Valentine’s Day was three days ago, and I have love on the brain. Call me sappy and corny, but I think of guest reviews as love letters, not to the host, but to the cottage, and how she gave them some of their best memories ever. We relish reading the reviews, public and private alike, which share snippets of heart-pumping adventures out on the lake, or low key time gathered around the table or the fire pit, moments still fresh in their minds and conveyed with so much force of feeling.
But typeface simply doesn’t compare to hand-written sentiments at times left behind for us, whether hurriedly scrawled out on scrap paper, or penned in ornate script on a greeting card, or crudely expressed and illustrated by a child. Those hand-penned notes deeply move us, and buoy us in the inevitable valleys of small business ownership. It reminds us that we are not merely providing lodging. We are setting the stage for families and couples to reconnect.
There is no better example of a love letter to the cottage than the one drafted by Craig and Michelle, whose saga reads like a movie script. Their marriage had endured much and collapsed. Post-divorce, defying all odds, they rekindled their romance. They had just remarried, and their second honeymoon was underway, when [enter plot twist with its mounting tensions] the “love nest” they had booked months prior wound up being a hornet’s nest. They spent one traumatic night, packed up, and promptly fled the following day.
Crushed in spirit, they began to seek out a needle in a haystack, prime waterfront in peak season, at the eleventh hour. As fate would have it, the cottage was free for two nights between reservations. The rest, as they say, is history. Cottage history. And, as Michelle observed in the quick note she jotted down before leaving, that couple’s history. She wrote, “Thank you so much for being a part of salvaging our honeymoon – your place is wonderful – truly a breath of fresh air. We will definitely remember this place forever.”
What an honor that is, to be part of your stories, and we will strive always for the cottage to be worthy of them.