A completar

Before I became a host here, I was a host of a different kind. I’ve walked the Camino de Santiago four times across northern Spain and Portugal, and on one of those journeys I served as a hospitalero, one of the volunteers who welcome pilgrims at the end of a long walking day. You learn something doing that. People arrive tired. What they need is a clean bed, a warm room, hot water, and someone glad they came. That’s the standard I hold myself to every time a guest walks through the door.

The rest of my life is music and life coaching. I trained as a singer, spent years as a worship musician, missionary, and a minister, and today I work as a life coach helping people prepare for their own pilgrimages, on the Camino and off it. I’m semi-retired now, which mostly means I have time to answer your messages quickly and to actually care whether your vacation goes well.

What I want you to know: I take care of these rentals myself. If something isn’t right, tell me and I’ll fix it. If you want to know where the good coffee is, which pier to walk out on at sunrise, where to eat fresh perch, or how to find the lighthouse, just ask. I’ll give you the real answer, not the brochure version.

Come rest. Come celebrate something. Come sit by the water and do nothing at all. However you use your time here, I hope you leave feeling welcomed, not just checked in.

Buen camino, and see you in Port Washington.

Dave

I’ve had a love affair with Port Washington since I first rode my bike into it on the Interurban Bike Trail. It’s a working harbor town that never got around to becoming a tourist trap, and that’s exactly why I fell in love.

A marina full of masts and charter boats, a unique white lighthouse on pillars out at the end of the north pier, and a bluff rising above the church steeple that rewards you with a view of the whole town and lake. Franklin Street runs a few blocks up from the water with brick storefronts, coffee, a butcher shop, antiques, resale shops, and places to eat where people actually enjoy talking to you. You can easily walk into town, and most guests never move the car until they leave.

What I enjoy most is the water in the morning. I like walking out on the breakwater early and watching the charter boats go out, when the lake is doing whatever it’s decided to do that day. Some mornings it’s glass. Some mornings it’s throwing spray over the lighthouse and you stand back and let it. Coal Dock and Rotary Parks jut out into the harbor and offer the best free seats in Wisconsin for a sunrise. If you want to earn your view, climb the stairs up the bluff to the 1860 Light Station and look back down at the harbor.

Beyond that: the Interurban Trail runs right through town, Harrington Beach State Park is a short drive north for sand and quiet, and Lion’s Den Gorge sits just south with bluff trails down to the shore. In July the whole town turns out for Port Fish Day, which locals will tell you is the world’s largest outdoor fish fry, and they will not accept argument.

Mostly, though, Port is calm. Half an hour from Milwaukee, a couple hours from Chicago, and an hour and a half to the Packers’ famous Lambeau Field, yet far enough removed that your shoulders drop somewhere on the drive in. That’s what I want for you here. Water, good food, a walkable street, and nothing you have to do but breathe.

Come see it in the morning. That’s when it’s best.

I’ve traveled in forty countries. That is where this place came from.

When you stay in enough rooms and short-term rentals in enough countries, you learn that the difference between a nice stay and a great one is almost never the view. It’s whether you have to leave and go buy something the minute you walk in the door. Salt. Dish soap. Laundry detergent you’ll use once and abandon. I got tired of that, so I built the opposite.

Guests tell us the same thing over and over: they open a cabinet, then another one, and they’re surprised. It’s all already here.

The kitchen is genuinely stocked. Not a token salt shaker, but real spices you can actually cook with. Pots and pans in the sizes you’d reach for. Cooking utensils. Plenty of silverware, so nobody at the table is eating with a teaspoon. Paper towels.

Laundry is in the unit. Washer, dryer, and the detergent to go with it. Pack lighter. Go home with clean clothes.

That’s the whole idea. You should be able to arrive with a bag and a plan and nothing else, and have everything you need waiting for you. Cook a real dinner your first night by making one grocery stop on your way into town. Stay a week without ever making a supply run.

I think of it as a quiet kind of luxury. Not marble and gold, but the feeling of reaching for something and finding it already there. That is a harder thing to deliver than it sounds, and it’s the part I take the most pride in.

I stock these places myself, and I keep a list going. If you use the last of something, tell me. If there’s something you expected and didn’t find, tell me that too. If I can physically get it to you, I will. Either way it goes on the list and it’s here for the next guest.

Come and see if I got it right.