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vacation : Hilton Head Guest Services

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The one blight on our trip to Hilton Head was our experience with the timeshare hawkers, Hilton Head Guest Services. On the surface, it seems like not such a bad trade-off: you sit through a presentation about their timeshare system (they’re a participant in the RCI program) and they give you some coupons and gift certificates. If it had worked that way, it would have been fine. The way it did work—a presentation twice as long as we were promised, fees for things that were supposed to be free, misprinted fliers advertising things that didn’t exist—wasn’t worth the time or aggravation.

They caught us after breakfast on the first day, as we were looking for a map of the island. We were told by Chris that we’d listen to a 90 minute presentation (all that’s allowed by law in South Carolina, although we weren’t told that part) which would consist of walking around outside and getting a tour of the resort where the timeshares were located (‘You won’t be inside, you’ll be out in a beautiful area by the beach,’ Chris claimed). In exchange for our time, we’d receive a free boat ride over to Daufuskie Island, a guided tour of the historic sites, and lunch (a package categorized by Chris as having a value of $120) and an additional $50 of gift certificates that could be used at participating restaurants. We were also told to call him on his cell phone if anything went wrong, which we definitely would have done later in the week had he not written the number on the paper that (he no doubt knew) was going to be taken from us at the presentation. Bad form, Chris! To Chris’s credit, he also told us to record our income as only in the lowest bracket, a piece of advice that I forgot to take and which might have steered us away from the aggressive, patronizing, and three-hour long hard sell, which we experienced while sitting inside at a little table in a freezing room. But I get ahead of myself.

In order to get the presentation out of the way, we went at noon that day. When we showed up, there were lots of other people. Instead of being taken to the resort and being presented with the information in a group, as Chris had laid it out, we were taken into a room full of tables and subjected to a one-on-one with Robert. Robert is no doubt a decent salesperson, but he’s not a very good listener. We got off on the wrong foot from the beginning, but Robert had no clue. To wit, our first exchange was this:

Robert: I’m confused here, it says you’re married but your last names are different, what’s that about?
Me: Feminism.
Robert: [blank stare]
Me: You know, that thing that happened in the 70s? [big smile]
Robert: [nervous chuckling]

Honestly, the information in the presentation was pretty interesting. We learned a lot about the new system of points and credits and moving around from place to place that is the structure of RCI’s program. I can see how that approach would be more appealing to people than a single week timeshare in the same place, especially if you can only afford an undesirable week. Having never considered vacation timeshares, it was informative. Sadly, the information was drowned out by the song and dance of the sales pitch. The approach of the pitch, no doubt standard in this business, was to (1) attempt to determine how much we spend each year on vacations, and assume we’re going to spend that much in future years; (2) assume that those expenditures exist outside of, and do not take away from, other expenses such as repairing our house; (3) tell us we’re dumb if we continue to spend that money on vacations in the future without getting any property out of it; and then (4) offer to sell us a timeshare coincidentally priced at the point that we’re already spending. You might imagine that this didn’t go down too well with us. To be fair to Robert’s efforts, we’re not really his target audience. We don’t spend money on vacations, we spend money on visiting our family. This was the first vacation we’d taken in four years, it was functionally our honeymoon, and we never would have rented a timeshare on Hilton Head if we hadn’t had an extremely preisgünstig opportunity come along. Also, we are not terribly susceptible to salespeople telling us they understand our financial situation better than we do and we’re stupid if we don’t buy into their plan; maybe other people are more afraid of missing out if they didn’t Act Now To Take Advantage Of This Limited Time Opportunity! That’s not really our weak point; we trend more to the Fools Rush In camp, at least with this kind of thing.

Once Robert laid out the whole shebang, he took us over to see the condo where we’d ostensibly be buying our week, all the while emphasizing that we never actually had to stay there, we could spend our credits on going other places. In the model presented, the assumption was always that you’d be traveling at the last minute, so you’d be able to go all these fabulous places for less than their full market value, which would be so much better than your lame off-season week in Hilton Head which was all you could afford to buy into. Of course, you might wonder why you would want to be traveling to luxury resorts during time periods when no one else wanted to be there (thus enabling you to snap up an opening at the last minute); it would seem that the people who were attracted to this plan for the chance to rub elbows with the rich and famous at locales around the world would be sorely disappointed. It’s not like buying into a cheap off-season week in Hilton Head puts you in a category to be able to get into peak weeks in Aspen (for example). And, you not using the actual week you purchased means that the local resort (Coral Resorts) can rent your week to someone else, assuming there’s someone else who wants to be on the beach in January (some poor sucker who bought into a winter week on Cape Cod, maybe). Which is not to say that you can’t make this program work, more that the scenario they were spinning—buy an undesirable week here and parlay it into better vacations in other places—seemed like the exception rather than the rule. Also, it’s not clear to us whether credits from each year can be saved and used in future years: Robert said they could, other sources online say they can’t. If they can’t, you definitely aren’t ever going to be able to go anywhere other than other off-season locales.

On top of all of this, the price structure is heavy on the fees, making the upfront property investment not representative of what you pay. The investment we were quoted was about 9k for a week every other year, with a $900 fee in the years that we actually have the week, whether we use the week on Hilton Head or not. Then, there’s a fee to be a member of RCI; my partner and I have different memories of what this is, whether it’s a one time joining fee or an annual fee to receive their guide of participating resorts. If you want to trade in the week you’ve bought for other vacations, you give up your week in Hilton Head and then pay several hundred dollars ($200-$300) for the week in whatever other place you choose. If you want to, you can pay another fee and enroll in a partner program that offers discounts on airfare. Finally, all of this is yours for the low investment financing rate of 15%. You can imagine my reaction to that number! Let me recount it for you:

Robert: And, you don’t even need to get financing, we’ll provide it for you at 14.9%!
Me: 15%? Are you kidding? Surely some people qualify for a lower rate?
Robert: Well, you’re certainly free to use a home equity loan or something like that if you don’t want to take our financing.
Me: Because I cancel my credit cards when they jack my rate to 15%. That’s nuts, why would I take that?
Robert: [nervous chuckling]

In the end, we finally convinced Robert that we weren’t buying anything from him, realized that it had been three hours, and hightailed it out of there. Which brings us to the final chapter of this tale of woe, our botched attempts to use the fabulous prizes we’d earned by listening to someone tell us for three hours that we were stupid if we continued the way we were going. First, we learned that the 10% discount card could not be used in combination with the gift certificates. Second, we rode our bikes down to the Coligny Bakery intending to get lunch (advertised in the brochure as croissant and bagel sandwiches, which sounded nice) only to discover that they don’t sell lunch sandwiches. During that bike ride we were assailed by not one but two different people trying to get us to take the timeshare ‘tour’, the second of whom was shocked (shocked!) that the bakery didn’t offer lunch sandwiches, because she’d had breakfast sandwiches there. Uh huh. Over the course of the next few days we did use our gift certificates for two meals, lunch at the Hilton Head Diner (outside of which a third person was all ‘oh, too bad, I wish I’d been the one to sign you up for your tour’ and I was all ‘no you don’t, it was hellish, be glad you weren’t the one responsible for it’) and dinner at a Mexican place that was our third choice after our first and second choices weren’t open in the evening. In the end, the gift certificates worked out okay, providing us with a couple of extra meals as an alternative to cooking at home.

By far the most frustrating part of the whole experience, however, was trying to use the Daufuskie Island package. I am sure that it made me as bitter as it did because I was really looking forward to it: Daufuskie Island has a number of historic churches, schools, and houses, as well as an old black cemetery and several artist studios. So, I called right away to make a reservation for the Thursday boat, which is where things began to go wrong. First, the ferry was not free, as Chris told us it would be, but cost $16 per person. This $16 arguably covered tips, taxes, and fees, but I can’t imagine what the cost of the ferry ride would be without the credit, honestly. Because I wanted to make the 12pm guided tour listed on the ticket, in order to catch the 2:30pm boat back to Hilton Head, we went on the 9:30am boat. The boat ride was pleasant enough, barring the elderly lady from Massachusetts who kept punching me in the arm to get my attention: we saw birds and dolphins and it was a beautiful clear day. Once we arrived on the island, we went to check in for the tour, intending to look around a bit beforehand. Which is when we learned that in fact there was no longer a 12pm tour, only a 1:30pm tour. I believe the response was something like, ‘Yes, we know the tickets are wrong, it just costs a lot to reprint them.’ Because I was trying to be a good sport about all of this and salvage some of the day from going down the drain, I regrouped and decided that we would walk down to whatever historic sites were nearby, come back up for lunch, and then go on the 1:30pm guided tour. I learned from the woman at the desk, another HHGS employee, that the cemetery, schoolhouse, and local history museum were all within walking distance, and we set out with our map.

We made it to the cemetery with little trouble, and that was neat. Then we set out for the historic buildings. Our walk made me appreciate the journey the kids made to and from school each day in Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry. It was hot. It was buggy. It was dusty. There was not another soul around, except for the maintenance guys who passed us in their trucks as they went to and from their jobs in the gated communities that were somewhere ahead of us out of sight. We slogged along; we hitched a ride up the road with one of the pairs of guys in a truck when I couldn’t take it anymore. And, when we finally did get to the buildings (the museum was a set of displays housed inside an historic church), we learned that they didn’t open until 1pm, something the woman who gave me the map didn’t see fit to mention. There was some cursing and railing and shaking our fists at the sky, and then we walked back. At that point, we were beginning to get a little sick of being on the island, and we decided to assess our options. We could rent golf carts for $50 for two hours (no partial time periods allowed) or we could wait until the 1:30pm tour, missing the 2:30pm boat and not being able to return to Hilton Head until the 5:15pm ferry. Neither of these options were ideal: I believe my phrases were ‘I’m not giving these $#^%#!s any more of my money!’ and ‘I’m not staying on this godforsaken island until 5pm!’. In the end, we decided to cut our losses, eat our free lunch (fish sandwich, chips, and a soda), and hop on the 12:30pm boat back. While I regret not learning more of the rich history of the island, leaving when we did was definitely the right choice. One of our fellow travelers who had chosen to rent a golf cart told us on the ferry ride back that none of the galleries were open yet because it was still the off-season, another useful piece of information the woman at the desk had neglected to share when I specifically asked her about the art studios and she told me ‘I believe the tour stops at one of them, but I’m not sure which.’ I think my head would have popped off if I’d either spent $50 to travel to the other part of the island or stuck it out until the tour only to discover that one of the main attractions in this whole escapade was closed.

The upshot: don’t waste your time on this. Or, if you are going to waste your time on this, don’t get the Daufuskie Island package as your prize. Instead, hold out for more cash in hand. And, wear a watch. Apparently at 90 minutes you can walk out and insist on your compensation even if the pitch hasn’t been completed. Probably we should have taken Chris’s advice and placed ourselves in the lowest income category; that one was my bad. The icing on the cake of all of this was that the check we received, our refund of the $20 we paid in cash upfront to ensure that we’d come back for the presentation, wasn’t actually signed. We didn’t notice this until we got home; I didn’t inspect the check beyond making sure the amount and the name were correct, since we wouldn’t be depositing it there. As far as we know, our credit union accepted it. However, I strongly recommend getting someone to actually sign the thing while you’re down there, just in case your bank isn’t as amenable.

I realize that we wouldn’t have nearly as many stories from our trip if we’d followed our original plan and gone to the visitors’ center in the Coastal Discovery Museum to get a map; I suppose that’s worth something.

vacation : Hilton Head Guest Services

vacation : new life birds on Hilton Head

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When we planned our trip to Hilton Head, I researched the refuges in the area and decided to stick with Pinckney Island NWR. It is close to the island, just over the bridge on the way to the mainland, and it promised miles of walking trails. Once we arrived in the area, I have to admit that the alligators put a bit of a damper on my enthusiasm for going hiking around in the marshes. I was nearly content to have spotted a Yellow-throated Warbler for the first time just across the street from our rental, in addition to Brown Thrasher, House Finch, Red-bellied Woodpecker, Blue Jay, American Crow, Common Grackle, Boat-tailed Grackle, Northern Mockingbird, Eastern Bluebird, Tufted Titmouse, Green Heron, Great Blue Heron, Downy Woodpecker, Mourning Dove, Rock Dove, and Carolina Chickadee just in the residential area where we were staying. In the end I manned up, and we went ahead with the plan and spent a productive Wednesday afternoon at the refuge, spotting several new life birds and revisiting some old favorites.

Just inside the refuge, there was a flock of migrating Whimbrels, with a Black-bellied Plover, a couple of Dunlins, and some Semi-Palmated Plovers mixed in. There was also a larger gray bird that was either a Willet or a Red Knot in winter plumage; having seen both of these birds before we chose not to spend all day squinting through our under-powered binoculars to make a firm identification. Shorebirds are the most frustrating to identify with the binoculars we have; they’re typically farther away with less distinctive coloring than woodland birds, so we’ve learned to do our best and then move on. Once inside on the paths we saw old friends—Northern Cardinal, Ruby-throated Hummingbird, Carolina Wren, Yellow-bellied Sapsucker, Blue-gray Gnatcatcher—but none of the tanagers that were rumored to be around. On the mudflats we saw our next new bird, a flock of White Ibis with brown-backed young. Further along, at the aptly named Ibis Pond, we found herons of all shapes and sizes, those we’d seen before (Great Blue Heron, Green Heron, Great Egret, Snowy Egret, Black-crowned Night Heron) and two lovely new additions: Little Blue Heron, Tri-colored Heron, and an adult male Anhinga (we later saw a female near our house). The Little Blue Heron wasn’t exactly the first sighting; we’d seen a young one the day before along the lagoons where we were staying, and I probably saw one during our trip to Chincoteague five years ago. Nonetheless, this was the first up close and confirmed sighting of an adult bird for me, and it was fun to watch it fly back and forth bringing bits of grass and twigs for a nest.

After hanging out at Ibis Pond for a while, we hiked a loop around what was advertised as Osprey Pond and Wood Stork Island, highly motivated to get a sight of the uncommon and elusive Wood Stork. We never did. What we did catch sight of, though, were gazillions of mosquitoes and a few alligators; the latter sighting led us to conclude that Pied-billed Grebes must not be very tasty, because on two occasions they were the only bird in the water near the enormous prehistoric reptile. During this trek we saw more Eastern Bluebirds, several Great-crested Flycatchers, an Eastern Phoebe, Red-winged Blackbirds, Brown-headed Cowbirds, the aforementioned Grebes, and a pair of Common Moorhens, but nary a stork. Nor an Osprey for that matter, but we had the excessive good fortune to have an Osprey nest in a palm tree behind the house next door, complete with young that plaintively cried out each morning as its parents harried it from the nest and into the air. Having booked it out the woods at the refuge and left the grass paths behind, we made another circuit of Ibis Pond in the hopes of finding a Wood Stork but only saw a couple more alligators, which apparently aid the nesting birds by eating predators like raccoons should they attempt to go for the nest. Or so the sign near the bench where we collapsed in a haze of citronella spray informed us. On the way out of the refuge, we did manage to see a male Painted Bunting at close range, which cheered our spirits greatly; they nest on the refuge and we’d been unable to flush one on the way in. I consider six new life birds to be a successful excursion, and I left happy; having to bark at some mating raccoons to get them off the path was just icing on the cake.

Overall, Hilton Head was a great place for wildlife sightings. In the lagoons around our housing development we saw several kinds of very large turtles, one of which we had to rescue from the middle of a road—Carolina Diamondback Terrapins, Eastern Mud Turtles, probably Chicken Turtles, and possibly Common Musk Turtles (I believe I saw the distinctive two lines on the head, but they dislike brackish water). We had Green Anoles around the house, and my partner startled a Five-lined Skink out of the bathroom when we visited Daufuskie Island on Thursday. During the boat ride over, we also spotted a couple of new birds—Royal Tern and what we are pretty sure was a White Pelican—and some familiar ones (Brown Pelican, Double-crested Cormorant, Least Tern, Forster’s Tern, Laughing Gull, Ring-billed Gull, Barn Swallow and Tree Swallow) in addition to several groups of Bottlenose Dolphins. We saw a whole flock of Black Vultures along the side of a road, with their white hands. Add to these the starfish, crabs, clams, and keyhole urchins we saw on the beach, plus the dead armadillos on the side of I-95 and the mystery snake we saw the heron eating behind our house, and it was quite the wildlife-filled vacation.

vacation : new life birds on Hilton Head

vacation : beach

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I love the beach. Any beach, any weather. I love the pebble beaches of Lake Erie, the quicksand swampy beaches on Cape Cod, the cliff-lined beach in Carlsbad, and the rocky beaches in County Donegal. It is safe to say I haven’t met a shoreline I didn’t like. Hilton Head is no exception, which is no surprise, as everyone loves the beach there. The sand is hard-packed and easy to walk on, the high tidemark is (seeming) miles from the water at low tide, and there are all kinds of sea creatures great and small wherever you turn. Since this wasn’t my first trip to the ocean, I didn’t insist on going in the (still quite cold) water for hours on end; instead we walked the beaches nearly every night and participated in a ritual dunking on the last morning of our trip.


Keyhole urchin.

I had very few goals on this trip, and one of them was to acquire a sand dollar. Acquiring a sand dollar of a consequential size from the beach is harder than I realized, for a few reasons. First, it’s illegal to take them from the beach when they’re still alive. Second, they usually live along the bottom of the ocean. Third, if and when they do wash up onto shore, the gulls peck at them and break them, especially the larger ones (which I imagine are the only ones that have enough food inside to make breaking them worth the trouble). This adds up to lots of pieces of larger sand dollars, which are the skeletons of dead keyhole urchins, and lots of smaller living keyhole urchins washed up on the beach at high tide, and quite a few pecked at and soon-to-be-both-dead-and-broken keyhole urchins, but very few of our target item of suitably-dead-but-neither-broken-nor-tiny sand dollars. In the end, we collected a handful of what could best be described as urchin corpses: urchins that were in a relatively advanced state of decay but had not yet dried to a full sand dollar skeleton. In the end I was glad that I took this approach, as there were hundreds of sand dollars washed up on the beach that night and none any of the other days we were there. We also saw two starfish that night, floppier than the ones in the Northeast and beige-speckled like the crabs we came across; no pictures of either of those, as I was busy trying to throw them back out into the water.


Jellyfish, washed up.


Different jellyfish, washed up and kicked around by children.

I think it’s safe to say that the most disturbing part of our vacation for my partner was the jellyfish. Since Hilton Head is where I first visited the ocean, and my first visit was following relatively major storms, the jellyfish that were washed in with the tides were exactly as I remember jellyfish. Enormous. Which is why I’ve always been trepidatious about them, and have stood in awe of those friends from the Northeast who poo-poo jellyfish and talk about ‘just brushing them aside’ should you happen to encounter them in the water. Apparently, this awe has been totally unearned all these years, because jellyfish in the Northeast are about two inches big. Yes, two inches. No wonder they thought I was a silly land-lubbing Midwesterner for being just the teensy bit afraid of getting stung and not terribly confident in my ability to ‘just brush them aside.’ Because the jellyfish on Hilton Head are quite literally as big as my head, that’s why. Once my partner realized this he pretty much refused to go in the water at all, and most definitely refused to go in the water along the stretch of beach where we were seeing a jellyfish corpse about every 10 feet or so.


Little clams exposed by the tide.

One of the many creatures on Hilton Head that aren’t on the north Atlantic beaches, as far as I’ve been able to tell, are little tiny multi-colored clams that live on the shoreline with only a thin covering of wet sand. They are exposed in massive numbers by the tide washing in and receding, and then promptly wiggle around and dig themselves back under the sand. Which makes them darn hard to take a picture of. At first I thought they were just getting washed back out, but after digging around with our feet we realized that the sand was laden with them. Also, if you stand on the mass of them you can feel them wiggling their way back under cover; it’s a weird and compelling feeling. You begin to see why I love the beach, I could do things like stand around on pile of little tiny clams for hours and continue to be entertained. Not so much my partner, which is why we have other experiences to report than ‘I went on vacation and stood on clams.’


Jack’s sand castle.

Walking in the evening after the kids have been taken in for dinner and the tide is just coming back in, we came across many abandoned sand castles. This was the best one, for a few reasons. One, it had a functional moat. Two, it incorporated keyhole urchins, which we liberated into the moat after this photo was taken. Three, it clearly stated next to it ‘Jack only, no Mom!’ Which I’m sure was heartbreaking for Jack’s mom, after she brought him to the beach and all; we, of course, found it hilarious.

Because of the late winter this year, there were not yet any Loggerhead turtles coming up onto shore to lay their eggs. We would have been at the very beginning of the nesting season and lucky to have seen one around the first of May during any year, and the folks at the Coastal Discovery Museum relayed that not a single nest had yet been reported by anyone. This was one of the other things I really wanted to see, it just wasn’t meant to be on this trip.

vacation : beach

vacation : all I ever wanted

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Last week we took a vacation, our first in four years. It got off to a bit of a rocky start, as we went directly from a family funeral to a full day of driving. Nonetheless, we were glad to be out of town and glad to be seeing someplace new; I’d been only once, about twenty years ago. We spent the week in a house in Kingston Cove, a development in the Shipyard section of Hilton Head Island, which we rented from a neighbor who was unable to use their timeshare week for the first time in twenty-odd years. The house was nice, the block was quiet, and the noisy frogs on the lagoon behind us were excellent; I only wish I had been able to see them in addition to hearing them, but the alligators were quite the disincentive to approaching the bank and peering into the water at dusk. When we weren’t on the screen porch drinking coffee or on the couch watching cable TV, we were on our rented one-speed cruisers riding around. We rode back and forth to the beach and around to various strip malls for lunch, breakfast, and more bottled water from the Piggly Wiggly. I will admit that when I first saw the cruisers I regretted not bringing Pearl, but once I realized that (a) you’re not legally allowed to ride in the road there and (b) cars have the right of way if they hit you and (c) the sand and salt water are uber-bad for a bike, I was glad I left her at home.

Although we weren’t following any set schedule, the week was a full one. We went birding in Pinckney NWR, adding several exciting new birds to my lifelist, which was a trip deserving of its own post. We sat through a timeshare-hawking presentation, and endured various (and seemingly endless) frustrations when attempting to use the Exciting Prizes we received for our trouble, an experience also worthy of its own writeup. At the end of the week, we returned with sunburns, several small keyhole urchin skeletons, and a variety of arts, crafts, and preserves. While we were gone, the yard turned into a blooming green jungle, thank you April showers, and the house is bursting out at the seams with papers to be recycled and belongings to be put away. Everything in its own time: we’re glad we went, and we’re glad to be home.

vacation : all I ever wanted

back on the horse

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View of the falls from the Maid of the Mist plaza.

We’re back from our Midwest driving tour, having celebrated with both families and made brief stop at Niagara Falls in between parties. We also appear to have recovered from the head cold we contracted in Niagara and passed between us for a couple of weeks. It was too tempting to walk to the falls at night, and the combination of travel fatigue and the cold wet night was just too much for us. Despite the rain and cold, we had a good time riding the Maid of the Mist (I love that boat), visiting Niagara-on-the-Lake (not really my thing), and hiking down a trail into the gorge from an access point near the Totem Pole park. After I got over my fear of slipping on the wet rocks and falling to my death in the whitewater—the terrified screams of the passengers on the jet boats passing us on their way to the whirlpool didn’t help—I enjoyed that hike a lot.

Now that we’re back at home, my plan for the rest of the summer and autumn consists of yard clearing, house repairs, clutter clearing, more house repairs, major fall cleaning, and some house beautifying in the form of paint. A lifelong process, I know, but I have big visions of what we’ll be able to accomplish over the next few months. And I’m going to get right on it just as soon as I finish my coffee.

back on the horse