This Fairfield or I should say, Wyndham, as that company has bought out Fairfield and most of the resorts are changing to that name, stay is a one week trip to Daytona Beach. The resort is directly on the beach facing the Atlantic Ocean, a far cry from our life near the Gulf of Mexico.
Check-in was after 2:00 PM, but we didn't arrive until a little before 4:00 PM. Connie and Austin drove in a separate car from our Caravan (really, a Plymouth Voyager) and they arrived earlier and stood in the huge line at registration. The Caravan arrived in time to unload and head to our room.....or so we thought.
Because the resort is beachfront property, parking is at a premium and limited to one car per unit. Extra cars park across the street in an indoor parking garage accessible from the 4th floor of our resort by a catwalk. Registration told my mother that it would cost $10 a day and acted as if this was a natural progression of checking-in at Wyndham. So we waited through the long line of cars trying to unload in the small circle at the entrance of the resort for our turn. A nice bellman loaded up both cars and he, Connie and the kids left to find our unit. Susan and I left to find the parking garage.
You could only make a right coming out of the resort. From there we had to drive two blocks, take a left at the light, take another left at the first block, and drive until we found the opening to the parking garage. We drove into the garage where we were met with one of those parking barriers. Push a button, take a ticket, and the arm barrier will lift and allow you access. The signs around us stated that parking cost $8.00 for 12 hours and that unauthorized vehicles would be towed. Behind the ticket machine was an attendant station and we tried in vain to attract his attention to let him know that we were with Wyndham and of course, immune to these rules. No, go. Apparently, in order to talk to one of these attendants you had to exit the garage. We proceeded into the depths of the garage, but already I was sweating and feeling a tad stressful.
#1 SUGGESTION FOR MY EXIT INTERVIEW: Alert the guests to the car situation upon phone-in registration.
Up the hill, we drove and there at the top was a garage flag attendant directing me to turn left as if I couldn't follow the sign above my head on my own. The one that read "Level 3" with an arrow pointed left. I stopped and Susan stuck her head out of the window and asked him the scoop on Wyndham parking.
"Wyndham has their own parking," he told us while waving his flag to the left in time to the music coming through his iPod. We smiled, turned to the left, proceeded up the level and parked. We decided that we would fix the parking situation on the way out to the grocery.
We got on the elevator and went down a floor to the catwalk which then took us to "Ocean Walk" a small area full of shops and restaurants and kiosks selling henna tattoos, turtles and hair wraps. It also housed the entrance to our resort which took us into the 4th floor of the south tower.
The resort is quite large. There are two towers, north and south, joined together at lobby level by an area that holds registration, an eatery, the concierge, and some conference areas. Each tower has an indoor pool. Outside the two towers are four other pools.
Each tower has a pool (one with a winding slide) and in the middle of both pools is a bar and a lazy river that encircles a putting green. The north tower also has an extra activity pool with water towers, water guns, tunnels, splash pools, etc. Between the two towers, there is also a spa, a fitness room, an activity center, an arcade and a small shop with beach and pool toys. From a walkway from the pool center, there are stairs that lead to the beach. This area is guarded by security and all resort guests must wear blue bracelets to enter or exit through this walkway.
Our unit was actually two units called a "lock-off". The first unit had a small living space with pull out sofa, table and chairs and a small kitchen gallery. It had a King size master bedroom and a full bath. A door led into the second unit which faced the beach.
This unit had a much larger living space, a dining area, a bigger kitchen, a huge double bathroom (one room had a sink and whirlpool tub/other room had two sinks and a shower), a King size master bedroom, a foyer, and a balcony.
The unit was on the top floor, 19, and so we took a lot of joy requesting the penthouse when we entered the elevators to go up. The downside to this was going down because the elevator tended to stop on each floor to pick up wads of families and no one cared how full the elevator was becoming. They would just cram on in.
We explored the units and then left Connie and the kids to go grocery shopping. We had to backtrack to the garage to pick up my car and this time we got to discuss the parking situation with the attendant in the little house. You would have thought this parking garage was Fort Knox or offices for the Witness Protection Program with the run-around we kept getting.
This attendant reminded me, as his earlier cohort had, that Wyndham had their own parking. Once we got past that he told me what I had already read on the signs. This garage is separate from Wyndham and they really don't care about the resort's customers so shut-up and pay up was the attitude. I continued to ask questions and obviously came upon the correct secret question because finally, he told me that I could pay an $8.00 a day fee for "extended" parking, but that to get this I had to go to the Bus Depot and get a pass.
Guess what? They weren't open on Sunday. Getting directions to this Bus Depot was next to impossible so we just paid our garage fee for that hour we were in there and hightailed it to the grocery.
We had pizza from the Ocean Walk for dinner and spent the rest of the evening watching the kids swim in all of the pools until midnight when they closed. Tomorrow I will attempt to locate the Bus Depot.
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