Sally Breslin: My Life: STUCK IN THE POCONOS AT A NIGHTMARE HONEYMOON HOTEL (PART TWO)

In last week’s column, I started to tell you about the luxury suite at a Pocono Mountains resort my husband and I reserved back in the 1970s to treat ourselves to a second honeymoon.

The brochures had shown an elegant, Roman-styled hotel with lavishly decorated suites done in velvets, gold-leaf and marble. We learned the hard way that brochures don’t always tell the truth.

The first thing that struck us when we entered our suite was the overpowering odor of mildew. When our eyes adjusted to the room’s darkness, we couldn’t believe what we saw.

By no stretch of the imagination were we standing in the luxurious Venetian suite pictured in the brochure (see last week's column for those photos) - the suite that had cost us a good chunk of our savings to reserve for a week. The walls were paneled in knotty pine, and the floors were covered with hideous-looking worn-out black and purple carpeting, which matched the fake velvet bedspread on the regular-shaped bed (it was supposed to have been heart-shaped). The stains on the bedspread (and on the TV screen and ceiling!) defied description.

IN TEARS ON THE VINYL LOVE SEAT!

On both sides of the bed, on rods hanging from the ceiling, were faded black and purple drapes. The furniture in the room was made of cheap wood and vinyl (in either orange or turquoise!), which was torn and patched with duct tape. The Roman-style "marble" fireplace looked like something straight out of a hunter’s cabin.

In the photographs in the brochure, the sunken bathtubs were surrounded by marble pillars and elegant Roman Statues pouring pitchers of water. The sunken tub in our suite was dirty and was surrounded by scratched mirrors and purple carpeting that had more green mold on it than a loaf of year-old bread. In the bottom of the tub was a rubber plug with a hairpin attached to it, replacing the little pull-ring that had fallen off.

THE SUNKEN TUB & PURPLE CARPET!

My husband and I broke all speed records running back to the main desk to complain. We had plenty of company.

“Where’s the Roman goddess statues?” one ruggedly built man was shouting at the desk clerk as we entered the lobby.

“Those are only props,” the clerk explained. “We rent them when we take the brochure photos.”

The guest reached across the desk, grasped the clerk by the lapels and yanked him forward until their noses nearly touched.

“My new bride is up in our room crying her eyes out right now,” he said through clenched teeth. “This is our honeymoon, and she’s NOT happy...which makes ME unhappy! She wants her statues!” His grip tightened on the clerk’s lapels. “And she WILL have them...won’t she?”

“Y-yessir!” the clerk squeaked.

When it was our turn at the desk, we demanded our money back. We figured that no matter where we had to spend the night, it would be better than staying where we currently were.

THE "ROMAN" FIREPLACE!

“Impossible,” the clerk said, shaking his head. “We've already spent money on your food and entertainment for the week. Besides that, you were informed of our 48-hour cancellation policy when you received your reservation confirmation. Didn’t you read the fine print on the papers we mailed to you?”

My husband’s expression warned me that he was about to explode. I hastily cut in, “Fine then, we’ll stay,” and practically yanked him out the door.

“Are you crazy?” my husband huffed as we headed back to our suite. “Do you really want to stay in this dump for a whole week?”

“We don’t have much choice,” I said. “We’ll lose all our money if we leave. And let’s face it, we can’t afford to stay anywhere else. So I think we should just try to make the best of it.”

Our week of torture was about to begin.

“GOOD MORNING HONEYMOONERS! RISE AND SHINE!!”

My husband and I sat straight up in bed the next morning, our hearts pounding.

“Who or what the hell was that?” my husband snapped, looking around the room.

“IT’S 7 A.M. AND TIME FOR OUR BRIDES VS. GROOMS VOLLEYBALL TOURNAMENT!” the voice continued to boom.

“It’s coming from up there!” I said, pointing to a built-in loudspeaker up near the ceiling behind our bed.

My husband dragged the love seat over near the bed and stood on it to get a closer look. “There’s no off-switch on it,” he muttered.

“Welcome to summer camp!” I joked.

We ended up, as most of the other couples did, using towels to muffle the loudspeaker.

As it turned out, summer camp was less regimented than this Poconos resort. Everything was done according to a strict schedule, which was distributed during breakfast each morning. Our entire day was planned for us from 7 a.m. to 11 p.m. Meals were served only at specific times, and we were told that if we missed them, we’d have to wait until the next meal to eat. It nearly was impossible to forget where we were supposed to be at a certain time, however, because the voice of “Uncle Weaver,” the resort’s activities director, constantly blared through the loudspeakers to remind us.

The first night in our suite, I was looking out of the window and happened to see several guests searching for something in the nearby woods. Whenever a car approached, they’d duck behind trees, as if they were doing something illegal.

Over breakfast in the dining room the next morning, Barry and Cindy, our assigned table mates, confessed that they were one of the couples who had been out in the woods the night before.

“We were told we could burn only special ‘Pocono logs’ in our fireplace,” Barry explained. “They sell them in the lobby here for $2.50 each. So we decided to save a few bucks and sneak out to the woods to find some of our own firewood!”

I thought he was kidding, because no one had mentioned logs to us when we’d checked in. But at the resort’s first “game hour,” I realized Barry had been telling the truth. The prizes the couples were competing for? Fireplace logs!

But the logs weren’t the only extra expense we couples were hit with unexpectedly. For example, the drinks in the nightclub were only $1 each…until the entertainment started, then the price jumped to $3.50. At first, we didn’t mind paying the extra money, because we figured the entertainment would be worth it. After all, the brochures had pictured everyone from Kenny Rogers to Paul Anka and Tom Jones performing at the resort.

Well, we must have chosen a week when all of the big-name performers were stricken with some terrible, debilitating illness because our nightclub featured the fantastic duo, “Juan and Maria,” a hugely pregnant woman and her platform-shoed husband, who did an off-key tribute to Sonny and Cher…when Maria wasn’t dashing off to the ladies’ room, that is.

The resort did go all out for Champagne Night, however. On that night, all drinks were free, and two bands were scheduled to entertain. The members of the first band, the Poets, who serenaded us with soft love songs for over an hour, were dressed-to-kill in crisp white tuxedos. Then, following a brief intermission, the second band, Frankie and the Corvettes, took the stage.

Attired in studded black leather jackets, boots and chains, with greasy slicked-back hair and sunglasses, they belted out a series of ‘50s rock-‘n-roll songs. I was sitting there, clapping my hands to the music, when I noticed that my husband was staring intently at the group. His expression clearly looked bewildered. I asked him what was wrong.

He narrowed his eyes at the stage. “I just realized that the Poets and Frankie and the Corvettes are the same guys. We’re not getting two groups for entertainment – they just recycled the first one!”

I took a closer look and was stunned to see he was right!

The field trips weren’t much fun, either. Our itinerary listed a day trip to a supposedly breathtaking area called Winona Falls, so all of us signed up for it. No one told us, however, until we gathered for the trip the next afternoon, that transportation was not provided - or that the falls were about 10 miles away. My husband and I were one of the few couples who had a car because most of the others had come by plane, so we ended up being a taxi service for all the field trips. There were as many as eight people stuffed into our car at times.

And once we reached the falls, we were on our own – no guides, no one from the lodge to tell us where to go. We ended up wandering through the woods for three hours – lost. We even missed our scheduled dinner that night, we got back so late.

After several days of being mercilessly chased by the resort photographer everywhere we went (he even asked us if he could shoot some photos of us in our bathtub!), eating mystery meat at every meal, playing the activity director’s inane games such as “pass the string down your partner’s pants,” and being hit with hidden costs that never were mentioned in our contract ($1 per bullet at the skeet-shooting range and $5 for a 15-minute horseback ride through knee-deep mud, for example) we, along with the other guests, were talking mutiny.

So on the last day we were there, all of us gathered around the indoor pool and unanimously voted to stage a protest. No longer, we vowed, were we going to adhere to schedules, play silly games, or eat food that looked as if it came out of a can with Lassie’s picture on the label.

We went into town and stocked up on burgers, fries and pizza, then spent all night, right up until dawn, sitting around the pool, eating and talking.

Because of our little “sit-in,” the dining-room meals went uneaten, Juan and Maria sang to an empty house, and the nightly game hour had no players. It was the best night of our vacation, not only because we tossed out our schedules and did whatever we wanted to do, but because we had the chance to really get to know the other couples and share all of our horror stories about the resort.

Although we never did receive even one penny of our money back, I was able to gain a small measure of revenge by mailing enlargements of my photos of the resort, clearly showing false advertising, to the Pennsylvania Better Business Bureau. A few weeks later, I was informed that armies of construction workers and interior decorators had descended upon the resort.

We’d thought our vacation might have been a little less painful if we had won the resort’s grand-prize of the week, which reportedly was worth nearly $500.

Well, as luck would have it, Barry and Cindy, our table-mates, ended up winning it. And when they received their prize, they actually were sorry they’d won.

It was a voucher for another week at the resort.

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