Make Your own Sunshine

My Husband and I own a beautiful 32-room upscale Lodge in the White Mountains of New Hampshire. Being in the Hospitality business in a very outdoor-oriented, 3-season destination area, we are obviously extremely weather dependent. Like other business owners in our area, we have had to create Cancellation Policies that allow us to remain in business from year to year, and these do not include guests making last minute cancellations due to weather. Prior to the establishment of our current policy, most of our reserved guests would cancel when a weather forecast predicted ‘bad weather’. At first we wrote a policy that required at least 7 days notice, but trying to be nice and accommodate our guest’s needs, it let people off the hook if they had a family emergency. Funny thing was, each time it rained, we found that dozens of families had “sudden deaths in their families”. This happened only on rainy days. Odd!!! We didn’t want to be responsible for any unnecessary deaths due to bad weather, so our 14-day cancellation policy went into effect, without the exceptions clause. Suddenly people stopped dying on rainy days. Everybody won … especially the dead people.

What we have found is that being in the mountains near Mount Washington, our weather is extremely changeable. Weather forecasts mean very little here. The prediction of a rainy day more often than not turns out to be gloriously sunny later in the day, and vice versa. Mountain weather is fast-changing and unpredictable; if you don’t like it at any given moment, just wait a bit and it will be great. We always try to tell our guests that; but we also like to share our personal philosophy with them that “No matter WHAT the weather, make your own Sunshine”. As a society, we have become soft; we expect perfection, but let’s face it: we’re not going to melt from a few drops of rain. In fact, one of the best hikes I’ve ever taken was on a misty day. While I would have loved it to be clear, it was the ‘place’ and the ‘people’ that made it memorable for me. Unless weather is so bad that driving is dangerous, my advice to everyone is ‘not to put your life on hold’ until the sun comes out! Live life to it’s fullest, and as Thoreau said so well of his year-long experiment on Walden Pond: “ I wanted to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and to see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I wanted to drive life into a corner, reduce it to its lowest terms, and if it proved to be mean, why then to get the whole and genuine meanness of it … or if it were sublime, to know it by experience …” I love that! Showers in the forecast? I say, bring it on! It will only rain on our parades if we let it.