Stress Relief in the Poconos
After months of hard labor at my job I was hitting a breaking point. I was tired, overworked, and simply needed a change of scenery. My wife came to the rescue with a weekend away at the Ceasar’s Poconos resorts in the Poconos mountains in Pennsylvania. We arrived Saturday morning and left Sunday at around noon but it did the trick for relieving stress and changing scenery. We were surprised by how short of a drive it actually was. Including a stop for coffee at a Dunkin Donuts on the way, we arrived a mere two hours and five minutes after we left home.
Once on the property of the Cove Haven branch of the resort, the first thing you’ll notice is that the resort itself is quite dated looking. It makes you feel a bit like you stepped back in time to an era complete with disco balls and leisure suits. If you ignore the cheese factor of your surroundings, or in fact if you enjoy them for nostalgic or comedic reasons, the place is quite nice. We stayed in the Adam and Eve “Apple” Suites section of the Cove Haven resort. The building itself is a one story tall space ship looking building without a single window, but inside we found a nice layout and plenty of lights to cancel any gloom that may be created by the lack of windows and the explanation of how a “two floor” room can possibly exist in a one story tall building.
The brochure would have you believe that your room is “two floors” and that will undoubtedly inspire ideas of, well, there being two floors worth of space in your room. That really is a bit misleading however, as you likely figured out when you saw that it was a one story building. In reality your door puts you on the “first floor”, shortly after walking in you should immediately turn on the lights lest you fall down the three steps that separates this floor from the “second floor.” In a stretch of logic you could in fact pretend that those three steps have placed you on an all new floor, and through that you could even likely get away with calling the pool room a “third floor” thanks to the two additional steps you must go down to get to it. Overall, the room in all its parts, and floors, is quite spacious.
The first floor includes what I would call your second TV, a heart shaped hot tub, a sofa complete with end tables, lamps, and a coffee table. The second floor has the fireplace, your big TV, your bed, a walk-in closet, and access to the bathroom and pool room. The third floor separated thankfully by a glass door and windows contains your personal pool and sauna. During our stay many interesting adventures occurred and some are worth metioning to help keep other people from screwing things up like I did.
Each room comes with a fireplace and a requirement that you can only burn Duraflame type logs in it. Buy your Duraflame log at a grocery store or Walmart or something before you go. We brought our own log, but only because we were warned by friends to do so. They will happily sell you a log if you failed to bring your own for around three times the cost you would expect to pay anywhere else. The important things to note about burning your Duraflame logs is that the fireplace has no flue to open or close, so don’t bother spending much time trying to find it to make sure it’s open. There is a metal log holder thing in there to put your log on, but before you do so, center it in the fireplace and push it all the way to the back wall. When you put your log on it, put that all the way against the back wall as well. I didn’t figure this out until our room started smelling smokey thanks to the smoke preferring to waft around instead of simply rising into the chimney. I was forced to use the ash tray that held the free matches to push the log toward the back long after it was burning at a normal pace. An exciting and warm experience to say the least, and the only thing I could find that wouldn’t burn that I could use to push the log with.
The heart shaped tub was a cute concept but it rapidly turned into a scene out of some weird horror movie thanks to the bubbles we had put into it while it was filling. A pattern taken from drawing a bubble bath at home in a normal tub. We picked up our bottle of bubbles from the porn store section at the back of the gift shop, and I highly recommend bringing your own bubble bath stuff thanks to the price mark up. What I failed to fully realize was that a hot tub, complete with interesting water jets, takes tiny amounts of bubble bath soap and turns in into mountains of bubbles. The only advice I can offer is that you fill the tub first, turn on the jets, and only then, add bubble bath stuff slowly, a few drips at a time and see how it goes before adding more. I didn’t use that much stuff and we were forced to drain the tub and start again without adding more bubbles. In the end, we gave up on being able to watch TV, sip wine, and enjoy the hot tub thanks to this mess.
The pool room is small, but kinda nice. The sauna was really a closet sized cedar walled room with the sauna heater in it. Both rooms were well suited to two people. I know this is probably pretty obvious considering its a couples resort, but I would recommend against booking a room for more than two people. The pool was warm and the right depth and was my personal favorite feature of the room even if it was a bit small. For some reason, late at night, they seemed to turn down the temperature of the pool and the pool room. This made it less enjoyable for my wife and I but not to the point where we didn’t want to use it.
When dinner time came around, we returned to the place where we had eaten our included breakfast. Unlike breakfast where getting a table to sit at alone was quite easy to do, there was a very long wait for a table to eat dinner at alone. We skipped the long wait and accepted that we would be sitting with a bunch of strangers for dinner. By the end of the night we were pretty good friends with our dinner companions and conversation flowed easily. My advice is to seek out a table to sit alone for breakfast since your brain isn’t likely to be working on all cylinders early in the morning before lots of coffee, but to happily accept the company in the evening for dinner.
The activities provided were quite extensive and frankly quite fun, but I don’t think I would be able to find much to do without lots of repeating things if we had stayed more than a couple of days. It was a nice change of pace to ice skate, rollerskate and shoot arrows in the archery range. The standard sporty fare of mini-golf, boccie ball, tennis, ping pong and things like that were all free, but expect to be shelling out quarters or tokens for arcade games and air hockey tables.
If the local activities have worn thin and you find yourself looking for things to do, there are a collection of somewhat famous outlet stores less than an hour away, or less if you are staying at a resort that is not the Cove Haven resort. Be prepared to follow your wife around while she shops happily though. If you are the nature type, also less than an hour away, but inconveniently not in the same direction as the outlet stores, is Bushkill Falls, a lovely woodsy hike with the “Niagra of Pennsylvania” waterfall to stare at and take pictures of for later memories. Thanks to being tired and my lack of desire to take countless pictures of a landscape still brown with winter we didn’t end up paying the admission price to walk back to the falls for this trip, but I would very much like to return.
All things considered, I would definitely return for another romantic weekend in the Poconos, but I also definitely wouldn’t want to stay for more than a couple of nights. It’s extremely convenient thanks to being close to home, and it was plenty of fun while we were there.