Wildquack Recap

What I started saying yesterday before I totally lost it (literally as well as figuratively … as I lost my entire blog to a weird hiccup in cyberspace) … was that we just got through a fantastic long weekend! It felt great to be back in the swing of things again at The Lodge. We had a totally full house here and things were hopping to say the least! For the first time in many ‘slow, mud-season’ months, we ran out of rooms and had to refer our overflow guests to fellow Jackson innkeepers. I myself was a bit rusty after the long slow winter, but soon got in the groove again … and what fun! Kids and families were heading to the season’s opening of Story Land, couples attended the first-ever Highland Games and whiskey tasting at Cranmore, and some even brought their mountain bikes and just hit the trails. My kitchen became a cinnamon roll factory each morning, as I got back into mass production for our complimentary continental breakfast. (Mmm … I just love the smell of cinnamon baking, don’t you?).

The wonderful weather did much to spur on the travelers, I think; and the weekend was just perfect … neither too hot nor too cold. The Wildquack Duck Festival, as usual, was the highlight of the weekend here in Jackson. It went off with a bang so to speak, thanks to Howie Wemyss’ post-time canon, which announced the start of the thousands of yellow duckies down the river. The parade, I heard, was the biggest and the best one yet. Unfortunately, this was the first in many a year that I did NOT make the huge 600#, 4-foot by 8-foot double layer cake for the throngs of hungry duck-watchers. My schedule this year took me to various innkeeping conferences in Boston, Bretton Woods and back again to Massachusetts during the 10 days prior to the festival, and wisely, I anticipated that making that huge cake (while FUN) would have put too much undue stress on an already big weekend. I’ve promised the Chamber of Commerce that I will be “back in the paddle” next year, so to speak, mixing up another quarter ton of cake batter. I did actually miss not doing it this weekend, but the extra time with our guests made it much more relaxing for me. About half of our 32 rooms were filled with repeat guests, the other half were first-timers. Being able to take time to chat with old and new friends is actually the best part of innkeeping. If this weekend was any indication, we are in for a fantastic summer. The phone has been ringing off the hook for two weeks now, and reservations are already pouring in at a record rate. I love coming in each morning to see that 5 or 6 new online reservations have come in overnight. With the month of May behind us now, I see that our occupancy was double what it was in 2009 … a very good indicator of what is to come this season … which I very much hope will include you and your family. See you soon, I hope!