Dreams of winter: picking a vacation home

I suspect that long time ago people used newspapers or magazines to find real estate classifieds. Thank God for the internet and real estate rental sites: now you can instantly search and view thousands of vacation rentals. You can filter them based on a house type, number of bedrooms, proximity to ski resorts etc. These are all fine features, but on December 10^th I had one goal – to find just about any type of a ski house within my price range. I simply needed a vacation house big enough to accommodate 8 people. The trick was to find it for less than $300 per night for the week starting on December 24^th and ending January 1^st – the prime time for home owners to cash out real estate investments.

vacation home in VT

Soon enough, I learned one brutal fact about vacation rentals – they are bloody expensive. And  after spending countless hours searching homes through vacation rental sites, I had no choice but to start stripping my winter vacation dream house like an onion: one layer after another…Needless to say, it was a quite tearful process.

Forget about having a ski cabin next to a resort. Every prime location required significant investment, and unfortunately, I did not have huge stashes of cash.  So, I had to say bye-bye to ski-in/ski-out lodging options. There was no way we could afford them, and so I had to accept idea of moving away from resort areas. Actually, it wasn’t a big deal because I hadn’t known anything about vacation rentals, never skied in Vermont, and frankly, did not care much about distances. I was looking at the bigger picture: having great time with friends, getting away from NYC, forgetting about a day job etc…

And though those dreams were so nice, the reality was brutal:  with almost no time left before the holidays, finding the decently priced vacation homes with extra amenities was nearly impossible. So, I had no choice but to strip all saunas, steam rooms, hot tubs, satellite TV’s, ping pong tables and other amenities from my itinerary. Hmm…At that point, the dream vacation appeared to be more like a tiny motel room rather than a spacious and cozy ski cabin.

I was ready to call our ski vacation off when all of sudden, I stumbled upon a house not far from Okemo Mountain. It did look quite original from an architectural standpoint of view. It was not too far from Okemo resort. It had three bedrooms. It had a fireplace. It had a Jacuzzi and a barbeque grill. It even had an ice-skating pond right behind the house. And the best part? An owner was asking $200 per night!

I could not believe my eyes. Fearing that it was some kind of a mistake, I asked a friend of mine to give an owner a call. She called me back in about 10 minutes: the owner was ready to take our deposit and mail us the keys. Gee…Now I could finally relax: I got commitments from friends, and we managed to rent a nice house…”What else did I need to do?” I was asking myself slowly feeling my winter dreams coming back. “Oh shit!” suddenly I realized that there was one more obstacle…

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