We stayed at The Art Shack in Salt Ash, Australia between April 28-30. Our main purpose of this stay was accommodation for the Groovin the Moo festival. On arrival, the state of the house was disgusting, with the kitchen bench scattered with old food and surrounded by flies. On Saturday night we returned from the festival on a bus at 11:30 PM. We informed our host, Deborah, that we would be home around 12:00 AM, and also informed her when we had gotten on the bus. She had told us that she had not locked away her German Shepard guard dog and it would be unsafe to enter the property without her being there. At 10:30 PM she told us in a text that she was out to dinner and she would be home around 12:00 AM, so we patiently waited in the Caltex service station across the road because it was nine degrees and we had casual day wear clothing on.
At 11:45 PM we called Deborah and informed her we were across the road at the service station waiting, as the dog was patrolling the yard and there was no way past him. At 11:55 PM she texted us and said she was “coming” and would be there in thirty minutes. At midnight, the service station shut down and the employee told us we had to leave, so we went back outside into the cold and tried to huddle up on the side of Nelsons Road, a 90-kph zone. At this point we were exhausted, afraid and freezing. By 12:45 AM there was no sign of Deborah, so we called her again. We asked where they were because we were afraid and cold. She told us they hadn’t left yet, as the guy she was seeing was playing the pokies and drunk and she was afraid to ask him to go.
She told one of our friends to put the phone on speaker and hold it up to the dog, but the dog went berserk and tried to bite us through the gate. At this point she told us she would be asking him to leave or leaving herself right now to let us in, and she would call us back in a couple of minutes. Nine minutes later we hadn’t heard back, so I called again. She told me that she was definitely on her way home, however she needed to stop for petrol, but she was coming as quick as she could. While talking to her, I could hear the man she was with talking about how stupid we were for not being able to get past the dog. At 1:06 AM she called us and told us that her house mate was at home the whole time, and that she could get the dog away for us and we could go through the front door, and the call ended. Five minutes later we saw her housemate Kathy open the front door, she came out and started leading the dog inside, taking him around to the back room. She then came and gave us the all clear to come inside, and had a giggle about what had happened.
Once we were finally in our room and in bed, I was so cold that I was having trouble breathing. We heard Deborah and the guy come home at around 1:25 AM. We could overhear him with a raised voice continuing on about the situation, and Deborah tying to calm him down. We felt incredibly uncomfortable and unsafe going to sleep. Before we slept we received a message from Deborah saying “So sorry, sleep in till late AM.”
We ended up leaving as soon as we woke up and started our eight-hour drive home completely sleep deprived. While on the way home we took a closer look at the reviews and saw this is not the first time this has happened. A couple had been kicked out by a drunk host at 12:00 AM onto the side of the road and left with nowhere to go. The fact that Airbnb allows people to host in an environment such as this, let alone with a vicious dog on site, is insane. I’m glad that we are older and it wasn’t a family with young children as I don’t know how they would have held up in the cold.