Haven't been blogging this week because we took a mini-vacation and went to the mountains in north Georgia. Mac has been wanting to go trout fishing ever since we moved here and it's much too warm for trout here on the coast so I picked out a cabin near Blue Ridge, Georgia, appropriately named Rising Trout Lodge, it was supposed to be situated on Fighting Town Creek a good trout stream and made a reservation for the first few days of November.
The cabin was beautiful, well decorated, well stocked and sitting in the woods. But there were a few problems the first of which was the road in. When we picked up the key-code at the rental office in town nothing was said about the condition of the road other than to say that the cabin was only 2 1/2 miles off the main road. The directions were fine and then we got to the last stretch where you left the paved road and went onto a gravel road, in itself not a bad thing gravel roads give good traction in wet weather, but this road was in bad condition with large, sharp rocks sticking up, we scraped our bottom but finally made it to the cabin and let me tell you the last piece was STRAIGHT down, talk about pucker! But we made it, deciding right then there'd be no night driving to this place and we'd eat our meals at the cabin.
So next we went to look at the creek which the lady at the rental agency had just told us was just across the field. There were no fields, just a log and dirt set of steps going STRAIGHT DOWN the side of the hill. Mac had to help me down and I all but crawled back up. The creek was fresh and running and Mac looked forward to fishing in it, I knew I'd never go back down the steps to it again.We had an early night and got up the next morning with the intention of heading into town and buying enough groceries to carry us through the trip, we'd picked up a few the day before thinking we'd eat out some--that was before seeing the road we had to drive. Jumped in the car and part way up the first hill a light for low tire pressure came on, we managed to get to a flat place near the entrance to the gravel road and Mac looked at the tires and saw that one was flat, we'd cut the edge of it on on of the large rocks we'd driven over getting to the cabin. Miatas don't have spares any more just a pump to pump your tire up and get you to a gas station. Well there was no pumping this tire up and we were considering who to call, AAA, a tow truck, God, when a man drove up from a cabin down a dirt road, said he had to go to the Post Office but would come back and take Mac and the tire to a tire shop. Mac went looking for the jack, which looked like a toy and managed to get the tire off, and bless him, the man, whose name was Dick, returned and took Mac and the tire off.
Meanwhile I walked back to the cabin, about a 1/2 mile, not a bad walk till the end where it was STRAIGHT down to the cabin, I all but sat on my bottom and scooted down, it was bad, bad, bad.
Anyway, Mac got a new tire, we went into town and bought food, returned and parked the car at a different cabin, one not to be occupied until the weekend and most importantly not down the road our cabin was on. We carried the groceries down to the cabin on foot.
We decided then and there that though we'd leave the car at the other cabin overnight, we really didn't have much choice, that we'd pack up in the morning and come home a day early. So Mac spent the rest of the day fishing--altogether on the 2 days he caught 8 fish, none of which were trout, for as we found out, there are no trout in Fighting Town Creek.
Yesterday morning we got up and began ferrying our suitcases and stuff the 1/2 mile or so to the car, and except for the horrible stretch right in front of the cabin it wasn't too bad, though truth be told Mac did all the heavy carrying, I'd done the packing up and carried the lighter stuff.
So now we're home, safe and sound and not very happy with the North Georgia Mountain Cabin Rentals LLC. The pictures and descriptions of the cabin we rented were deceptive. They said our cabin would be a trout fisherman's paradise because it had 500 feet on a good trout stream. Nowhere did it say you'd have to go straight down the mountain to get to the water or that you needed a special vehicle to even get to the cabin. We had exchanged e-mails with this company and talked to them in person Monday when we picked up our key-code. If we had not been in reasonably good shape we would have never have made it up and down the road. If we'd had young children I would have been terrified to let them out of the cabin. If there had been an emergency it would have been difficult for help to have gotten to us and impossible for us to have gotten out in a hurry.
Lovely as the cabin was I would never recommend it to any one. And I noticed that most of the pages in the guest book where you leave comments had been torn out, I'm not surprised.
I've got good at reading between the lines of holiday brochures but there's always a big omission somewhere. I can't tell you the number of letters I've had to compose after being let down badly by a travel company. I'm sorry you had such a trying time. Our last cottage in Wales didn't even tell us there was a key box code to use, it was just luck that I asked at the last minute how we were supposed to get in. There was no mobile reception at the bottom of the very steep drive there so we'd have had no chance of ringing the company to find out when we arrived. Small disaster narrowly avoided!
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