Living the Dream

By Sunny Matthews

This is the very first blog I wrote, and it never made it past my saved documents page.  I had no idea where to put it!  This year I started listing the 10 most overlooked sites around the Lewiston, Niagara Falls, Lockport area and got hung up when I ran out of pictures and nice weather to taking new ones.  Today I found this and thought I would pass it on:

It had been suggested (in 2009) that I start a “blog” to make my web site more interesting. Being reasonably sure no one wanted to read that today ironed sheets and tomorrow I was going to weed the garden, I checked with someone who has a blog about what to put in this masterpiece. His suggestion was to skip the day to day activities but to talk about what interested my guests. The kind of conversational topics discussed over breakfast.

The question I am most asked by my guests concerns what gave me the idea to run a bed and breakfast.

When my third son was born we lived in a mobile home in a small town in southern Colorado. My parents were invited to stand in for the godparents (who lived out of state) at his baptism. Since they lived 6 hours away, I needed a place for them to stay other then on the fold out couch (tho why they would want to stay in a room of their own rather than with our three boys under the age of 5 I'll never know). Anyway, the places available to them were a bed and breakfast or a small motel. They chose the bed and breakfast. The night before the baptism my mother was laying out her outfit to see if anything needed pressing. She had the hat, the gloves, the matching purse and shoes, the slip, nylons, shell, jacket and....no skirt. It was still carefully folded on the bed at home.

LaVeta was a small town about 62 miles from Pueblo, to the north and 65 miles over a mountain pass from Trinidad. Either way you looked at it, we were 60 plus miles from the nearest shopping center. The owner of the bed and breakfast went into her own closet and selected a skirt that would go with the rest of Mom's ensemble and altered it to fit my mother. (We are talking about a woman close to 100 heaver than my mother, so it was no mean feat.) The rest of the stay fades in my memory, but the way this woman was able to save the day, to make a difference in my mother's day, has stayed with me. I knew than that I wanted to run a bed and breakfast and someday pay that favor forward. And I have! Two years ago we had guests visiting in October when they expected the weather to be cool enough to wear jeans. Instead we had record breaking highs in the 90's. The man on the party had one pair of shorts with him and these he tore the seat out of on the first day of the visit. I was able to borrow a pair of perfect fit shorts from my sons closet for him to wear for the duration of his visit. I know we had stores closer than 60 miles, but in October they were not going to be selling shorts!