BOLTON, N.Y. — I have these childhood memories of my parents’ voices, cultivated in those last moments of sleep, before I would have to admit Yes, I am awake, and the wooden floor will be cold on my feet.
On those silent country mornings I would keep myself in that not-quite-a-dream space with their voices—no words; never words—pooling around me. I wish I could define the sound that was like a hum vibrating against the floor and my temples. I had forgotten that sound and that feeling till the seconds before I woke up in this sweet little house in upstate New York.
The murmurs belonged to our friends Ed and Laurie.
And therein lies the adventure this weekend. We are not the type of couple who travels with other couples. Our family is a tight, well-maintained road-tripping machine and even short trips with very good friends can go poorly very quickly if they don’t know or understand our style.
Ed and Laurie’s family—they have two girls who are 12 and 8—are the camping type. Though they rave about their two-room tent and as-good-as-home air mattresses, I am not a camper. I’ll tramp around the bush all day and get good and dirty, and I love a campfire, but once the day is done, I want a real floor under my feet and a bathroom with hot water just a few feet away.
Since I am immovable, they kindly came down to my level and found us an incredible house in the Adirondacks. The two-storey, three-bedroom bungalow on a silent dead-end avenue between Lake George and Bolton was a coup: affordable and available on Thanksgiving/Columbus Day weekend while the trees are still alive with colour.
The next sense to wake up that first morning in the low mountains was smell … coffee brewed and waiting for me.
It was the ideal lazy start to a pleasantly busy day filled with craft fairs, garage sales, an Oktoberfest celebration on Canada St. and—because every vacation day should end with some sort of fire—fireworks over the lake.
Tiny adventures on an unseasonably warm late October weekend make me think that maybe, just maybe, we are after all the type of couple who can travel with other couples.
