Le Anniversary

So, in some way that I TOTALLY don't understand cause I know I'm NOT old enough for this to be happening to me, but February 17th marked 15 years since Mike and I drove ourselves off to the Washington DC Temple and came home as husband and wife for time and all eternity. We figured that entitled us to a little fun time off by ourselves. Back into the car we went and drove a couple hours to a gorgeous little B&B in the town of Zoar. We had intended to get out and do all sorts of outdoorsy things, since Zoar is an old historic town on the Erie Canal AND it was the first warm day of the year. Then we got to the Cider Mill and caught a glimpse of this bed and decided to hold off on the activity for a while. (For those of you with more gumption that we have, what I mean is....we lay our old and weary bones down, read a book, and fell asleep. Whee!)

And here's a picture of the downstairs. The Cider MIll was -- surprise! -- a cider mill built in them mid-1800s.Most of the original woodwork and hardware is still visible, and the rooms are down really nicely. It gave it a really nice mix of comfort and cool feeling of history.


Eventually we did bestir ourselves to take a look around the town. It was founded by a commune of German Lutheran seperatists and has been kept/restored to the way it was in the mid-1800s. In the summer, it functions like a mini-Williamsburg, with people in period costume to show you how people lived on the "fronteir" back then. Alas, it is NOT the winter, and everything is shut down. We still had fun walking through the totally deserted village and checking out all the old buildings. On our walk, we found THIS guy, and who can resist?!?

Later, as we were reading through the book "Ghosts of Zoar" , we found out that -- cue the chills -- just such an Indian man is known to haunt the Cider Mill itself! As we were the only guests for this particular night, I guess he'd felt free to get out and have a night on the town before the real haunting duties kicked in. Actually, the ghost story went on to say that the Indian Man only appears to woodworkers (they hypothesize that he must have been a woodworker himself) and since no one at the Cider Mill is a woodworker, he hasn't been seen in several decades. And actually, further on in the story, it mentions that the most recent woodworker who DID live in the Cider MIll for several decades, never saw the ghost either. Now I think we know why -- he's been hanging out down the block in front of the antiques shop!

And, just to keep up the family name, we got out and did a bit of a walk, finding the perfect place to hide from marauding non-haunting ghosts:
And eventually did get down to the Erie Canal. Maybe. It was sort of unclear. But it was a very long, very straight, very crisply-banked bit of water with a fancy bridge running over it.....in the middle of a cornfield. So we decided, good enough. Mike made one more attempt at cute picture taking....