The first thing one needs to do is to mark your territory by using all the bathrooms, so make sure you conserve your bodily functions until you arrive. Once you do that you will no longer feel displaced and can begin to move in.
Coming to a new house you have to get a sense for the layout, figure out how best to enter and exit, scope out the best bedroom, find where the TV is and which remotes you use, and where might be a comfortable place to sit. Then you dump your things in the appropriate places and go to explore what is always the key element of a vacation home, the kitchen.
Part of the fun of this is to see what kinds of random stuff gets left around. Some of this is based on how often the owner is in the house and the rest depends on how much non-perishable stuff the previous tenants bought and left. Sometimes there will be almost nothing there except salt and pepper (often multiple salts and peppers). This particular house has a surprisingly well stocked pantry, with extra virgin olive oil and cans of soup and more. Other things that get left are sugar, flour (in a bag marked "December 2016" in this house), vegetable oil and, for some reason, tea.
There must be something about coming to a vacation house that makes people think they're going to drink tea. Sometimes they do drink a little bit of it but, but really when it comes down to it, people don't like tea, mostly because it doesn't taste very good. Even if you call tea "good" everyone knows that means "for tea that is." So they either don't like it enough to take the extra home with them or think it would be a nice thing to leave "for the house." It's unusual for there to not be multiple boxes of tea. I think there are 5 in the house we're at now, plus we brought 2 that we'd gotten for a gift. I think it would be nice to leave them for the house.
Then you can look in the refrigerator. The door will usually contain some condiments of varying ages. Mustard, ketchup, mayo, jelly. There might be some butter or salad dressing. Our current house has some whipped cream too. Most of this stuff ends up being usable, but check the expiration dates. At least at the places we go, the people are good about having a clean refrigerator for you.
Then there are the cabinets. What's in which cabinet? Plates? Glasses? Coffee mugs? Enough wine glasses? People bring even more wine than tea to these houses, but they rarely leave any. Silverware, sure. The biggest question involves whether or not there are any sharp knives. We used to stay in a place where we knew we needed to bring a sharp knife. And a vegetable peeler. All the houses here favor big, heavy plates and bowls. It makes emptying the dishwasher better exercise than at home, but I'm not sure if there's any other point to it. Lots of big heavy coffee mugs too.
We're in the Adirondacks, so most of the houses have that theme, in case you forget where you are. There are lots of images of moose and bears, neither or which I've ever seen here, and some loons, which I have. Some houses have chandeliers made of deer horns. I've never been quite sure what to think about that; I think deer shed their horns regularly but I'm not sure enough about that to be quite comfortable. Our current house has little of that.
There are also cute little signs about lakes, woods, mountains and such. This house has a nice little poem in the master bath about their "little cottage by the lake." This little cottage has 3 floors, 4 large bedrooms with full bathrooms, 2 screened porches with cushy bed-sized swings, an open-plan main floor with a 50 inch TV (all the bedrooms have TVs as well), multiple gas fireplaces, a teak ceiling and top of the line appliances. Just a little $2 million cottage.
But after a couple of days you almost feel like you live here. And that's the point I guess.
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