A decades-long tale of the hunt for leisure, and the price we paid, with apologies to Bob Dylan for the title.
About thirty years ago, I had been through graduate school, unemployment, and a succession of short-term jobs that didn’t yield any vacation time. Finally, we had some stability, the promise of longer employment, with vacation benefits, and had gotten our finances somewhat under control. But, we still didn’t plan *real* vacations.
When we stumbled upon the opportunity to buy into vacation property, in the form of a timeshare condominium resort, we decided this would be a good way to guarantee we used up our vacation for something other than visiting relatives. We bought a 1/34th share in a two-bedroom condo at Wapato Point, on Lake Chelan in Manson, WA, which worked out to three weeks every two years, rotating around the seasons.
During the 1980s, we had taken a couple of trips to Lake Chelan, taking the Lady of the Lake passenger ferry up the lake to Stehekin, once for a backpacking trip, and once to stay at a tent-cabin resort up the river and ride our tandem up the valley on the Stehekin River Road. We liked Lake Chelan, a landlocked fjord formed by glaciers, 90 km long, 2 km wide, and 500 meters deep, surrounded by the peaks of the Cascade Range, so it seemed a great “forever” vacation spot, just four hours drive away. And, we had assigned weeks for vacation, that shifted year to year. We had no excuse for not taking vacation for ourselves, and we still had a week every other year to visit relatives or go elsewhere, and maybe even have a vacation place to share with family in the future. At least, that was the promise in the sales pitches, which came with a “free trial” weekend at the resort.
But, life being what happens when you are making other plans, I soon took a night teaching job to pay off my graduate school tuition, which required us to shift our assigned week some years to fit between quarters. My day jobs turned out to still be short-term, with year-to-year contracts and not always with usable vacation time. And, it wasn’t always convenient to take time off from work on the assigned week, so I ended up working remotely some years, from the condo, with some difficulty in the age of dial-up. Remote work continued even after WiFi became available, and we sometimes brought hobby projects to work on, which had nothing to do with the resort venue. But, we did bring our tandem bicycle, and used up the hilly apple-growing countryside around Manson, when seasons permitted.
A few years into this timeshare venture, a new type of vacation company sprang up: Trendwest. They built or bought into resorts all over the Pacific Northwest and sold shares, which converted to points that owners could use to book variable-length stays anytime during the year, with the points-per-night rates seasonally adjusted, and lower on weekdays. This made more sense, but, since we were still paying the mortgage on the fixed timeshare, we negotiated a half-share, which would give us that missing week every other year, or the occasional off-season short stay.
So, there we were, up to our ears in expensive resort obligations, to the tune of over $20,000 “investment” and monthly HOA-type maintenance fees. At least we had a steady income, though not enough time off for everything. Fortunately, the fixed resort was tied in with RCI, Resort Condominiums International, a way to exchange time in one condo association with time in other resorts, or trade time for air travel. So, we converted the Wapato Point property to RCI points, and used the exchange (which also required a separate fee) for lodging near relatives and sometimes for travel. This was also convenient after we moved to Montana, and it was a seven-hour drive to Lake Chelan: we used our exchanges to go elsewhere.
Meanwhile, Trendwest had become WorldMark, a larger, more aggressive corporation that was expanding rapidly across the West through hard sell, and raising the points-per-night fees across the board. But, by this time, we were semi-retired, with more time for travel, so we succumbed to the sales pressure and forked over another $15,000 to be able to use more than a few nights a year. And, the upgraded ownership came with RCI exchange privileges, folded into the monthly fees, instead of the annual fee we paid with the other timeshare.
We did manage to milk a lot of practical leisure time out of our “investment,” in increments instead of full weeks, spending a few days mid-week instead of the expensive weekends. We got more use after shifting into semi-retirement, with all my work remote. Over the years, we visited resorts throughout Washington, Oregon, British Columbia, California, and Idaho, sometimes by ourselves and sometimes with friends who were also in the timeshare life, with whom we traded off hosting. We enjoyed urban vacations in Seattle, Vancouver, and Victoria. We took a brother-in-law with us once, and a granddaughter another time. We went to Kauai, Wisconsin, Iowa, Michigan, British Columbia, and Ontario, on RCI exchanges. We stayed at the resort in Santa Fe more than once, when one of our granddaughters lived there. We gifted children with weeks on several occasions. The monthly maintenance costs were just part of the budget, and the initial buy-in loan was just another monthly bill, so we didn’t think about how much a night this was really costing us. After all, buying a share was supposed to lock in a lifetime of luxury vacations at reasonable prices, right? Not really.
In semi-retirement, with a bit more freedom to travel on our schedule, we started going back to Wapato Point for our assigned weeks. But, things were not well in the deeded timeshare industry. Often, when we showed up in the off-season, ours was the only car in our association’s 24-unit parking lot. The housing crisis was in full flower, and owners were abandoning their resort property in droves. This, of course, drove up the maintenance fees, which were already high because the association had never built the third 12-unit building that would have distributed the cost of shared amenities among 36 units, with 1224 owners instead of 816, and now many fewer than that, as a substantial percentage of those 816 segments had reverted back to the association, and the rest of us were paying the fixed costs for those, too.
Our income had also tanked in retirement, since I had quit working part time after my heart surgery, so we tried to sell our share. No takers, and a big backlog, between private sellers and the association’s abandoned inventory. High monthly fees made low buy-in less attractive, and the deeded timeshare ownership was just not popular with a more mobile generation that would have been the market: our own children refused to be “gifted” with this financial burden, preferring the “pay as you go, wherever you choose to go” vacation planning in an uncertain age.
Finally, we pulled the “age” card, saying we couldn’t negotiate the icy stairs to our second-floor unit anymore, and paid the association a substantial fee (to offset the maintenance costs while they tried to rent or sell it) to take possession of our share, plus the usual steep realty fee. A sacrifice, to be sure, but the exorbitant maintenance fees also stopped. Our plan to have a cheap getaway in our senior years had backfired: despite having stayed enough weeks over the years of ownership to reduce the per-night cost, the maintenance fees alone pushed the per-night cost to many times what we would have paid for a modest motel, approaching that of luxury hotel suites we would never think of staying at.
Meanwhile, WorldMark had become Wyndham, and ever more voracious in their up-selling campaign. After escaping from the fixed timeshare, we were vulnerable, and forked over another $15,000 to upgrade our ownership level and maintain enough time to enjoy their resorts to the extent to which we had become accustomed. This was, admittedly, not a good choice. Within a few years, with the pandemic, and yet more and more pressure to buy, buy, buy, that left us bitter after what was supposed to be a casual vacation, we had had enough. We had evolved to van travel, opting for camping during the pandemic, and most of our “vacations” had always involved cross-country travel from lodging to lodging rather than multi-night stays that fit the timeshare model. Many years, we had simply planned resort stays to burn off points, with no particular destination in mind, just the closest resort that had space, and we often just booked one or a few nights, which fit our original plan of having pre-paid vacations we couldn’t refuse to take, but which didn’t always satisfy “bucket list” destination desires.
In 2022, after spending a week in California in the winter, having to endure one last high-pressure sales pitch disguised as an “informational” presentation, and a week in Idaho in the spring that was more pleasant, with relatives, we stopped planning resort stays, putting our shares up for sale, while continuing to pay out $180 a month in maintenance fees. Finally, with the promise of two full years of points on the table, we got an offer in late 2023. We got a modest return, probably $0.10 on the dollar for what we had spent over the three decades to buy into the timeshare resort scam, and which barely covered the last two years’ maintenance fees. But, we look forward to the end of the drain on our budget for the monthly fees, which will buy us a couple tanks of gasoline to explore in our van, and the small stipend we recovered from the sale will pay off half of what we still owe on our last ill-advised share purchase.
We’re at least glad that we didn’t talk any of our children into taking over ownership of either of the timeshares, or saddling them with the inheritance of this drain on finances that they are, instead of the promise of a secure and affordable retirement getaway. Timeshares are not an investment, just an expensive $500 per night hotel suite that we can no longer afford (if ever!), and which doesn’t meet our lifestyle or travel needs. We’re perfectly happy sliding out our home-built bed frame in the back of our van and crawling into our sleeping bag at a Walmart, Cabela’s, or Love’s parking lot when traveling across the country, winter camping around the state with our senior off-season pass, boondocking in state lands in the summer with our DNR pass, or camping half-price in National Forest and National Park campgrounds–places we want to visit, rather than where the resorts are located.
We’ve come full circle, going from backpacking to bikepacking with a tent in our early years and now back to camping, albeit in a “tin tent.” Besides, the times, they are a-changing, and our new mobile, stealthy, and modest van-lifestyle is good practice for WTSHTF. It’s coming. Be ready.