Thank you, Sally, for your the kind words in your e-mail about Jeanie and me as guests in your wonderful Orchard House. We return them to you and Sean manyfold. We totally agree with you that trust and open communication between owners and renters are essential to arrangements such as the ones that VRBO facilitates. And having lived in Orchard House for a whole month, we feel “well met” by you and Sean, even though we haven’t actually met you.
I don’t know that Jeanie and I have anything to add to the reviews of Orchard House on the VRBO website, which are all strongly positive, or to the House Book that you have put together, which is a great resource for your guests. Like your other guests we found our own favorite places on the Blue Hill peninsula, as did all of our own family visitors.
For Jeanie and me, the Good Life Center, a/k/a Forest Farm, was of special interest. I’m old enough to have known the Scott and Helen Nearing story from the 1960s on. We got to meet and have conversation with the interns in residence there and even a couple of members of the board that oversees the Forest Farm operation. The Wooden Boat and Haystack Schools were of special interest too, and we made more than one visit to both of them.
As for restaurants, we liked your favorites, the Bagduce Cafe for lunch and the Whale’s Rib for dinner, but the Cockatoo Portuguese Restaurant at Goose Cove turned out to be a favorite too, with the walk through the woods and across the sandbar to Barred Island as a kind of bonus to our meal.
Everywhere we travel Jeanie has an unerring instinct for finding the most amazing hiking trails, and the Blue Hill peninsula, as you know, because of the Island Trust, proved to have a seemingly endless supply of such trails, a new discovery every day we went out.
You may recall my having told you that Jeanie paid her way through college, back in the 1970s, by working six summers at a restaurant in Bar Harbor. So nostalgia called us to Mount Desert Island while we were staying in Orchard House. We took all of our family visitors to Mount Desert too… for hikes and climbs in Acadia and, of course, tea and popovers at the Jordan Pond House.
Our month in Orchard House, escaping at least some of the (almost) unbearable heat of the Florida summer, was, in a favorite phrase of Jeanie’s and mine, “all good.” Here’s wishing you and Sean and your children the same, only and “all good” things.