25 August 2009

We Could Make a Fortune

...if we could build a guest house and find some folks willing to spend $300 per night for a "haycation." And I'm sure the kids would greatly appreciate getting some help milking the goats.

As the NY Times reports:

In a world where small farmers need to diversify to keep their fields afloat and city dwellers are more desperate than ever to learn where their food comes from, a “haycation” for about the price of a nice hotel room in Manhattan didn’t seem like such a far-fetched idea.

For my family, the appeal was a fancy floored tent with a flush toilet and running water. On the Web site, it looked bigger than a junior one-bedroom apartment on the Upper East Side.

I’m no stranger to this kind of thing. My mother grew up on a Wisconsin dairy farm. I was once so tough, I hiked for days across Alaskan tundra. But I have gone soft from all this city living. And my partner makes a point of telling me regularly that her people don’t camp.

On the other hand, we have a toddler who had never seen a live chicken. And I was desperate to get out of the city and eat vegetables still warm from the sun. So what if I had to do chores? How tough could a $300-a-night farm stay be?

This is essentially how we talked ourselves into spending a long weekend at Stony Creek Farm in Delaware County, N.Y., a part of the Catskills so rough that most everyone who grew up there describes it as “two stones to every dirt.”


Go read the whole thing. It's fun. It might inspire your next vacation. And for all our out-of-town friends and family who came to visit overnight and got to help out with chores for free this summer: Do you feel lucky or what?

1 comment:

Julie said...

We do feel lucky to have helped out with chores! And the conversations were priceless! Thanks for the "haycation"!