Planet Hopperz: Thinking about renting a house or condo for vacation?

We are home from Florida, and Rob is sorting through the thousands of photos we shot. Our goal of posting something profound every day during our trip didn't really work out, but our brains are out of vacation mode now and we're ready for some serious blogging.

I want to start out by giving a little background on the place we stayed. For the first time, we decided to rent a condo rather than stay in a hotel. I don't know why we have never done this before--we are a little slow, I guess. We rented a 2-bedroom, 2-bath beachfront condo for 9 nights for $1070. That's about $119 per night. We never would have been able to get even a single hotel room on the beach for that price.

Having a full kitchen meant we didn't have to eat out every day, which saved us even more money. Naturally we sampled the local restaurants, but just having the ability to eat breakfast and make cocktails at "home" saved us a lot of dough. The condo also had a much homier feel than most hotel rooms--orange walls, down comforters, even some books and games and beach toys.

There are, of course, downsides to renting a condo. The most obvious one is that you have to do your own cleaning--there's no maid service to clean your room every day and provide you with fresh linens, and you need to leave the place in decent condition when you go.

The other is that you can't be entirely sure of what you will get. We rented our condo through a site called http://www.vacationrentals.com (the specific listing is here: http://www.vacationrentals.com/vacation-rentals/62323.html). There are quite a few sites that list vacation house home rentals, including http://www.vrbo.com and http://www.homeaway.com/

The nice thing about these kinds of sites is that customers can post reviews. But even those are iffy--some listings (like ours) don't have any reviews on them. And even if there are reviews, of course, you don't know how reliable the reviewer is. They could be a good friend--or enemy--of the owner.

You can, of course, request references from a potential renter and call these people yourself. We didn't do that, but it's a good idea.

Rob had a good gut feeling about the owner when he talked to her on the phone, and we went with it. His gut did not steer him wrong. The condo looked exactly like the photos, had all the amenities listed, and really was right on the beach. We weren't smack dab in the middle of South Beach nightlife (we were further north, in Surfside) but that was fine with us--we wanted quiet, relaxing, and family-friendly. There were never more than a handful of people on our beach. And we loved being able to just go downstairs and jump in the ocean for a swim before breakfast. We didn't have to pack a big bag of stuff and plan for a daylong excursion.

We were on the 8th floor and the two balconies afforded us great views--the ocean to the left, and the city to the right.