Our first week running two vacation properties is in the books, and I’m giving our team top marks. We only had one shitty situation, and with my non-perfectionist world view, that’s just fine.
As you know from last week’s blog, I was nervous as the opening date for our new location, the Baron’s Estate approached. Anxiety is part of my make up and it looks like this:
Anticipate all manner of failure then watch as things work out nicely.
And that’s exactly what happened.
The first Friday night going away party at the Estate. It was a huge hit.
On April 13 in the early hours, our guides went to Rome with 12 departing guests from the week before at our original location – Villa d’Abruzzo. The departing guests were spread out over four, nine-passenger vans. The guides did their drop offs at the airport and downtown and collected our next group – all 29 of them – from all over Rome and made it back to our town, Torre de’Passeri, by mid-afternoon.
By dinner time, the 16 people at Villa d’Abruzzo were bonding over the fact that almost all of them were from Ottawa, Canada, my home city. Some even knew people in common. The wine flowed.
Over at the Estate, a group of eight people were introducing themselves to a couple and a group of three people. They didn’t know each other when they arrived, but by dinner time, they were fast friends. The wine flowed.
All week the kitchens pumped out great food and the hosts poured and mixed. The guides took our guest on great tours, added a couple tours, and dodged some rain while wowing our visitors with Abruzzo’s natural beauty and vibrant culture.
Luca shows the guests how to tell if somebody has put the evil eye on you.
Our head guide Luca was even able to take one of our guests, David Ferri, to Moscufo, the town David’s grandfather was born in. David had never been there before, and Luca found two of David’s second cousins. David even got a tour of the house where his grandfather was born.
Friday night brought a couple of going away parties, lots of good wishes and compliments from the guests and even a few tears while our resident 16-year-old accordion player Ricardo wowed them with his lightning-fast finger work.
As mentioned, there was a shitty incident though.
We’d stress-tested the Estate in the lead up to opening. We turned on all the showers at once and turned on every electrical appliance. We blasted the heat and air conditioning. Tested every door and toilette multiple times. Everything worked.
So, on Sunday morning as the guests got ready to go on tour, I was surprised to hear “O dio” and “managia” and other exclamations coming from our service bathroom next to the kitchen and our office. When I looked in, grey water was shooting up out of the shower drain and flooding the floor.Our cleaners were trying vainly to stop the water.
We turned off the clothes washer. The water still came. Then we went to the kitchen where the industrial dishwasher was running hard and a sink full of water was draining. The sink was plugged and the machine shut off, and the flooding subsided.
We were overwhelming the drainage pipes, or they were blocked somewhere or too small for the amount of water we were using.
We called our plumber and … he came. On a Sunday in Italy, this, in and of itself, is considered a miracle worthy of veneration.
Ricardo, Lisa and some guy. Each Friday, we thank our guests for chosing to come to Abruzzo, a place most people have never heard of.
For eight hours, he and our general contractor/friend Romolo, snaked pipes, inspected the septic tank, dug out pipes and finally found the problem(s): The drain pipe for the grey water was too small and it had become blocked at a critical point. This was exacerbated by the fact the toilet stack pipe was blocked at the entrance to the septic tank and had been slowly filling up as we used the toilet over the last few weeks.
Turns out, we were lucky as we were a couple bowel movements away from having that pipe overflow in the bathroom too.
It took eight hours of really dirty work to find the problems, but I’ll never forget the look of happiness on our plumber’s face when, as he stood in the septic tank, he snaked the toilet pipe and a geyser of horridness erupted. As he was doing this, the guests returned from their tour and took up position beside the pool, 40 metres away, and in another 15 minutes, the grey water pipe was repaired enough to allow our operations to continue for the week. (A permanent fix is schedule for Monday.)
When I went over to the guests to see how they were doing, one asked if everything was OK.
I nodded and cracked a beer and that was it. The rest of the week went off without a hitch and resulted in a lot of positive feedback.
As I said before, I’m not a perfectionist. In fact, my mom has a drawer full of my old report cards attesting to this.
We had one shitty situation in our opening week at the Baron’s Estate.
To me, that’s a win.
Top marks to our co-workers and contractors.
They did a great job.
Our guests overlooking the Fucino high plain.