Letter from Vermont

We’ve had quite a few visitors lately.  Yesterday, the couple who owned our house from 1982 to 1998 stopped by.  Roy and Lois are a wonderful couple who still live in town.  We went around the house with them and shared a lot of their fond memories.  Might be a good time to introduce our house, since it is such a part of our lives:

The “house” is actually an antique country inn in Vermont.  The family who built it in 1872 was named Churchill; the house is now the Churchill House Inn, and it is the reason a classically-trained Siberian violinist (Olya) came to live in a small Vermont village.  On our honeymoon, we had stayed near Bar Harbor, Maine, at a very pleasant bed and breakfast called Oceanside Meadows.  The innkeepers’ lifestyle seemed very attractive, and when I had the opportunity to change jobs, we decided we’d like to try innkeeping.  We wanted to spend more time together, and three meals a day with each other, working and living in the same house seems to qualify. 

We took a seminar for aspiring innkeepers, and followed that up with a month-long car trip around a good part of the United States, leisurely looking for the right fit.  We looked from Maine to Minnesota to Georgia and back up, and finally chose an inn just three hours from home, in Rutland County, Vermont, where my great-great-grandfather Lyman Taylor was born and raised.  We’re in our fourth year here, and it continues to be a wonderful experience. 

This year, we decided to close the inn for March and April.  And, wouldn’t you know it, we had a “walk-in” couple come to the door this afternoon looking for a room.  We rarely have walk-ins because of our out-of-town location at the Green Mountain National Forest.  We were able to send this couple (hiking around Vermont from Germany) to one of the B&Bs in the village that we knew would take care of them wonderfully.   

So why have we closed the inn for two months?  Some other time, perhaps.