A Date with America

The Poconos Honeymoon Resorts

Before Virginia was for Lovers¹, the Poconos were for honeymooners. According to Roadtrippers, “in 1963, when Morris Wilkins, owner of Cove Haven Resort, invented the heart-shaped hot tub,” and a Life magazine article which sparked an interested in kitschy romantic decor sent lovers flocking to the Pocono mountains, where honeymoon hotels had flourished since the ‘40s.

The resort where Wilkins built his famous hot tub still stands, and they’ve progressed to champagne glass hot tubs and heart-shaped swimming pools, and their rooms are something that must be seen to be believed. The United States has always preferred its own mythology to reality, and this is a piece of American love mythology made real. My wife and I visited this adult amusement park on our anniversary, and it both exceeded and defied our expectations.

The traditional gift for the fourteenth wedding anniversary is ivory, and because neither of us have the desire nor the firepower to kill an elephant, we opted for a romantic dinner. Friends recommended Alpen Rose, a speakeasy-style Philly steakhouse, but we could only book it after the actual day, on a Sunday evening. With the rest of the weekend free, we decided to flaunt our child-free hedonistic lifestyle and drive to the Poconos for an evening of tacky debauchery.

I’m not sure where we first heard of the Champagne Hot Tub resorts. In the tri-state area of Pennsylvania, New York, and New Jersey they are somewhat of a rumor or urband legend, something you’ve heard exist, that maybe a friend of a friend visited, or where that second cousin got kicked out of, or that randy uncle was arrested. Sarah had heard about them, and being a hot tub connoisseur—we bought a house with a vintage 1972 lima-bean-shaped in-ground pool with a built-in hot tub—decided that the Champagne Hot Tub was something we should inflict upon our enduring connubial bliss.

The time was never right. The Poconos are a bit of a haul, and while there are cheap honeymoon hotels around, the Cove Haven and Paradise Stream Resorts are not among them. Nearby Mount Airy Lodge—beautiful Mount Airy Lodge to those who’ve suffered their TV commercials—now boasts a casino and luxury suites, and Great Wolf Lodge has an indoor water park for your squalling, urinating offspring to defile, but neither offer en suite hot tubs shaped like champagne glasses, hearts, or lima beans for that matter. If you have no children and no gambling addiction, the only choice is to embrace your seventies swinger persona and head to the birthplace of the heart-shaped hot steaming tub of bodily fluids, Cove Haven Resort.

Is it a cove or a haven? Is it a haven for coves? Can we call it a coven for short? I don’t know, because we chose its sister resort with its own unseemly name, Paradise Stream Resort. Cove Haven Resort is on Lakeview Street in Lakeville on the shores of Lake Wallenpaupack, in case you forgot it’s on a lake. Paradise Stream, which evokes both golden showers and other ejaculations, is on Paradise Valley Road near Paradise Creek, in Cresco (not Crisco). And yes, the Paradise Stream flows into Paradise Valley, to keep with the double entendres. Truth is sometimes better than myth—if you peruse the map, a larger creek running by the resort is named Devil’s Hole, which would make for a delightfully Puritan sex resort name.

I chose the Stream over the Cove because it was about half an hour closer, and next to the abandoned remains of Chestnut Grove Resort, a honeymoon resort which was turned into a family one in the ‘80s, where my mother took us as children for summer vacations, as an alternative to the Jersey Shore. I had fond memories of playing arcade games, performing in abysmal costume contests, fishing for largemouth bass, and swimming in the rectangle-shaped pool; the only evidence of its romantic roots is that the pond in its center is heart-shaped, and unless it was drained, also home to snapping turtles. The song writes itself: “We used to skinny dip, but a snapping turtle has taken residence in the fishing hole of your heart.” There was also a firing range nearby where you could rent and shoot AR-15s, which remains open; if you couldn’t find romance, you could at least indulge in violence.

Chestnut Grove, today

A mile from Chestnut Grove you pull into Paradise Stream, where you are greeted by signs and murals informing you that you have entered The Land of Love. You park and a sign tells you to leave your luggage in the car, as you’ll be driving to your private semi-detached love cabin after check-in. The main building is where complimenary dinner and breakfast are served, and every time we entered the lobby, the floor was wet from being mopped. I’m not sure if someone spilled their free soft drink refill, drank so many that they became incontinent, or were so overcome with amour that they lubricated the linoleum with their own juices.

The Piso Mojado sign was always on the other end of the floor, so we slipped and skidded to the front desk where a snorting matron had us sign waivers that absolved them of liability for any injuries incurred during our sexual gymnastics, and offered us the Semi-Suite Seduction, which included a bottle of champagne in a silver bucket and etched champagne flutes, votive candles which we could take home, and rose petals sprinkled all over the room, which we could also take home, if my wife was into crafting and wanted to repurpose them.

I don’t need rose petals between my toes and other private places, so we opted for the Passion Package, which had a Duraflame lighter log for the fireplace, bath bubbles for the hot tub, two mini bottles of prosecco, and a nice box of chocolate truffles. From outside, the room looks like a boring stucco condominium. If you walk around the building, for example to wander the half-mile “nature trail” along the eponymous Paradise Stream, to the Baseball Diamond of Love, dodging the horse turds of romance deposited by the equestrians of the neighboring riding stable, you will notice that there are no windows, except for one well-blindered one by the front door. There will be no peeping toms here, not even if they climb on the roof, because in lieu of a skylight, the drop ceilings have black tiles with tiny stars on them, operated by dimmer switches.

When you walk into your Champagne Tub room, at first glance it could be any hotel room; a couch, a rug of whose history you’d rather remain blissfully unaware, a credenza with a coffee maker—but then the chalet-style ceiling opens up and reveals the pink champagne glass of your filthiest dreams. It’s enormous, as if the Great God Dionysus is proffering you a cosmo that’s certainly spiked with Olympian roofies. Flip the switches and red mood lights and stars illuminate the ceiling. Pop a pressed sawdust fire log on the andiron and set the mood for the evening to come.

As you mount the stairs, there’s a heart-shaped swimming pool in a greenhouse to your right, with a sauna room below, to heat up your old bones. The pool room is slightly warmer than jungle temperature, and you won’t need your bathing suit in the privacy of your own room. Upstairs, the circular bed, shaped like the pillowy aureola of Venus, is tucked in a mirrored alcove that turns any scene on it into triplicate, and the black starlit ceiling tiles also reflect everything that goes on below.

From there you can step into the hot tub and look down upon the fireplace. The only improvement I could have imagined would be an enormous bay window overlooking a private lake populated with flamingos and manatees, or perhaps a clearing in the woods where badgers and antelope were perpetually getting it on. Or maybe a projection on a screen of same, set to the collected works of Barry White, performed on the Pan flute.

If you can enter such a room and not be overcome with aphrodisia, you should have stopped for some gas station Viagra at the Kum-n-Go. When you book the room, you are reminded to reserve your table for the complimentary dinner and breakfast for each night of your stay. This may be at odds with the effect entering the room has upon one’s loins, so be advised.

If christening the bed has inflamed other hungers, you will make your way down to the main building, slip on the floor which is again being mopped, and be led by hosts with black vests and man-buns past the salad bar to your table, where you will be serenaded by a man playing something called The Stick. A cross between a ten-string electric mandolin and a cursed oboe, it can play anything a bassist with a fake book can blunder his way through. The best I can say about it is it’s not an accordion.

The menu has no prices, and our vested server told us everything was all-you-can-eat. Not only the salad bar, which was nicely appointed with anything you might get at a Scranton steakhouse, but the entire menu. Nothing says American like an all-you-can-eat dinner menu with ribs both short and prime, everything on McDonald’s farm seared or fried, pasta with spicy sausage that was somehow not called Cajun pastalaya, and either eggplant or chicken parmesan. Our server said to order whatever we wanted, and if we didn’t like it, to just order something else.

It was then than I realized that this place was Homer Simpson’s dream. All it was missing was a chocolate fountain in the champagne hot tub itself, with a Fondue package where you fed yourself until you drowned. My shrimp flatbread was something like a microwave gluten-free pizza with salad shrimp thrown on it, with a side of vodka penne that Olive Garden would be ashamed to serve. I could not bring myself to order something else. How bad could the burger be? But you don’t want to get into a champagne hot tub feeling stuffed like the Chicken Florentine. I braved the tiramisu and was pleasantly surprised; it did in fact pick me up.

If this post were a romance novel, it would be a closed door one. Fires were lit, champagne was had, and many bubbles were made. The champagne hot tub takes so long to fill that you’ll have expended the sexual energy fueled by your all-you-can-eat lamb shank and seafood fra diavolo in time to cool off your friction-scoured nethers in the soothing cup of its magnificence. As you sip your prosecco from plastic flutes, if your marital bonds have not already been reforged in the fires of robust lovemaking— they will be tempered by mutual laughter as your soapy asses skid along the flat slippery surfaces and you both flail like horny invertebrates in a tide pool.

Sarah said, “there’s no sex in the champagne room,” quoting an old Chris Rock bit, and in the hot tub itself, that is true. It is best suited for soaking ones bones between sessions than the act itself. It’s a long way down to the fireplace, which lacks even a bearskin rug to cushion your landing.

The breakfast buffet the next day was somewhere between a Catskills hotel and Cracker Barrel, with steam trays of biscuits and sausage gravy, cheese blintzes, home fries, airy bagels the size of donut spare tires, a Belgian waffle maker, mountains of bacon and sausage and scrambled eggs, and homemade whipped cream cheese in distressing pink (strawberry) and mint (vegetable) colors. No one will meet anyone else’s eyes, which is for the better, as you don’t want to imagine them engaging in two minutes of the most vigorous aerobic activity they’re going to get for months. They were better-dressed than the average American hotel breakfast denizens, who will show up in jammies and socks and look at you like you’re the reality show camera crew in their living room.

We also booked a couple’s massage that morning, at the spa/gift shop. The massage was welcome, and before you joke, had no happy endings—but I was disappointed in the gift shop. I mean, I wasn’t expecting the same inventory as the Pleasure Chest in West Hollywood, or even a red barn porn shop in the Bible Belt, but this place wouldn’t have been saucy in Salt Lake City. In New Jersey, you have BYOB restaurants; in Pennsylvania, the love hotels are bring your own lube. I don’t even think there were condoms! Or kinky postcards. Not even a photo of the Philly mascot Gritty in the champagne hot tub full of bubbles, with the motto, “Wish you were here.” I would have bought a bunch of those.

1. According to Wikipedia, the slogan was created by an ad agency in 1969, and “The Martin Agency says that, contrary to some claims, the slogan is not a reference to the United States Supreme Court's 1967 ruling in Loving v. Virginia.”