Our Lodgings: Better Than A Hotel!

Sometimes on road trips you have to stay in hotels.

And sometimes, a hotel is a good time.  You’ve got the pool, the free breakfast, the room service.

But you also have the high cost.  (Especially for a family of eight, a number hotel managers declare is unsafe for one room.)  And you also have the creepy probability that no one actually ever washes hotel comforters.

Anyway, for our Jamestown Journey, we didn’t even consider a hotel.

Because we had something so much better.

Someone, really.

Our cousins Sherry and Willy.

(Our kids have these names burned in their brains because Sherry and Willy swooped down a few years ago on our family like superheroes, carrying our children to the never lands of Toys-R-Us and Chuck E. Cheese – all on the same day!)

And as if the love and affection of our cousins and their children were not enough by itself, which indeed it is, their house is better than a hotel anyway.

Their house has a pool, a hot tub, and just for our visit – a slip and slide!

(Plus, cousin Erick provided hours of entertainment for all age groups with a four-wheeler, treks to the nearby marsh to see bald eagles and an opportunity to watch him crazily jump out of a plane to go skydiving.  Did you know that that man has ridden a plane six times, but never landed in one?  Yeah – six skydives but never actually been a passenger on a regular flight.  I’m not making that up!)

Goodness, it was fun to stay at our cousins’ home.

My brother and sister-in-law and nephew came over for an afternoon while we were there.  It’s always wonderful to see their smiling faces again – and Max’s curly head of hair.  (It seems it was the last sighting of said hair too, as he buzzed it off the next day!)

We were able to meet Amber’s fiance, who passed the play test as he spent hours slipping and sliding and jumping in and out of the pool with eager children.

And he and Amber provided the dog that Piper Finn fell in love with.  (Amber has a heavy obligation to have Piper in her wedding as a flower girl.  It’s a family tradition.  Sherry was my momma’s flower girl.  I was Sherry’s.  Amber was mine.  You see how that works?)

Sherry cooked and fed us like only people raised in South know how to do.

I mean, seriously – she even had purchased supplies for us to make a picnic out of on the days we would be exploring Jamestown.

The kids did enjoy Jamestown, but there was little question in anyone’s minds – they enjoyed Sherry and Willy’s house about a billion times more.

And we enjoyed just being together, talking about big things and little things, laughing and chatting and taking walks in the evening with the swimmingest dog I’ve ever met.

Oh -and we loved being so proud of Sherry and her incredibly hard work.  I barely recognized her when we pulled up in the driveway as she has lost sixty pounds since December!

It was a lovely weekend.  It truly was.

Yes, it was a long drive – that’s no exaggeration.

And we might have received a speeding ticket along the way.

However, it was absolutely worth all of that, to be allowed the privilege of hanging out and spending time with our sweet family with whom we just never get to see frequently enough.