I've talked before about KC and Kirk (right), our fabulous innsitters, who come and run the B&B for us when we go on vacation, but I can't say enough good things about them. They really know how to come in and "become" us. The key to good innsitting is being willing and able to run the business the way the owner/innkeepers run it. Ideally, guests should notice no difference between being hosted by us and being hosted by innsitters.
We've had great feedback from repeat guests who have stayed with KC and Kirk (well, except for the guests who tell us we should go away more often...). It's such a luxury to be able to take a couple weeks and forget completely about business. Really, it's more than a luxury -- it's a necessity for innkeepers to be able to relax, refresh, and renew. Nationwide, the average length of time people own a B&B is four years. That takes into account the folks who do it for 25 years and the folks who look at each other six weeks into the reality of working every single day and say, "What have we done?"
The fact is that most innkeepers do work every day. We don't work every hour of every day -- each of us structures our business and our life in the way that works with the demands of the business and with our own personalities. But every day that we are at home in our inns is a work day. So it's important to get away -- far away -- so we can really take a breather. Some innkeepers never do it. Other innkeepers have family members, friends, or staff run the inn for them. Others close down. But however we deal with it individually, we have to somehow stack up all those weekends we don't take during the year and get away.
The trade-off for all this work is that we are our own bosses, that we can sometimes take a few hours off in the afternoon and, for instance, go to a movie where we're the only ones in the theater. Or in the winter we can serve breakfast, then jump in the car and go skiing for a few hours and be back in time for check in. Or we can go out for a great meal at 2 in the afternoon. And in the last 2 1/2 years, since we discovered KC and Kirk, we've taken 6 to 7 weeks of vacation a year -- not bad.
This time we're going to Michigan for two weeks (with one night in Chicago tacked on to both ends) to see family and friends and some of the places I grew up. We'll actually get to be B&B guests in Holland and Alma. (We never confess to being innkeepers when we travel -- it causes too much shop talk -- we just want to be guests.) We're looking forward to seeing lakes (one of the few things I miss about the midwest, being here in Colorado). Mosquitoes and humidity -- not so much. But that's just all part of it.
Becky, our assistant innkeeper, will be keeping up the blog and the Twitter and Facebook postings while we're gone. We'll have the laptop with us, so we might check in now and then, and I'll probably do some posts about our trip on my travel blog.
KC's website is http://www.kcsinnsiting.com/, if you're interested in checking it out. Ours is http://www.doveinn.com/. And thank you for reading my Innkeeper's Blog.
Annette
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