Four In One: Full Moon Resort

 When is a vacation not a vacation? Uh, when it's four vacations in one.

Yes, my husband and I flew east in early May to spend some time with our number two daughter in Columbus, Ohio. And that was fun. We ran errands together, helped her with some odd jobs around her home, and kept up our WFH responsibilities as well. I cooked a handful of her favorite meals and we also indulged in the best local takeaways. In the evenings, between baseball games and the Kraken playoffs, we found common streaming ground, which is no mean feat: The Last Thing He Told Me, Ted Lasso, and my personal favorite, Transatlantic. All in all, it was a solid, productive and entertaining week.

Yet that was just the tip of our vacation iceberg. Wanna hear the rest?

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Saturday morning, bright and early.

Swing by the Starbucks for the caffeine crew.

And settle back into your seat because we are road-tripping to a wedding in upstate New York.

Yep, one of my nieces is tying the proverbial knot at a cozy resort in the Catskills. That gives us 8.5 hours of driving up to the northeast corner of Ohio, and across the lovely rolling green hills of Pennsylvania where we saw a literal team of horses pulling a plow across a field - Amish country! By 6 p.m. we pulled into a train station in Dover, New Jersey, where my first-born, who had flown from Seattle to JFK the day before and stayed overnight with a friend in Brooklyn, hopped off the coach and into our car. We stayed the night nearby and next day took the scenic route to our first destination.

Full Moon Resort. 

You know, I'd not spent any time Googling the resort so I had no any preconceived images in my head, other than the epic jewel that is Mountain Lake Lodge where Dirty Dancing was filmed. Now that resort is technically in Virginia, even though the story line insists Baby and Johnny danced their hearts out at the fictional Kellerman Lodge in the Catskills, so that's where I got my imagery. Anyway, it was great fun because my mom loved Dirty Dancing - and Patrick Swayze in general - so I felt her presence near found myself smiling at the unlikely connection. 

The Sunday ceremony was held down at the riverside, the gurgling stream and tender spring greenery made pure poetry, and the wedding came off without a single hitch. And though I took no photos during the evening shindig, I captured a hint of the resort's beauty the next day.

^ As I ran down the slate slabs that form a walkway to the Night Sky Cottage and found an old gate leg wooden table with chairs on the well-shaded front porch, I knew we had chosen our lodgings well. We pulled our cooler from the car and sat right down for a lovely lunch of salami, cheese, crackers and fruit. 

^ Esopus Creek runs along the western edge of the resort property; the other side is a forest preserve with nothing but tender young deciduous trees. A tributary of the Hudson River, this happy stream's name is a Dutch word meaning "brook" or "small river" as well as a local native tribe. She's very sweet.

^ To the east, another forest preserve covers what the Eastern folk refer to as a mountainside. They are so cute about their tiny little hills, and we PNWers must never poke fun at their monumental illusions. 

Here we are in The Barn, enjoying a simple but satisfying farewell breakfast. I confess to skimming 90% of the blackberries off the very large serving bowl of fruit salad, and I have zero remorse. Along with the little link sausages and the white paper lanterns, they were my favorite part of the meal. 

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And now we're off again! You'll never guess where we are heading next...