Once upon a time (aka, Sunday) I rode Clementine onto a dirt trail not knowing what to expect. We were on our way to the German-founded town of Fredericksburg, Texas, but still 7 miles away and needed a place to stop for the night. After a while, I came to a widened area in the acorn-strewn forest. I turned Clementine in one of the four empty stalls and proceeded to look around.
To the right, there was a small chapel with a disinterested carpenter working inside. To the left was a trail with a carved wooden sign reading “Cottages.” I followed the trail, passing one cottage, and then another and then crossing over a wooden footbridge past a stone well. The trail ended at a third cottage with a sign over the door, “Rumpelstiltskin.” I hesitantly tried the door. It opened and an enchanting melody welcomed me inside.
A dim lamp in the back of a high loft lit a large wooden spinning wheel. Two sconces on the ground level cast warm shadows in a sleeping chamber. It seemed that if I were to curl up onto the bed, I would drift off into a fairy tale journey that might lead me, albeit frighteningly, to my eventual happily ever after. Literally enchanted, I set out to explore the cottage more thoroughly.
This is all a true story of what really happened this weekend. Sure, the chapel was a garage painted to look like one. Sure, Clementine is not a horse, but rather a minivan. The fact remains, however, that I entered that cottage in the woods, without a key, and spent the night.
There was a plate of candy and nuts (surely not poisoned?). There was a mobile of twine, topped with a bird’s nest from which dangled a long seed pod fashioned into a boat. It sailed in circles above the kitchen sink. There was a crowned green frog atop the bed. I never spoke to anyone here, but in the morning, as if fairies had come at dawn, a breakfast was resting on the porch table: cheese, homemade bread, sliced meats, fresh berries, jam.
I am sorry to admit that I booked this cottage with points from a credit card and not even with the host directly, but I am glad that the genius behind this fairy tale experience was able to sing their enchanting song wide enough for me to hear it and be drawn in.
As an anxious person with an insatiable urge to travel, I spend a lot of nights on a computer, obsessively investigating places to stay. In these late night scrolls, I have noticed a pattern emerging in vacation rentals. One tiny area will offer a dozen vacation rentals, all within a millimeter of each other on the map, and all within a few dollars of each other in price per night.
Each one looks similar, but the couch will be a different color or the coffee table a different shape. It seems as if entrepreneurs are buying apartment buildings and turning them, wholesale, into a bunch of vacation rentals. These places will be bleached and sanitized. They will be spartanly populated with four cheap forks, three wine glasses, two towels, and no soul.
The first time I came across this sort of thing was at a place we stayed in Utah back in 2018. Picture a situation in which a business akin to Motel 6 (let's just call them Vacasa) is running 2,000 furnished vacation rentals. The bed was broken, a burner on the stove had not worked in over a year, a housekeeper flung the door open a day early and told us to get out before I was able to convince her that we still had another day. And let's not blame the housekeeper here. I am sure that she was underpaid, overworked, and that similarly underpaid and overworked office staff made a mistake.
In contrast, let us meander back to last year, in Henderson, North Carolina. Jon had a disc golf tournament and I combed for a place to stay. Up until this time, I had avoided the kind of vacation rentals where you get a room in someone's house. As much as I am an intrigued voyeur of the human experience, being a stranger in another person’s house, anticipating talking to said stranger and ruminating later about the talking, well, it makes me nervous. For a few extra bucks I am happier conversing with an electronic lock.
It turns out, however, that sometimes a room in a place like this involves less social anxiety than one might think. Maybe the host lives upstairs, or across the street, or even across town. The people in the other room are travelers like yourself, giving you all some weird equal status in the household. That was the case in Henderson. Carol lived upstairs and, while she checked in on us occasionally and made sure things were nice, she mostly kept to herself.
Carol’s place was this amazing 120 year old house. Jon and I had a one bed suite. Across the kitchen was a larger two bed suite. I tentatively met the occupants, Graham and Ted. It turns out that they were also traveling disc golfers. I had the great honor of pointing out to these traveling companions that they were now to be known as the Teddy Grahams.
We had little impromptu gatherings, a pot-luck dinner party one night. While the others were playing in the tournament, I made brownies with one Teddy Graham on top of each square. There was a cafe down the street called George's Cafe. We nicknamed the cafe “Chez Georges” and all went out to eat together.
This lodging style we now call the AirBnB (even if you found it on your credit card travel points app) has reinvented the boarding house through the internet. Allowing regular people to rent out a room or a few rooms or a cottage has created a treasure of human hospitality. Modernity has offered us fresh access to something we did not have when I was a kid. Sometimes the past does not have the best stuff, sometimes the present moment does.
Amidst the forces of small hotels being bought up by big chains and branded and/or boutiqued, the mom and pop vacation rental has cropped up as this awesome antithesis. These independently run rooms and apartments and cottages portray the culture and minds of the host in a way you just can’t get from another medium.
Sunday night, nestled in my fairy tale cottage, I crocheted next to the spinning wheel, I read from the gilt-edged book of Grimm’s fairy tales, and I ate the chocolates. Before trying to drift off to sleep, I kissed the frog, ensuring that I would be able to collect my prince at the Sacramento airport in a week’s time.
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