Mexico Bound and Determined : Our New Normal: Hotelier Life

I mentioned in my last post that I most likely feel less inspired to write about our "experiences" down here because they don't really feel like "experiences" anymore. What was once bizarre is now our "new normal."

Like seeing a guy take a snooze on a pile of pallets in rush hour traffic? Shrug.

It gave me the idea to write about what a typical day in the life of two dorky Gringos running a busy, boutique hotel is really like since I don't have any new expat-fails or terrifying bug stories to entertain you with.

Our new normal...life as hoteliers:

7:30am - The damn parrot starts squawking his head off for 20+ minutes because the sun is coming up (he thinks he's a rooster) which is when I sandwich my head in between my two pillows and try to go back to sleep after muttering about the "dumb bird." The bird's name is "Macho" because he thinks he's the king of the friggen castle, even though we (Ty) has squished spiders bigger than him.

He tried to bite me several times while trying to get this photo of him...jerk.

All of our guests love him for some reason and no one (expect me) has ever complained about his incessant squawking, so I guess we'll keep him around. (I personally call him "Ruidoso" instead of Macho which makes the staff chuckle because it means "noisy" in Spanish.)

Ty almost always gets up before me because ever since moving here, I am no longer a "morning person." Every job I've ever had has always required a super early wake-up time... As a waitress opening a busy breakfast diner in my late teens, I had to be there at 5:30am; all of the office jobs I had started at 7:00am or earlier; while going to college in my late 20s, my first class started at 7:00am; teaching bootcamp classes before the sun was up meant I had to be out the door by 5:45am... So, I think I've been doing a LOT of catch up in the sleep department since moving here, but I'm okay with that.

But around 8:30, (okay, sometimes 9:30), I'll sluggishly mosey out of bed...always hopeful that Ty has already started brewing coffee in our kitchen, which is across the courtyard/hotel lobby. I throw on something presentable, tame my crazy-ass hair, brush my teeth and wash the sleepy look from my face. It's a weird thing having to immediately "get ready" before you can even leave your bedroom because you don't want to run the risk of running into the gardener, the (hunky) pool boy or any of your hotel guests while sporting a disheveled nightgown without a bra on, frizzy bedhead and eye crusties. Sexy.

Most of my morning is spent sipping coffee, repeatedly asking Ty to go on "poop walks" (where he makes a loop around the property in search of puppy nuggets that our guests don't need to be subjected to) and then I usually continue doing laundry. And by "continue" I mean the laundry is absolutely never-ending when we're fully-booked. Sheets, pillowcases, bath towels, beach towels, hand towels, kitchen towels, bath mats, small rugs, cleaning rags, seat covers, table cloths, guests asking if you can do a load of laundry for them....there just aren't enough hours in the day (and our washer and dryer are old and inefficient) to stay caught up with it all. When the baskets in the laundry room are empty, I always want to take a picture of them and scream, "Victory!!!!"

Two out of three...not bad! (They were all over-flowing when I got up this morning.)

The dryer can't keep up with demand (and it's expensive to run all day), so I "half-dry" things on the line first...

Yes, we have a housekeeper who has the laundry going all day too, but she doesn't work every day so whenever she's not here I'm chipping away at the heap myself. (If I didn't try to stay caught up with it, there wouldn't be fresh towels ready when she services the guestrooms or clean sheets when she needs to change over a room, etc.) And then comes the hours of me standing at our kitchen table neatly folding everything before it gets wrinkled until my back hurts, but I digress.... (We could legit hire a full-time laundry person from November to April, and maybe next year we will...or better yet, I'll convince Ty to buy me better machines!)

10:00am on Monday, Wednesday and Friday - Our housekeeper arrives and I give her the rundown (in mediocre Spanish) of the day's events: which rooms are checking out today, which are checking in, what the priorities are, what guests told me they needed, what we are running low on, what THING OF THE DAY IS BROKEN, etc. (Seriously.... There are 11 toilets, 9 showers, 23 sinks, 6 kitchens, 5 hot water heaters, 23 ceiling fans, at least 4 propane tanks, who knows how many pumps and cisterns or whatever else kind of plumbing thingys I know nothing about, and one gazillion lights on the property (I just did a quick count of light switches in our room alone and there are 28), so there is ALWAYS something that needs fixing, replacing, unclogging, blah... Always.)

Oh! And then there are the curve balls! A week or so ago, a dead sea turtle washed up on our beach and Ty (with the help of some concerned guests) buried it in the sand and covered it with rocks before it started stinking up the whole hotel, only to have it be un-buried by the tide overnight; so then he waited until high tide and waded it out into the ocean. Unfortunately, I have no photographic evidence of this very traumatic/gross experience because I was super bummed that the very first turtle we've seen on our beach was a dead one. Moving on...

The rest of my day is spent updating calendars and spreadsheets, replying to emails and booking inquiries, managing our reservation software, updating our rental listings on multiple sites, doing inventory of supplies, helping the staff, (poorly) translating Spanish, calling taxis, walking the grounds and making sure everything's in order, and getting huge eye rolls from Ty when I so much as ask him to change a light bulb or put on shoes...

When we have a lot of guests, we mostly stay in our bedroom/living area (while keeping the doors open) and guests often come knocking to ask a question about how something works, or to tell us they're running low on something, or ask for restaurant recommendations or for us to call them a taxi or whatever else. I have a lot of anxiety about both of us leaving the house at the same time when we have guests because I'm always like, "But what if someone needs something?!!?!" But I need to be better about calming down and giving ourselves a night off once in a while... This past week was nice though; we we're fully-booked, but all of the guests had either rented a car (usually meaning they're more self-sufficient) or they had been here a few weeks already and were familiar with getting around and didn't need us at all.

In the evenings, we usually watch a show on Netflix or Hulu while we wait for all of our guests to return so we know they're "home safe" and to make sure the front gates get locked properly, etc. which makes me feel like parents waiting up for their kids.

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Guests tend to "drool" over our gig as Property Managers and Hosts at Jardin and they have a lot of questions about what's it's like to live here, and we always laugh and say, "It doesn't suck!" Which is true, it doesn't suck, and we're very fortunate; but we usually leave out (or downplay) the "hard parts" of maintaining a half-acre Estate (on our own dime, no less), running a busy vacation rental business and managing a full staff in a foreign language.

For example, some of the never-mentioned "hard parts":

Sometimes I spend 10+ hours on my feet and I feel like a grumpy, self-pitying, one-woman show and "the only one who gives a damn around here!".... but I'm a perfectionist and I put waaaaaay too much pressure on myself to make everything as good as it can possibly be. I've always been that way... I don't know how to NOT do my very best at something...even if that "something" is scrubbing toilets or folding towels. Doing anything less than my best will legit keep me up at night; and when I see other staff members not doing as well as they could too (Ty included), my head feels like it's going to explode, and often times I can't help myself and I go "fix" whatever they did.

As a bonus side effect to being an incessant perfectionist, I've started unconsciously grinding my teeth at an unnatural angle (with my lower jaw shifted to the right, for some reason) while cleaning, rushing or stressing and I can actually feel/see the wear on my bottom teeth -- not to mention the headaches it's causing me. (I sound like a delightful, laid back person, don't I?)

Oh, that reminds me... I've also been bombarded with what I call "work stress dreams" the past month or so. When I was a waitress, I used to have dreams where the entire restaurant was full and I was the only one there and all of the customers were angry at me. Now, I dream about guests showing up early and their room not being even close to ready or about accidentally double-booking a room. When our WiFi went out a couple weeks ago (for 4-5 days) I had dreams two nights in a row about it being fixed and then waking up and realizing it was still broken. Nothing like having a panic attack first thing in the morning because umpteen guests are gonna be pissed off about not having internet... Fun!

Much to Ty's credit, he does all the accounting and bill-paying/banking/tax junk for the hotel because that's way too boring for me to care about. He also does the majority of the in-person guest interaction and "crisis management" (a.k.a. bribing a TelMex technician to fix our WiFi today, not next week) because I'm not very good at talking to humans I barely know or handling problems. Both make me want to hide, so I'm thankful he's good at being the calm, cool, like-able front man and "fixer."

I don't like it when Ty's not home, in case you can't tell...

Most days are okay, but some days are really HARD. Whenever we have a "turnover" (hotel lingo for when guests are checking out of a room and new guests are checking into the same room on the same day) on a "non-maid day" (Tuesdays, Thursdays and the weekends) ...then yours truly gets to spend 2-3 hours busting ass to get the room clean and ready before the new guests show up. Stripping sheets, making beds, scrubbing bathrooms, emptying leftover food from fridges, emptying garbages, washing dishes, dusting, sweeping, mopping....and then restocking everything: towels, soaps, coffee, water, paper products, etc. It's a ton of work to get done in a small window of time and it's about 87 trips up and down the stairs because it's impossible to get everything you need in one trip and then I usually forget half of the things I went to the supply closet for. And, of course, there is still laundry happening in the middle of all of this. Let's just say, I'm grateful when guests say their plane doesn't land until 4:00 or 5:00!

I really don't mind the cleaning aspect (because of the whole perfectionist thing)...it's the rushing and stressing and sweating part I don't like, because after I'm done getting a room ready, I still have to change my dirty clothes, mop up my face, fix my hair, and try to look easy breezy when Ty pulls in the driveway after picking up our latest visitors from the airport. So, I often go from stressed-out, sweaty maid to smiling, care-free hostess in a single afternoon.

Heaven forbid there be any sort of emergency when it's down to the wire...like a toilet overflowing in another room and flooding into their living room while I'm the only staff person here and I'm still trying to finish a different room and the new guests are going to arrive any minute....yeah, that happened like 3 weeks ago. But I pulled it all off and still managed to play the "put-together" hostess when they arrived. (I might have done a little stress-sobbing in private later that night, but you can't prove it.)

We also do tons of shopping. It feels like we're at the store every other day. It takes a TON of supplies to run a hotel... Laundry detergent for colors and for whites, fabric softener, OxiClean stain remover (for when people decide to use my pristine white towels as makeup wipes....grrrrrr), bleach, dish soap, hand soap, body soap, shampoo, conditioner, kitchen sponges, plastic wrap, tin foil, toilet cleaner, floor cleaner, tile cleaner, glass cleaner, wood polish, rust remover, paper towels, napkins, toilet paper, kleenex, garbage bags in 4 different sizes, coffee, water bottles...just to name a few. And then there's something that always needs to be replaced, whether it's a rusty can opener, or a refrigerator that's older than I am, we're always shelling out cash. Speaking of which, don't get me started on our electricity bill...(and guests ignoring our polite requests to turn off their A/C when they're not at the hotel.)

The other thing about being so busy is the impact it has on our personal lives... Remember all that laundry I mentioned? That means there is rarely time to wash our OWN clothes. Our hamper is usually overflowing, our room hasn't been cleaned really well in over a month (because the housekeeper and I are too busy and Ty only knows how to "boy clean"), I don't have time to shave my legs or wash my hair as often as I'd like (I know, too much information), we never exercise anymore (but I'm still developing plantar fasciitis anyway from constantly running around on hard surfaces in flip flops), we go to the store constantly but it takes about 6 trips to remember that we're nearly out of toothpaste and our fridge is always empty, we rarely hang out with our friends, we don't go on dates or out to restaurants, we don't get to have lazy days in our pajamas binge-watching movies, and Ty and I are both more irritable with each other than usual.

But... This is our life now...at least for the "high season" anyway. Looking at our calendar, we won't have a single day where we're "home alone" until mid-May and we have reservations into late July. Oy. We're not living very exciting or relaxing lives at the moment, and I don't see any laid back beach days, impromptu hot springs trips or private pool parties any time in our near future...but we get to live in a truly unique place and we get to share it with visitors from all over the world, so that's pretty dang cool.

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Easily the best part of running Jardin is getting to witness other people fall in love with it, like we did. I never tire of showing guests to their rooms, giving tours, telling stories about the history and the artifacts, or seeing the expressions when guests walk through the ancient wooden doors for the first time.

I also love reading people's reviews after-the-fact (most of them make me teary and/or give me goosebumps) and I especially love when guests book their next vacation with us before they've even finished their current one! Because, to me, "I can't wait to come back," is the truest test that a place is magical. (It's exactly what happened the first time we vacationed in little La Cruz de Huanacaxtle, and now we live here.)

Anyone can stay at a mega resort or fancy condo with all of the high-tech amenities...but it's not going to leave an impression on them -- which is what this place does to people. But...don't take my word for it! Experience it for yourself. Hint, hint.