June 30, 2018
This morning I slept in until 5:30, so slowly but surely, my jet lag is starting to get a little better. Come to find out, it will take me a full 8 days to completely kick the jet lag and be able to stay up past 9 p.m.
We are heading to the Wolgan Valley in Blue Mountains today, and it is supposed to be cold there. Our driver is picking us up at 10 a.m. for the 3 hour drive. I am not looking forward to the long drive and this will be the first indication on this Australian trip that our travel agent didn’t really think things through when it comes to how much we are traveling on our vacation. Once there we find out that you can be flown in and out, directly to the resort by helicopter in 30 minutes and we were never even given that option or told that it was an option. By the end of this entire trip, we know that the trip was not planned very well and we wasted several days traveling unnecessarily, but let’s get back to today.
We got cleaned up and packed everything and headed down to breakfast. Then, since we had about an hour and a half until our driver picked us up and the sun was shining and it was an absolutely beautiful day in Sydney, we decided to walk around the area around our hotel. We took more photos of the Sydney Opera House and just enjoyed walking around out in the sun. We are feeling sad that we have to leave so soon, we didn’t really get any free time in Sydney to just walk around and shop and enjoy the town on our own. The only day scheduled for that was the day that we arrived, but jet lag kicked our asses and leaving our hotel room to grab food was hard enough, let alone leaving the hotel to look around.
Our driver picked us up at 10 a.m., he was a middle aged guy that makes this trip into the Blue Mountains several times a month, so he was full of information along the way about the towns, the different areas, etc. The drive was pretty, a typical mountain drive, cute small towns and just a lot of pretty scenery. He also told us, as did everyone else, that we were about to be completely spoiled at the place that we were going, it was 5 star and we were going to love it!
We arrive at Emirates One and Only Wolgan Valley and it felt like we were arriving at our own special paradise. Once inside the gate, we saw wombats and several kangaroos…I was getting excited thinking about the photography options while here! When we get to the lodge, we were met by a friendly lady that took us in and offered us drinks, but all that I wanted was coffee and water. I needed the caffeine and I was thirsty. We spoke with her about getting a helicopter flight out at the end of our stay, to save the 3 hour drive back to Sydney to fly to Uluru. After about 20 minutes and an explanation of how everything would work during our stay (breakfast, lunch, dinner, etc.), we were taken downstairs to the cafeteria for lunch. By this time is was 1:30 and I was starving. The place was full, but we found a table and sat down. Our waitress came over to tell us about the specials and she was young and kind of quiet and we couldn’t understand one word that she was saying, she mumbled and barely opened her mouth to talk. We just smiled and nodded trying to be nice and when she walked away, we look at each other and ask at the same time “Could you understand a word that she was saying?”. LOL. First indication that this stay may not be all that it is cracked up to be, but we don’t know that for sure yet. Everyone around us is drinking wine, cocktails, etc. and when our waitress came to take our order, she didn’t ask if we wanted anything to drink or even give us a drink menu for options. She hurried away and we spent the next 15 minutes looking around at everyone else enjoying their drinks and trying to find our waitress (or any waitress) to come over to us so that we could order drinks. Looking at everyone else, we were noticing that we were really the only ones being ignored. Rich was getting upset, I could feel it. After a very long time a manager finally came over to clean up our plates and offered us dessert. Rich was pissed. I knew he was about to blow and being that we haven’t even been here for two hours, I don’t want to be the annoying “new” people and get a note on our sheet for management saying that we are the whiners in cabin 28, beware! I can see it now! I didn’t want him to say anything, especially with me sitting there, so I pleaded with him to just wait, maybe this was a fluke. He reluctantly promises to keep quiet about this for now. Thank the Lord, we won’t be kicked out yet!
We get to our cabin and at first glance around it is really pretty cool. It has a living room, a bedroom and a large bathroom. There is a screened in porch with two rocking chairs and a room off of the living room with a heated plunge pool. I could get used to this. And outside, there are kangaroos everywhere! We are from the Texas Hill Country and we have deer everywhere we turn and I equate the kangaroos here to the deer in Texas, they are all over, it’s really cool and pretty amazing, since I’ve never seen a kangaroo before.
By this time, Rich is on the couch taking a nap, trying to calm down and get his blood pressure down, since I won’t let him say anything about the service at lunch and he is pretty upset. He normally wouldn’t be this upset, but we are paid a lot of money for this trip and we expect it to feel like it. Since he’s napping, I decide to look around our cabin some more and familiarize myself with everything. I start to notice things. The windows are dirty, and when I say dirty, I mean really dirty, like kind of gross. I open drawers under the coffee maker and next to the mini fridge to see what kind of goodies are in them. I found a goodie all right, and it wasn’t a good one! In the second drawer that I pulled out, there was a bunch of trash and a dirty coffee mug, with a dirty spoon in it and a used tea bag inside the cup…EWWW! Now I am grossed out and I am afraid to tell Rich, knowing that we may be sleeping in the woods by the time he gets done with them after this find!
When Rich got up from his stress nap, I told him about my find and I convinced him again to let it go for now, so that we could try and enjoy the rest of our time here since we just arrived. I was being very generous to these people at this point, because I was honestly pretty grossed out. I assumed if they didn’t clean that, that they were cutting corners all over the place and my mind was going wild. The sheets were probably recycled, etc., etc. I was working on how to get around that one. In the meantime, we checked in with the spa and they had time for two massages, so we snuck in quick for some muscle relaxation, maybe that would help everyone’s stress level. The massages were very good, but I looked like a grease bomb exploded on me when I got out of there!
After the massages we decided to go for a short walk before daylight ended to check out the property. I took my camera and got some pictures of the roos. We came back to rest and since my mind was still obsessing with the sheet situation, I found a blanket that looked clean in the closet and I laid it ontop of the comforter and took a nap. When I got up, I called and had them bring me clean sheets and comforter, so that I could change them myself. That would take care of that!
We went to our first dinner at 7:15. We waited for 15 minutes to be sat, because the host was also a waiter, a coat check and everything else under the sun. For a 5 star resort, this was starting to look like a hot mess. They try to pull off fine dining at dinner and it ends up being comical. We will soon find out that it will be like this for the duration of our stay.
After being seated, we sat at our table for a very, very long time before anyone came around to us. I am starving at this point (I told you, I’m always starving) and I see everyone else with bread, I even see a girl taking a bread basket around to every single table in the restaurant, including the tables surrounding ours and somehow manage to “miss” us. I start smelling my armpit, I’m beginning to wonder if I need to shower again! When our waiter finally came around, he was a very awkward gentleman with a suit jacket on that was way too big for him and I actually felt sorry for him, he was trying so hard and he was just a complete mess. I was friendly and I asked him for bread and he apologized and said that he would get it to us immediately. This next part is no joke. He went and grabbed a bread basket, took it to the two tables next to us and offered them bread, skipped us and then set the bread basket down and went to take another tables order! I was either going to blow or learn the practice of keeping my mouth shut during this stay, I could tell already that my patience were going to be tried at every turn. I assumed the latter was probably our best option, because to be honest, at this point, I don’t think anyone here knows their head from their ass, so I don’t think me complaining is going to change one damn thing. I’ll just keep it in the back of my mind to leave in a review and tell everyone I talk to about this place, including our travel agent and all of you!
We FINALLY got some damn bread and ordered and no surprise by now, but when I ordered the pasta dish by name, he grabbed my menu, looked at it, then looked at me and apologized, but I had last nights menu and they don’t have that pasta dish tonight. Are. You. Kidding. Me!!! Bring me your pasta dish for tonight then. Big mistake, it was disgusting and cold. I ate it anyway, because I didn’t want to waste away (lol), but we skipped desert, because let’s face it, by this time, we are two hours into the dinner and we are exhausted and can barely stay awake. We walk back to our cabin, dodging wombats (they come out at night in droves) and kangaroos in the dark and go straight to bed. It’s 9:30 now and I sleep in until 7:30 the next morning, so either jet lag is getting a lot better or the mess of the first day in the Blue Mountains wore me out!
