We stayed in a town home in the smaller section of EI where you go through a gate and enter a code instead of going through the main gate where there is a guard. We absolutely did not like the trash situation of having to take our own trash to a dumster. I'm not sure if all of the town homes have this trash situation or if it's only those in the smaller, separate section. I understand that the individual homes have trash pick-up at the curb.
The people before us left 2 bags of trash on the curb outside our town home. Well, within a day animals had gotten into it, so trash was then scattered all over. Really nice thing to come back to each evening.
We reported it to the staff at the clubhouse, but they didn't seem really concerned. After about 5 days the landscape company came around to mow, and we think they picked it up so they could mow.
The landscapers had also dumped a giant pile of mulch right outside the dumsters where there were parking spaces and an area to turn around as you dropped off your trash. On several days, the landscaper's vehicles were also parked there, so we couldn't even get our vehicle close to the dumster at all! We had to wait in a line of cars or park quite a ways down, and then walk our trash where we then had the wonderful task of physically touching this nasty dumpster to open it up and deposit our trash. It was tricky to figure out how to get the door opened, and many people obviously gave up and just left their trash sitting outside the dumster.
We also regularly saw someone with a uniform on that said "security" who was going through the trash looking for "treasures". In other words, he was dumster-diving. This security guard wouldn't move out of the way so we could put our trash in! My DH said "excuse me", and the guy just ignored him and kept sifting through the trash. DH finally just sort of dumped our trash bags over the guy into the dumster. It was totally ridiculous! I don't know if this was someone from EI security or somewhere else, but we saw the same guy there several days.
I also thought that outside street lighting was inadequate in the section we were in, and actually didn't feel incredibly safe there at night. We had noisy neighbors outside playing music very loudly a couple of nights and my DH had to go out and ask them to keep the noise down. There appeared to be no security around that section at all.
We will not be staying at EI in the separate town home section again. I'm open to trying one of the individual homes in the future as I think the issues we had would not exist in that other section, and the resort around the main clubhouse looked very nice, but the trash and general security situation in the smaller section will definitely keep us from going back there.
I did not know about the trash situation before we reserved & paid, although I did find out about it here on the DIS before our stay there. I just wanted others to be aware. I'd strongly recommend EI owners to do what they can to find another way to handle trash at the town homes as this is really unacceptable IMO.
)
