When I stay in a waterfront vacation rental, I often feel as if I’ve stepped back a decade or two in time. The appliances, for example, typically have been around for a while, and may not feature all of the most modern amenities.
Consider the refrigerator. If you open the freezer, you aren’t likely to find an automatic ice-maker. Instead, you’ll probably see a plastic ice-cube tray. You’ll need to reacquaint yourself with the lost art of filling the ice tray with water — using the preferred “tilted tray downhill waterfall” method, of course — and develop the reflexes to give the tray just the right degree of twist to free the ice, without applying too much torque and causing the cubes to spring uncontrolled from the tray like escaped convicts and fall to the floor.
If you’re really lucky, the refrigerator will have a metal tray with a handle that needs to be pulled up to break the ice. That was my favorite as a kid — with the metal fittings frost-covered and burning cold to the touch as you gripped the handle, and the loud cracking sound as the handle was lifted with a yank and the ice splintered into shards.
Appliances that remind you of your childhood, when your grandmother referred to “the icebox” and ice cubes were hand-made, make vacations a little sweeter.
