Mountain vacation

I've gone to the mountains on summer weekends my whole life, mostly to stay in a tent at campsites on mountain lakes. These are the mountains where my father spent his summers as a musician when he was a young man. I've come to the mountains as a child, a teenager, and an adult. And I've brought my own kids to the mountains on camping trips.

For the last five days, though, I stayed in the mountains with my husband, just the two of us. Our kids are old enough now to stay home by themselves, allowing us to vacation by ourselves. We stayed at an old inn on Large Ungulate With Antlers Lake, an inn with sixteen guest rooms, a restaurant on the first floor, a fireplace in the lobby, and three docks with canoes and a paddleboat.

When we sitting by the fire the first night at the inn, I told my husband the story about the famous 1906 murder that happened on the lake. A man killed his pregnant lover by taking her out in a rowboat, whacking her in the head, and leaving her to drown. The sensational case inspired Theodore Dreiser's book An American Tragedy.

My husband, who is not a strong swimmer, listened to the story, and said to me, "Okay, now I am afraid to go out in a boat with you."

Well, he did get over his fears and go out on the lake with me one evening at dusk. We also spent time hiking many of the trails in the area, sitting on the rocking chairs on the porch of the inn, walking along lake edges, and just talking. When it rained, we stayed in our cozy room where we had a view of the lake, spectacular even in a drenching rain. We could look east down the lake at a sunrise in the morning, and west to the other end for a sunset at night. The days went by fast. It was hard to come home.



The top photo is the view from the front porch of the inn. The bottom photo is the view from our room. The long legs in the photo belong to my husband.