Hmmm. Hadn't thought of barbecueing but not my mouth is watering. That's a good idea. I don't like cooking in the kitchen but like grilling. This way my wife doesn't do all the cooking and we don't eat out all the time. Great idea!
For us the food was the setup.
Just after New Years of 1999 I took my daughter and two of my sons on a ski trip to eastern British Columbia. I think we were gone three nights. The youngest was 15; the oldest 22.
We stayed in a no-name motel that was at the level of a Motel 6. We brought along an ice chest and had cereal and milk in the mornings. We bought lunch at the ski resorts; dinners were take-home pizza and Chinese take-out. En route we ate at Denny's or equivalent.
The room had two queen size beds. DD, being the only female, got one of the beds. The guys took turns sleeping on the floor.
When we got home I reviewed where we had spent money; the big item - that shocked me - was how much we had spent on food.
About six months after that DW and I were on Kau'ai for our 25th anniversary, staying at the Marriott in Lihu'e. We did the timeshare tour. My mental gears started turning, as I estimated how much less that ski trip would have cost had we had a refrigerator and kitchen available to us.
I quickly realized that the cost savings we could generate from having a kitchen available almost entirely offset the difference in costs. We could spend the same amount of money, while staying in a much larger unit, with at least one private bedroom, with better qualify of furnishings than the Motel 6, and with more facility amenities.
This was a no-brainer decision for us.
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Since then we've come to really enjoy having the kitchen. We stick drinks in the refrigerator; they're ready anytime we want them. People can get up whenever they want to in the morning and just mosey into the kitchen for breakfast; we don't have to coordinate eating schedules. We can come back to the unit any time for lunch, or if we're going to be gone all day we can fix whatever we want.
When we travel, we enjoy getting some of the local food specialties and preparing them ourselves. We make great use of the grills that most timeshares have.
*****
The two oldest kids are now married. They vacation with us at times, and when they do each couple gets a room to themselves. It's so wonderful to be in Hawai'i, sitting in a real living room, with real furnishings, relaxing with wine or mai tais, just being together. No way could we have that kind of relaxation trying to socialize and be together in hotel rooms.
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Our favorite timeshare projects are developments that were originally conceived as whole ownership condos that were later converted to timeshares. We like those properties because they are generally designed more like residences and less like resorts.
We just like the feeling that for the time that we are there we are staying somewhere that feels as if it is our home, not just a room. To us that contributes to the relaxation of the vacation. Home is where you settle in, and that's a feeling that we never have in a hotel room.
