Luxury Villa Rental on Highlands Reserve

I read the letters about holidays in a newspaper last Friday and just had to add by moans for good measure. OK, in our case it was a holiday in Florida, and we got back home a month ago. Florida was fine, no complaints there, but value for money it wasn’t. But I know now that it could have been which annoys me even more!

You see, we thought we were being smart when we booked into a hotel. My friend Jane booked the same area, for the same period, but they went for a villa rental, and we thought that’s not a holiday, what with preparing your own meals and that. So we suggested they could have a break from time to time from their villa rental and join us for meals and other activities at our hotel.

We duly arrived at our hotel and checked out the rooms, pool, restaurant, etc. After our flight we decided to have an early night. Jane phoned the next day to describe her villa rental, about which she was, shall we say, gushing? I was not in the best of moods because none of us could say we slept, what with the racket coming from adjacent rooms and the floor above. Our complaints to the hotel management were countered with comments about mutual tolerance, and the like.

Jane phoned again, asking if we would like to join them at the pool at their villa rental. I must confess I did respond with some smugness, imagining their villa rental would have a postage stamp of a pool, whereas the hotel’s was what you would expect at a hotel. I said maybe we would drop by later and check out their villa rental.

Later that day my Hubby had a disagreement at our hotel pool - something about drenching a few sunbathers when he jumped in. I suppose he could do with losing a little weight. Anyway, we couldn’t keep putting it off, so we looked up the location of the villa rental and drove off.

Our instructions mentioned a golf course, which we thought of more like “turn left at the Rose and Crown pub”, so you can imagine our surprise when the villa rental we had to look out for was right there not far from the greens and bunkers! And this was some luxurious villa rental indeed, apparently one of numerous villa rentals to be found on the exclusive Highlands Reserve Golf and Country Club, Davenport, Orlando. When we saw the villa pool I could have choked with envy.

We spent most of the remainder of our holiday with Jane’s family at the villa rental, and even slept over a few times when we guessed the hotel was going to be noisy again. When we considered that our holiday cost half as much again as Jane’s, we resolved to also be independent from now on and book a villa rental next time.