Lake Gaston Vacation Rentals

You want to rent a vacation house on Lake Gaston. What's available and how do you go about it?

First, there's reasonable, but not abundant, availability of rentals. Homes that sleep 12 or more, especially, fill up early as guests often reserve the house for next year when they check-out. Thus, if you have a large party and can only come during a specific week or two, you should reserve now!

Lake Gaston vacation rental homes are normally family vacation homes that the owners use part of the time and rent out part of the time. Rarely are they full time rental homes. Because of this, they are individually decorated, every dish may not match, and there may be a mixture of "styles".

The vacation house will normally be directly on Lake Gaston, not across the street, and have a private dock in front of it for your use. You're welcome to bring your boat, but normally you will not use the inside of the boathouse or lift, but will instead tie your boat to the dock. Usually the water right off the dock is a minimum of 3½ feet deep and quickly increases to 8 feet as you get further out.

Normally, the rental house will be centrally air conditioned, have cable or satellite television, a telephone, and be completely furnished with dishes, bedspreads, pillows, and lawn chairs for the maximum number of people it will accommodate.

The key is how many persons will it sleep? For this purpose, babies count just as do adults. One bedroom frequently has two sets of bunk beds so it can sleep four and there's often a queen sofa sleeper in the great room to sleep two more.

After you've decided which vacation weeks work for you and how many will be in your party, contact the rental manager and see which homes are available that meet your criteria. If there's a feature that's really important to your crew ("We like big water, but don't want to be on the main Lake"), be sure and tell the manager so she can match you with the right house. But try to be flexible, remember, you're just renting the house for a week, not buying it.

Once you've made a match, confirm the financial arrangements. So much right now, the rest on what date.

Usually during June, July, and August, the rental weeks are inflexible (check-in on Saturday between 2:00 pm and 4:00 pm) because other guests are checking in before and after you. However, during the other 9 months, you can usually start your week on any day of the week.

Be sure you have a clear understanding of all the terms - pets allowed? (usually not), do we pay extra for the cleaning or do we do it ourselves? (both arrangements are common), are linens included? (usually not), does the house have a dock fishing license? (some do, most don't), etc..

When you check-out, if you liked the rental house and waterfront and the vacation week worked well for all your myriad schedules, you should consider reserving it for next year right then.