The house itself was wonderful - the large number of beds, fully stocked kitchen, bikes, games, swim toys, electronic games were all wonderful. My biggest issue is that we picked the house not for any of what I listed above but 100% because it had a hot tub. When we arrived my teen ran to the hot tub first and it was SO COLD. I texted the owner to find out that the cleaning staff emptied and refilled the water and it would heat 2 degrees every hour. Which meant for our two night stay - we would only have access to the hot tub for half of our visit. Disappointing.
Secondly, with children the big draw of Anderson Island is the popular swimming hole. Being an outdoor attraction and that Anderson Island is phase 2, I felt confident we could social distance and enjoy some water activities. I was wrong. The swimming hole is closed to the public. There should be notification to renters that this attraction is not open. I was shocked an outdoor location was closed. We spent day 2 looking for other swimming options. I would have appreciated an update of Covid notices on the listing or even the Anderson Island website. Not the owners fault, but it did damper our planned activities.
The last issue was check out day. The check out time was early at 10:00am - a hard time to check out with teens, but I figured with COVID, extra cleaning time was bolted on and figured we could work with it. I received multiple text messages reminding me to leave by 10 and a request to text as soon as we left so they could bring in the cleaning crew. It dampened my trip to have multiple messages asking me to leave starting the day before we left. When we departed at 10am, the cleaning crew was in the driveway watching us. I've never had that experience before in all my VBRO rentals and it didn't feel great. Once we left, we went to find breakfast because I was barely able to wake the teen before we had to be out of the house and there was literally no where on the island to eat. The restaurant on the lake wasn't open until 3:00pm and the little place by the grocery store had blocked off all their tables so food was only to go-but we literally had no where to go and eat. So we decided to go to the ferry but the next ferry didn't come until nearly 11:30 -- I feel like check out from the house should more closely correlate with the ferry schedule or else you are like we were, hungry, needing a bathroom and with no where to go but a long wait in our car in a parking lot.