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Now that I've got some time and remembered to do this here's the ski trip story.

Last summer a friend of mine invites me to come on a ski trip with some friends of his that I've never met before. It's at a resort that's on my skiing bucket list so jump at the opportunity to go. The person organizing it books a big stand-alone condo to fit the whole group in one place in the fall, I look at the pictures of the place and it seems cool, the only downside is the rental states no dogs so my friend and another couple will have to leave their dogs at home (this is important for later).

I don't think about it for the next few months until my buddy comes to town and we load up my Jeep, drop his dog off at his moms for the weekend and head out. Many hours later we roll into town, grab some supplies at the grocery store and head up to the hill to find the place we're staying at. According to some text messages we're likely going to be the first ones there so we go to the address we'd been given by the couple organizing it and pull into the empty driveway.

Right off the bat my friend is annoyed because there's a Kong dog toy sitting right in front of the garage so we're confused as to why we weren't allowed pets. I brush it off and we find the lockbox and try the code we'd been given, which was 2016. It doesn't work, but it's shortly after the new year so we try 2017 and it unlocks so we grab the key and open the door. We bring a bunch of stuff inside and start looking around. We find that the place is clean but one bathroom and two bedrooms are half reno'd but there's still enough beds for our group so no big deal. We see a dog bed, and dog dishes, and a fridge magnet that says "the dog is the real king of the house" and my buddy is getting a bit pissed that his dog had to stay at home. The fridge is half full of food which seemed a bit odd but I've never rented from an AirBnB before and figured maybe the owners were new at it or something so I move their stuff to one side. In hindsight these should have tipped us off but after 8 and 12 hours on the road respectively we weren't that sharp. We unload the clean dishwasher, I make a sandwich and my friend starts making sausages while he shovels off the deck around the hot tub. I sent a couple pictures of the place to my parents and fiance of the place and then look around a bit more. I managed to bluetooth my phone to the stereo and find the router with the wifi password on it and I'm happily eating my sandwich and decide to check Facebook before calling it a night and just meeting everyone else in the morning.

As I'm munching away I see in my notifications that someone's posted in the FB group for the trip. I open it, and it reads something along the lines of "it was a bit tricky but I found the place, it's awesome, see you guys when you get here". Now alarm bells are finally starting to go off, since there's nobody else there. I call to my buddy out the door and ask if he knows X and if we're all staying in the same place on this trip. He says yes and I fill him in on the post. It's been a while since we looked at the pictures of the place so I pull up the link to the listing with the pictures and realize we're in completely the wrong place, we're even on the wrong side of the road. Now we're in fully alert mode, we're grabbing all our stuff and tossing it back in the Jeep as fast as we can while trying to make sure we don't forget anything, we're tossing dishes in the dishwasher and watching every car that goes by to see if it's gonna pull in the driveway. We know they have a dog but we have no idea what kind of dog it is or what kind of people own this place. Do they have a hidden security system? Are they the kind of people who would just send a not-so-friendly dog in the door with no warning? Finally we get the heck out of there and drive down the road to find the place we're actually supposed to be at, now that we've got pictures and are looking on the correct side of the road. When we get there a few other people are already there, the guy who made the post had similar issues finding the place but at least he was looking on the right side of the road and knew the name of the place.

What had happened was the listing didn't actually have an address, so one of the organizers had found it on Google Maps, dropped a pin at the spot and copied that address. What Google had spit out was actually a range of addresses for that chunk of the road, (ie 1002-1067) but my friend had just punched the first number in his phone not realizing this. It all worked out in the end but I've wondered what would've happened if I had just gone to bed and never saw the post. There were a few vehicles in the driveway of the other place on the day we left, we were half tempted to stop by and see if they were the owners and noticed anything but decided against it.