Western Voyage

Tomorrow, bright and early, we leave for our long awaited trip out West. We'll first head to Idaho for the 50th anniversary of the Rubin family lake cabin. From Friday afternoon through Thursday it'll be all-you-can-eat-s'mores (I hope) and a good dose of family togetherness. Our side of the family (meaning Steve's immediate family) are in charge of dinner Saturday night and breakfast on Sunday. For breakfast, Steve and I hope to create an incarnation of our ideal bed and breakfast buffet. This means granola and fresh fruit with yogurt and honey. Fresh hard boiled eggs and cheese. A variety of breads and spreads (including Nutella, naturally). Breakfast cereals. Juices. The list goes on, but in reality, we'll have to see what's actually available in this remote locale!

On Wednesday we will fly into the Sonoma County airport for the Napa portion of our trip. It's during these three days that we hope to learn more about buying a bed and breakfast, and to see if there is one out there for us! We have four appointments—two on Thursday and two and Friday. In between we hope to slip in a few winery visits, of course. How could we ever get through a trip to Napa without doing so?

Options

Today we finally had the opportunity to review the inns-for-sale-websites sent to us by our bed and breakfast broker (there's got to be a shorter, better name for that job). Unfortunately, these sites arrange the inns by state, so that you need to know the various areas within the state to know if the inn is in the location you want. Make sense? So, after scrutinizing the sites several times over we've developed a list of five inns to see when we visit in two weeks. FIVE. That's it. AND that includes one inn that is WAY out of our price range and two that are quite likely bad business opportunities. Sigh. The "expensive" one is a fancy shmancy boutique inn in Napa. It's lovely. It's perfect. It's what we would want to end up with (not start with). The two smaller inns include the historic inn, which we discussed in an earlier post, and a four room inn, which is simply too small to be profitable for us. All this leaves us with the two possibilities we identified initially, both in Sonoma. Though one has an unfortunate name, both are a decent size (six to seven rooms each) WITH space for expansion. We plan to see all these when we visit Napa, but it seems that our biggest challenge in opening a bed and breakfast may simply be finding one to buy.

Looking Forward to August

Yesterday our bed and breakfast broker sent us a cryptic email. This was in response to an inquiry about our schedule for when we visit Napa to look for properties in August. Her email said "I think you and Steve would be better served if we spoke by phone rather than email." Immediately we thought of the negative. Were there no properties to be had? Were banks not lending? Was she quitting the business and abandoning us mid-search? After some hand-wringing, we finally got a hold of her. It turns out that she simply wanted to find out more information about what properties we would like to see while we are there. She forwarded us links for several websites where we can search what is currently available. At first glance it seems that there are only two properties that are based in the area that we are interested in (Sonoma). We will have to do some research to determine if the locations of the others are viable. If nothing else, this narrows down our search considerably!