very creepy.

Here are two of the three monkey plates

The house in Newport beach would not be a place we would return to for a second stay, although I am sure it could have been a lot worse.  After a lot of cleaning, curtain taping and food restocking we had a memorable vacation in the "Monkey House".