Fellow TS guests .... most interesting encounter during any resort stay.

[vacationhopeful]

I travel solo most times and have met several other resort guests who I enjoyed spending time with. Thought this might be an good thread topic.

The WWII Navy veteran and his wife.
It was a March week stay at the FLBR. I took a seat at the bar/eatery to drink a beer and look at getting something to eat that early afternoon. Asked guy (in his 80s), if the only empty seat next to him at the bar was open. Turns out he & his wife were fellow owners for 20+ years at the resort but this year, their children ruled they could NOT drive down to their Ft Lauderdale resort by themselves. And a married daughter (her husband stayed home with their dogs) was the family member ELECTED to use her last vacation week for this trip. He described her as miserable (my condensed word) and the daughter had taken is wife out for food shopping for the week.

He had served in the US Navy during WWII, had retired as a civilian military employee in the Washington, DC (I would bet in an intelligence function) and actually knew the area my sister & family lived (as he lived very nearby my sister now).

But he was not happy with his 45yo +/- daughter ... describing her multiple times as "miserable". But the real funny thing was during his WWII service, he & wife actually lived ... in the NJ town I grew up in and still lived. The small trailer park they had started their early years of their marriage in was still there. I grew up maybe 4 miles from small 30 +/- trailer park. And I knew the old ferry docks he had taken daily to PHL Navy base. Sharp, alert, interesting gentleman ... we were having a grand afternoon ... until his daughter came into the bar. DARK CLOUD ... she stormed off, to call her husband in MD and his wife joined us in another beer. And needed a 2nd beer to adjust her attitude for the horrible grocery shopping trip with their daughter.

It was an interesting week ... they see me & join me; 45ish yo daughter would NOT and leave to go back to their unit to call her husband (they had no kids, but 2 big dogs). The daughter's goal for the week was to leave EARLY and get back home. Her parents were really nice, intelligent, interesting, friendly people ... and after a couple of days, I asked if she was adopted. Both of them commented that their other daughter was NOT like her and they really did not know why she had been this way her whole life... had been wondering if they had been given the wrong baby at the hospital.

The parents did go home a day early. I would bet they would have gone home even sooner if we had not struck up our friendship.

 

[taffy19]

Children are sometimes too bossy even if they mean well. From your description it sounds like the man is still sharp so would be able to drive. It may take them a day longer but that is better than having a family member there who is miserable most of the time. They should have refused the offer and gone alone anyway. We are about that age and feel totally able to drive that distance but may stop a night in a motel instead of driving over 10 hours in one day.

 

[clifffaith]

Our interesting encounter comes under the heading "small world".

In October 2014 Cliff and I took a three week vacation that included five days in Munich (duh, we didn't know it was Oktoberfest when we made the arrangements), 7 days on a Viking river cruise from Budapest to Passau, with a few days in Budapest before and a couple days in Prague afterwards. By then I was sick so when we arrived at our friends' house in Berlin for the next phase of our trip I spent the entire five days in bed. The only thing I saw of Berlin was on the bus to the train station (train from Prague dumped us in Dresden where they put us on buses because German trains were on strike) and a huge Chinese pagoda where we had dinner the last night.

We were next due to travel by train to friends in Cologne, and then by train to CDG airport for our flight home. By now Cliff was sick too and rather than bring our germs to Cologne (we left both Berliners sick) and risk having issues getting to France to get home, we shelled out $1200 to fly into Orly and were able to book two nights at our DRI resort in Vincennes near Paris. We know this resort well, having stayed there four times before.

So we arrive at the front desk of the Royal Regency in mid-afternoon, and for the first time encounter a sales manager. We are sick, it is Sunday and I know shopping for groceries is going to be an issue, we just want to get quickly settled in our room, go get some juice and bread, and collapse. But the manager wants to be sociable. "Where are you from?" he asks. I reply "Los Angeles". "Oh, what part of Los Angeles?" Big sigh, like this French guy is going to know anything about LA neighborhoods/suburbs. Rather than describing that we are in the harbor area or give a more lengthy description I decide to shut him down by replying "San Pedro". He comes back with "Is the Busy Bee Market still there?, they make the best sandwiches!".

We both picked our chins up off the ground at that point so we could tell him Busy Bee is still open. Turns out as a foreign student he went to Marymount which is ten minutes from us (we've housed a couple Russian kids and a Saudi student before the college changed from two years with lots of foreign students to a four year curriculum) and then he lived in LA for twenty years before his wife, a lawyer, accepted a job back in France and they'd fairly recently moved back with their kids.

As we were getting settled in our room he came to the door with a bottle of red wine, but we pretty much gave him the bum's rush. You know Cliff was sick when the bottle of wine remained unopened and we returned it when checking out two days later. I managed to stagger out twice for baguettes and pastry while Cliff slept for 24 hours. Lord only knows how many we infected on the flight home.

 

[Rjbeach2003]

To bad they didn't fly.

 

[JudyH]

In Barbados 14 years ago I started talking at the pool. with a Canadian man from Germany, who, he admitted, had been a young soldier in Hitler's army. I can't even recall how we got on the topic, he seemed nonplussed by his experience, my skin was crawling, and I left shortly after.

 

[vacationhopeful]

To bad they didn't fly.

Problem is many rental company companies have age restrictions or surcharges for our older relatives. Plus, I hate driving and parking strange cars. It was most likely 1300 miles each way. Their daughter was NOT a real active person ... I am sure driving that distance would have been too hard on her. This was not her idea of a vacation ... she displayed a very negative attitude about this adventure (trip) with her parents. Every thing her parents suggested she was not interested.

 

[MuranoJo]

Problem is many rental company companies have age restrictions or surcharges for our older relatives. Plus, I hate driving and parking strange cars. It was most likely 1300 miles each way. Their daughter was NOT a real active person ... I am sure driving that distance was very hard on her. This was not her idea of a vacation ... she displayed a very negative attitude about this adventure (trip) with her parents.

Bet she'll regret that one day (or perhaps not). Wow, if I could only have another day with my parents.

 

[theo]

A timeshare encounter that I will always fondly remember was my first meeting an older fellow at a SW Florida resort where I rented a week some years ago, months after my Dad (and my best friend) had passed away. We initially struck up a conversation about fishing, while on the adjoining docks. Like my Dad, this fellow was a WWII combat veteran and, also like my Dad, spoke only rarely and humbly and without any air of "heroism" about the horrors of war he had experienced. This fellow had been an Army paratrooper, dropped behind enemy lines in Europe. My Dad had been a young Marine, fighting in the Pacific theater on islands like Okinawa, as the U.S. Marines advanced toward mainland Japan. Two atomic bombs ultimately precluded need for troop invasion of the Japanese mainland and Japan's surrender thankfully followed soon thereafter.

I had quickly perceived that this fellow (much like my Dad) was the living embodiment of what Tom Brokaw had years earlier labelled and written about as "The Greatest Generation". Hard working and accomplished --- but very humble. Fearless and self confident --- but quietly so. The concept of "entitlement", so pervasive and common throughout our society today, is a notion just entirely foreign to such people. Spending time talking with (and later doing some fishing with) this fellow was somehow almost like vicariously spending quality time with my own departed father.

I learned only later that this fellow had unexpectedly lost his oldest son, who was exactly my age and also a former Marine, right around the same time that I had lost my Dad. In retrospect, I have to believe that the universe somehow facilitated our meeting and forming a new friendship, each of us in some small, inexplicable way somehow helping a little to address a painful void recently created in each other's lives.

I subsequently bought two consecutive weeks at that place (resale, of course). I gratefully gave the fellow and his wife a $100 gift card to a local restaurant, as a small gesture of thanks for their having very quietly made me aware of the (otherwise unadvertised) opportunity to buy those two consecutive weeks in the same unit from another owner there. Those two weeks remain the "pride" of our small timeshare "portfolio" today.

Each year since, I genuinely look forward to seeing this great old guy and his wonderful wife. He is 90+ now; his health (but not his spirit) plainly in decline. I know that sometime in the foreseeable future I may check-in and learn that he won't be there anymore. That will be a very sad day, but I'm certainly very blessed and very honored to have met and befriended and to know this wonderful old guy in the meantime.

Perhaps not a very exciting story, but for me timesharing has certainly provided other intangible pleasures and benefits beyond just "vacation".

 

[wilma]

Who knows what was going on with the daughter-- marital problems, personal issues, alcohol issues, but seems a bit inappropriate for the parents to be trash talking her to a stranger in the bar!

 

[VacationForever]

Having children is like playing lottery. You win sometimes and lose sometimes. The fortunate ones win more often. More people lose than win. My cynical view of having kids.

 

[wackymother]

Does it have to be a timeshare? Because once, about eight years ago, we were staying in a TownePlace Suites near Albany, and we were having breakfast and looking out the window. There was a car in the parking lot that had something written on it, like a homemade advertisement. We couldn't quite make out what it said and we were discussing, and my husband was about to put on his coat and go out and take a closer look.

Some women sitting near us stopped him and said, "It says 'Dive Bars, Wicked Scars, All Stars!'" (That's not what it said, I just can't remember what it said exactly.) We were like, what does that mean? It turned out that the car was the team car for a ROLLER DERBY team and these ladies were the team!!! I was thrilled. It's not every day that you meet roller derby skaters, right?

We had a long talk about the resurgence of roller derby (I had seen it on TV when I was a kid) and they told us all about the roller derby leagues, life as a roller derby skater, how they had gotten into it...it was just really interesting. They invited us to come to their roller derby game that night, but we were heading out right after breakfast. I wish I had gotten a signed autograph!