Bed in Breakfast

Once upon a time we planned a weekend escape to a Bed & Breakfast place in Cambria, on the coast near Santa Barbara…B & B's in and around Santa Barbara were supposed to be the Mecca of the world and who would want to miss that…
Donas was thrilled to go and looked forward to it …me too…

I forgot the name of the place but it was called something like Miss Molly’s B & B and it was modeled after either a French or English country manor or an authentic log house…I remember the manor was at the end of a long dirt road with four or five private houses in a row, and as we parked our car I saw a man sitting on the front porch next door trying to suppress a laugh…

We were met at the door by Miss Molly (delightfully dressed in bib-overalls) and after checking in she escorted us to our bedroom…the room looked like any other grandmotherly room...I felt like if I touched anything an alarm would go off…I couldn’t help but notice there was no TV and hoped I got to love the smell of potpourri…

After setting our bags down we were escorted to the ‘activity room’ where we found out that Scrabble was the activity…we played for a while as I sipped the vodka I brought in case of an emergency…
We went to town later and had a nice dinner, then came back and hit the sack…

The next morning we went down to breakfast, while all along I thought they served breakfast in bed but that never happened… we found three couples enjoying oatmeal and bran muffins…no eggs, bacon or sour dough toast…I never saw any of the garden fresh bread they were famous for…all these thirty-something’s were wearing walking shoes, hiking boots, backpacks and sweaters tied around their shoulders no doubt dressed for hiking, bike riding, walks on the beach or whatever… no one spoke for a while but eventually the word shopping came up to liven things up for some of the women…others talked about saving water, saving our land, trees, spotted owls and clean air…they’d all be driving hybrid cars these days…

(Good Golly) Miss Molly told us that a gift shop was available on site and antique and gift shops were all over town…later in the afternoon she promised Hors D’oevvres and wine but we missed that…she also pointed out a few books on a shelf, some of which were titled ‘The Beast, the Ghost and the Haunting of Cambria’…my favorite one was titled ‘The Mystery of the Dark Lighthouse’… enchanting novels huh?... …another thing Molly mentioned was to watch out for bears in the area…we walked two days around town but never saw one…

To this day we talk about how romantic it was and how much fun we had…we ate lunches and dinners together with wines, nineteen flavors of iced tea and delicious desserts…she bought quilts and bedspreads that she still has and she bought me a hat…I scored points that weekend and I’m thankful she and I were able to do it…we are living happily ever after…

But I still can’t understand the fascination of B & B’s. We were not senior citizens at the time so maybe it’s something you acquire in time…like the taste for prunes…