A Tiny House

As often happens during this time of year, the office that I work in is turned completely on its head for approximately 4 weeks while colleges and universities across the country welcome their students back onto campus.  Although being away from home for three of those weeks is NO excuse for not posting, I'd like to think it gives a pretty good explanation of where I've been hiding out :)  In a complete turn of miraculous events with all the stars and planets aligning at just the right moment, the schedule opened up in such a way that the J man and I were able to get a full Saturday/Sunday combo of days off--perfect timing for his cousin's wedding and the discovery of a Tiny House open house in NH!  So early on Saturday afternoon, we loaded up the truck and headed to Andover for a night of wedding fun that more than raised the bar for all weddings to come.  Bride and groom were impeccable and the pinkcentric (that means very pink for those of you unfamiliar with that word) color scheme spoke straight to my Barbie girl heart.  The paper accents were absolutely exquisite, and all designed and created BY HAND by J's sister.  If you're a member of that old website known as Facebook, you should totally check out her page for All On Paper because this lady is a master of paper!  The wedding took up all of Saturday plus some of Sunday because we had to get a delicious breakfast at the hotel before heading to Jackson on our Tiny House adventure.  Oh what an adventure it was!  Two and a half hours of driving might not seem like a nice way to spend a Sunday afternoon, but for professional drivers such as we are, a scenic drive on a beautiful day with no arrival time looming is heavenly.  Eventually we made it to Jackson, NH, but the Garmin was not being super friendly and we struggled to find the site of the open house.  As we're driving in circles looking for The Lodge at Jackson Village, J suddenly blurts out, "wow...look at THAT tiny house..."  Talk about an AHA moment.  I took my attention away from the road for a few short seconds only to glimpse in person the Tiny House that I'd been admiring online for the past few days!  It was marvelous!  Tiny is certainly the right word for it; I think my current height might slow any plans that were forming in my head to build such a small abode, but it sure was fun to finally get to see what tiny really means.  As we were walking across the parking lot, we bumped into a few folks who were also checking the place out.  They told us they were from Boston (like us) and that they had seen the open house advertised online (also like us) and were really interested in checking it out (again like us).  They were super excited to find out that they weren't the only "crazy" folks who had made the drive up there, and I can assure you that the feeling was mutual.  Crazy as it might have been, the ends most certainly justified the means.  When we went inside the house, we met the owner of The Lodge who explained how she had started following Jay Shafer and his Tumbleweed Tiny Houses, and eventually was lucky enough to have a house built by Jay delivered to her parking lot to live for the next few months.  It's even available to rent for a night so that visitors can get the full Tiny experience.  What a great story, and what a great Tiny house:

Tiny House courtesy of The Lodge at Jackson Village and Jay Shafer

Back at it :)

This week proved to be MUCH busier than I anticipated.  I was hoping to have some great adventures from the road to write about, but with 4 events in 3 days, there was a serious lack of time and sleep on my part.  To make up for my no-writing-mostly-driving-through-the-mountains-of-West-Virginia week, I've decided to go back to one of my favorite weekend trips and reminisce about one of my best days off ever.  The trip started at J's house.  Normally Sundays are Paul's Diner days because they have the most delicious breakfast around and the wait staff there is second to none.  I've never seen so many smiles serving eggs and orange juice, no matter what time of morning you go in.  Unfortunately, we didn't quite make it before they closed at 1:00 so we had to move on to plan B.  We didn't really have a plan B but J was clever and he thought of something right there on the spot.  "Let's just drive," he said.  Just drive?  Driving is what we do for a living.  Why would we voluntarily drive on a day off?  Hmmm...because we don't have to follow a map, or be anywhere on time, or do any work when we get where we're going...genius.  Needless to say, it was only a few minutes before we jumped in the car to go off on our journey.  We started in the direction of New Hampshire since it's only a few minutes to the boarder from Justin's house, but then things changed.  Instead of hitting the highway like we normally do, we stayed on the main road past his house and just kept going.  I had never been down that part of the street before because I always stop at J's, so this was a real treat for me.  We saw things that I never even knew were down there.  And oh, was it worth it.  There were scenic woodland views and swamps and beautiful houses and adorable little shops, and this was all before we finally crossed the state line.  We had planned on stopping to eat right away, but nothing really caught our attention so we just kept driving.  In New Hampshire there was a little river running next to the road and a bunch of places to stop and park.  By that point, we had made it almost 45 minutes without eating breakfast, but the rumbling coming from our tummies was getting a little ridiculous so we stopped for pizza to calm the hunger beasts.  Now, it seemed like a real shame to have driven all that way past a river and a bunch of scenic spots without stopping at any of them.  Nature was right there calling to us and we had just ignored her!  So along came the second brilliant idea of the day, this time from me.  "Let's have a picnic."  Smart, I know.  With high hopes of finding just the right spot, we held out on the pizza a little longer and turned around to start our return trip.  Finally we found a great little place, right on the water and with just enough room for our car to park.  When we first pulled up it looked like we could sit right on the bank on our side of the river, but unfortunately some rather unthoughtful visitors had left a huge bag of trash there so we decided to get adventurous and jump rocks across the river to the other side (no trash).  There was a great big rock for us to sit on and we enjoyed our lunch while sharing a few bits with the minnows in the water.  Man do they like pizza.  Then we played.  There were so many flowers and pools and frogs to explore, we just had to check it all out...

rock hopping

being adventurous

flowers

pools

rocks