Fun is where you make it

Every year my sister and I take a sister trip. It's a tradition we started several years ago after my first husband died. At first it was a way of coping with grief but we soon realized it was a brilliant idea on it's own merit and it has become a sacred tradition ever since. Each of our sister trips has been completely different and this year we decided to rent a cabin in the mountains of North Carolina and spend a week knitting, cooking, laughing and attending SAFF.

So I flew across the country, we loaded up her car with way too much yarn and a dog and drove up into the mountains to our dream cabin in the woods. The fall colors were beautiful and plenty of people were out for a bit of leaf peeping in the mountains.

At first we tried to drive down a nearly impassible dirt track that GPS was really insistent about. Then we went around and around some more winding mountains to a different access and finally found the cute rustic cabin we booked on AirBnB. The porch was cute with rocking chairs, and the yard was nice, except for the shack in the back. And the sign indicating campsites beyond that. We unlocked the door and went in to find that the inside of the cabin was a little smelly, like that moldy smell when things aren't kept up. But we thought opening a few windows might help. Except we didn't want to touch the windows because it turns out everything in this cabin was grimy. My sister went to give the dog some water in a bowl and discovered even the dishes in the cupboard were grimy. As we were looking at each other with that "I don't know if I want to stay here" look, a knock at the door announced visitors from the shack at the back. One of them was twitchy and pocked, clearly struggling with an illicit substance or two, and they came to tell us they were using the washing machine in our cabin, and did we mind if they got their clothes and our towels out of the machine. At this point my sister and I had a telepathic conversation that went something like this:

"This situation is freakin' dodgy, let's get out of dodge"

"How fast can we get back in the car?"

So we politely mumbled something about dinner to our twitchy neighbors, put the dog back in the car and hightailed it to Asheville where we rented a nice dog-friendly room at Best Western. We unloaded our copious amounts of yarn and settled in for a good knit and chat. Because, after all, that's what the sister trips are all about, chatting and catching up and being sisters together.

My defense instructor would have been proud. He is always talking about how important situational awareness is, how the best defense is not to be in a bad situation in the first place. People often end up in a bad situation because they don't listen to their spidey sense, worry about not being polite and stick around when they shouldn't. I am all about polite, but safety ALWAYS trumps that.

So, here we are, with way too many groceries, just enough yarn and one cute dog in a Best Western. Airbnb refunded all of our money except the first night, and we have no idea yet what adventures we'll get up to today. But we are sisters, and we are going to have fun no matter what we do!