Originally published in Philadelphia CityPaper February 2005. Update: Caesars Pocono Resorts are now known as the Pocono Palace Resorts. All three of their hotels, including Palace (where I stayed), still offer rooms with champagne glass hot tubs.
It’s 4 p.m. on a frigid Sunday in late January and I am sitting completely naked in a 7-foot-tall champagne glass.
Frolicking with your sweetie in this Pop Art whirlpool bath is supposed to be the ultimate romantic experience at Caesars Pocono couples resorts. But as activities between me and my husband Phil got more vigorous in our glass perch, my thoughts turned to the fireplace in the living room below. What if I fell out and into it? What if I drown? Would the obit headline read, “Champagne Addict Succumbs”?
Phil and I have celebrated previous Valentine’s seasons with the prosaic candy, flowers, expensive restaurant meals — even a heart-shaped tub in Niagara Falls where our fun was frequently interrupted by calls from gentlemen looking for a previous occupant named “Candy.” But we also got married at Lucy the (giant) Margate (N.J.) Elephant building, and love kitsch culture like Caesars Pocono Resorts founder Morris Wilkins’ champagne glasses.
Wilkins put the Poconos on the romantic map in 1963 when he invented the first heart-shaped whirlpool. When competitors copied, he created and patented the people-sized champagne glass. Wilkins eventually sold his four resorts to the Caesars gaming company. They’re now owned by the Starwood hotel chain (they of Westins and Sheratons), though the resorts retain the Caesars name and continue to be sold as Vegas-flashy but upscale-respectable all-inclusive couples “playgrounds.” From the luminous pictures on Starwoods’ elaborate Web site and in their glossy catalogs, Pocono Palace looked like Nero’s Golden House spiffed up for a state dinner.
That’s why we were so shocked when after the two-plus hour drive from Philly, we pulled into the Palace parking lot and saw something resembling an aging Best Western. Forget doormen or bellhops: The Gallery Mall-style glass doors on the main Arena building weren’t even automatic. Seating in the cavernous Greco-hunting lodge lobby consisted of a single park bench situated beside a fire extinguisher-adorned pole. The free afternoon hors d’ourvres the catalog had boasted was a tray of cubed Kraft cheese.
Pocano Palace, with its nine-hole regulation golf course and tiny lake, is marketed to “sports lovers” (thus giving a whole new meaning to the word foreplay). But one look at the Palace’s indoor “sports complex” (a wing of the Arena consisting of a small pool, racquetball and basketball courts and antique arcade games for which you had to buy tokens) and we quickly decided to concentrate on collaborative water sports in our room.
All of the higher-end ones are attractively furnished, multilevel (you step into the champagne glass from the bathroom) and feature multiple pools and baths. Think of them as indoor adult water parks. Unless you have an Andy Warhol fetish, I wouldn’t even recommend shelling out the extra bucks for a champagne glass. There are mirrors everywhere except where you could see yourself in the glass (which is probably just as well because anyone looks ridiculous in it). As a result, though, when you’re in there, it just seems like any other whirlpool. In fact, the best room is probably the $350-ish glassless, windowless Garden of Eden Apple, partly for the protection it affords from having to see the cheap and bleak Palace compound.
The Caesars resorts’ cheapness seeps into the rooms in the form of extra charges. In a $400-$500 room with a fireplace and a giant champagne glass you might well expect complimentary champagne and champagne glasses. But we didn’t even get fireplace logs and bubble bath. That’s how we ended up drinking champagne out of plastic bathroom water cups.
Caesars resorts rooms do come with all-you-can-eat dinners, for which we overdressed, judging from the baseball caps and sweats at our group table (The hotel’s orientation pamphlet only draws the line at tank tops and bathing suits.). Caesars Pocono Resorts marketing coordinator Cathleen Bell had told me that all kinds of couples are customers but everyone at our table was in (or living with someone in) construction. They were also all members of Caesars “Forever Lovers” frequent visitors club, which entitled them to room upgrades and free firewood and bubble bath. We listened politely and cluelessly as the dinner conversation ranged from driving pilings to racing four wheelers to raising goats and kids (with corporal punishment). Everyone else had seen and loved Meet the Fockers (which makes sense since it was, in fact, what we were all doing). They also reported on some of the resort’s daily organized social activities, including a musical-chairs-type game that involved women putting a cucumber in their partners’ pants.
The food was actually quite good, if generic, as was the covers band that performed in the nightclub along with a comic after dinner. The comic echoed the dinner conversation about kid-slapping before closing with a long hemorrhoids bit that made us wish we had returned to the room sooner.
In fact, our advice for those who might like to stay in this place is the same as for the kids who are driving many of their corporal punishment-believing parents to a Caesars Pocono romantic escape: Stay in your room.