Healdsburg Vacation Rental lodge

I stayed at the Lodge for my 30th birthday with a group of my closest friends and family. My parents came up to cook for us and we all ended up enjoying ourselves, despite lots of frustrations about the lodge and the owner. The bottom line is that the owner is not a good communicator, so you have to be explicit and get things in writing. Once you do that, have her confirm two or three times and you should be good.

In planning the trip, she offered us the wine tour ($45/person for 5 hours including lunch). She said this would include the tasting fees so we wouldn't have to pay them ourselves. She told me to research wineries and select a few I would like to visit. After extensive research of wineries, she said we would have to pay all the fees because the wineries were in Napa and they only had deals with Alexander Valley wineries. To top it off, there were only about 10 wineries we could choose from. When she finally gave me that list, I went to town researching and made my selection. In the end, one of the wineries ended up charging us anyway. Frustrating.

We had two families with babies coming and I let the owner know this in advance, saying we were happy there was a crib in one of the rooms. She offered to put a pack-n-play in another room to accommodate the second baby. When we got to the house, there was no crib and only a broken pack-n-play. The houseman had to call the owner who ended up finding one at her son's preschool to bring to us. The problem was solved, but it shouldn't have been such a headache.

We put the two families with babies in the two rooms farthest from any noise. It turned out those were the rooms with completely unusable tubs/showers. This was beyond simple rural plumbing where you have to let the water run for 5 minutes. Even the houseman acknowledged that the tubs were unusable due to sludge and apologized, saying they had had a plumber out just that morning. The owner denied knowing anything about the bad water ahead of time when I told her a heads up would have been nice.

The house was beautiful, though, and we all enjoyed ourselves. I just wish I hadn't had to go through so much stress (which unfortunately seeped out to some of my guests as well) on my birthday weekend. It is possible to have a great time at Alexander Valley Lodge, just don't go in with really high expectations.