The drive was largely uneventful, although we had to pull over for a potty break for the little guy. We arrived a few minutes after MGD, who had just received a tour of the property and seemed rather skeptical of the place. We had known going in that we were going to be split between two houses but Murali thought that the houses were further apart than he had expected - his chief concern seemed to be that it would be too cold/too dark in the night when you had to go between the houses. Cindy, the cleaning lady (& her son) were rather accommodating and tried to address our concerns. To me, the place seemed adequate and more importantly, I didn't see that we had too many options. Eventually we took the keys from Cindy, but asked her to provide us additional room heaters and some flashlights (which they supplied, but we never used). While we waited for the next group - Anands & RD - to arrive (they were picking up lunch for us), we explored the property. The main house had two bedrooms and a loft. Only one of the bedrooms had a door - in fact, other than the bathrooms, this was the only room in both houses that had a door at all! The loft was for the adventurous - you had to climb up a ladder affixed to the wall - but the actual loft was kind of nice with a good view. There was also a swimming pool and a hot tub (that seemed permanently on) on the property. The kitchen was well equipped, but the bathrooms and bedrooms were marginal.
There was no issue with cleanliness, just somewhat below expectations. For instance, our sink would take forever to drain, although it always drained fully. The roll-away beds were as comfortable as roll-aways can get. The furniture in general seemed to be a bit thrift-store-ish, but nobody really cared much about it. After lunch we generally relaxed around the outdoor fireplace until somebody discovered the volleyball court at one corner of the property. After some cajoling from Mgd and Keerti, we all headed over and a game of jungle ball commenced. Kids were quite taken in by this game and positioned themselves in various parts of the court.
We would routinely run into one of the kids or have to re-position them, but nobody seemed to mind. In retrospect it seems a minor miracle that nobody got hurt! Every so often Yuvi would drop his glasses and we would freeze the game while everybody scrambled to find the glasses. After some time, the last group - Prem & family - showed up and joined us. Skill levels were somewhat uneven and even though a couple of folks (I'll leave them unnamed here) tried to hector their team mates into better play, everybody was having fun and it was only after sundown that a sore, but happy crowd that headed back to the house.
Dinner was a combination of vegi burgers, tandoori chicken, corn, and salmon. We had the outdoor fire going and everybody was in a good mood. We had various snacks to supplement (incl mgd's spicy 'mix') and it was quite late by the time we were all done with dinner.
In between I tried to take some pictures of each of the couples next to the fireplace. It was Valentine's day after all. Poker was the next order of the night and the table was quickly set up for that. The big winner this night was MGD, who is beginning to make a habit of winning big on these outings. We quit around 11pm since we were all tired and some of us planned to head out early for golf the next morning. MGD, RD, and us were in the other house and after we got there, RD tried to deploy the sofa-bed, but discovered that the frame was missing on the lower half. We thought he would be ok if he put his feet on that end, but the mattress would just fall through the opening - it was quite amusing, really. There was a board whose purpose appeared to be to cover the opening, but we couldn't really figure a way to install it and eventually RDX settled for a bunk bed and we called it a night.
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