Vacation, Cake Stands and Letting Go

My husband, two sons and both my in-laws all loaded up in the old Suburban on the last day of school and got the heck out of Dodge...or rather, south-eastern Pennsylvania...and headed for sights southward.

We went to Monticello and marveled at one of the founding father's homesteads, and we drove along Skyline Drive and oohed and ahhed at the Blue Ridge Mountains. We went far underground and walked through Luray Caverns, listening to an organ that actually uses stalagmites to make music.



We ate wonderful food on patios built on the cobblestone streets that saw soldiers from both the Revolutionary and Civil Wars march down them.

And we even slept one night in a Yurt...yes, a Yurt - a round, semi-permanent structure made with wood and canvas -- in the Shenandoah Valley

So, with all this activity you'd think I would put aside any thoughts of finding things for my etsy.com shop...you must know me better than that by now.

We were traveling down a back road on Saturday morning - leaving the Yurt and heading towards Skyline Drive -- when, at forty-miles-per-hour, I spotted a glass cake stand with dome sitting on a folding table at a yard sale on the side of the road. I yelled for my husband to stop and we all were flung forward in our seats as my husband slammed on the brakes and then made a u-turn.

I love him.So among our baggage rattling around in the back of the Suburban was this cake stand and dome that somehow made it back home without being damaged...there was also the additional baggage of my back-and-forth internal dialog of what to do about opening a shop.

Any quiet time on the trip, and since we got back (and already took a another trip back to New Jersey - but that's another story), my mind was preoccupied with deciding whether or not to take the plunge into store ownership. The other blond has been wrestling with the same thoughts.

I would love to write here the answer that would make for a good story, that even though we have a million bureaucratic hoops to jump through, fees to pay, a store to renovate and supply with merchandise, that we were going to forge ahead anyway...but this is not a story, this is our lives.

Both blonds came to the same conclusion...although we can both picture this cute little shop filled with wonderful things, the complications, overhead, hours and expense of opening and running it is not something we have to deal with in our virtual shops. And we decided to keep it that way.

So with heavy hearts we closed the door on the dream of a brick and mortar store, but feel a renewed thankfulness for the opportunities our etsy.com shops have given us.

I have traveled a lot of miles this last week, and not all of them were in the Suburban.