My husband has been working really hard this whole year, trying to keep his business afloat. I've shared before my concern about his diet, and he was not getting enough sleep either, so I begged him to go away with me for the weekend.
We are not the type to go on vacation. We both come from poor families, where a yearly vacation was something unheard of. I remember piling into my stepfather's Chevy Vega (there were four of us older children, and an infant, if I remember correctly) and driving to California to visit his parents and disabled sister, Aunt Nancy. I don't know about the rest of my siblings, but it was my first experience with a disabled person. That is the only vacation I remember, and eventually there were seven children. My husband has four children in his family, and he remembers going camping with his aunt and cousins.
In our adult lives, we have not gone on many vacations. Since moving out here we owned goats, and it's not easy to leave when you have to milk every single day. We did go to Washington, DC last summer and that was a nice little vacation.
But it's hard to relax here at home. I've tried camping out on our property (when we still owned the goats) but my husband manages to keep himself super busy around the yard. If he takes one day off, he's still working all the time.
So I thought the only way I could get him to relax (which in turn would lower my stress level!) would be to go away for the weekend.
Thankfully our youngest son is still living at home and was willing to stay home with his older brother who has Down Syndrome.
I searched online for someplace to go “up north” with the most important criteria: a full kitchen. It's typically much cooler in the higher elevations of Arizona at this time of year, and one of my coworkers told me of a place she likes to stay in Prescott, so I started with that place. It turns out it was full and continued my search. All the regular hotels that have full kitchens were completely filled, and I just happened to find a little place with cottages that looked like it might fit the bill. I made our reservations and we planned to check in on Friday. Let's say that I planned to check in at noon (check in time) but we were running late and then had to make a few pit stops on our way out of the city so we didn't arrived until 8pm! I was feeling very disappointed as we were driving away from home about 3 o'clock. It was hard to not feel bad for the time we'd lost already, but I worked hard to try and just accept that we were running late and it would be okay. We had two more days after all.
On the way to the cottages which were in Prescott, we had to drive through Prescott Valley and I caught this beautiful photo of some cattle grazing. They look like Black Angus.
A little further down the highway we found these pretty white “flowers” and stopped to take pictures of them, they turned out to be some kind of stickery weed!
Finally we arrived at our cottage, I was happy with it for the most part. This was the bedroom area. The bed was very comfortable. I brought my own pillow as I usually have trouble sleeping without my own.
The kitchen was compact but it had a refrigerator, a gas stove and an oven! And it even had cast iron skillets! I was very happy to see those.
Here is the dining room area and part of the living room:
At the far end of the room is a door which led out to the private patio area. The door was one of the half doors that could be closed on the bottom so the top could stay open to let in the cool air. These two photos show it closed first, then open:
Here is the living room area:
This is the hidden television. I thought for a minute there was no television! And I'm happy to report we didn't turn it on even once!
Here is the outside of our cozy little cabin:
Tomorrow I will share Part Two (there were so many photos I wanted to share I decided to break it into three parts, one for each day we were there).
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