Second-guessing home

Another sign on Pleasant Street in Woodstock, Vermont made me stop and think. Didn't we start coming to Woodstock in Anno 2000?
    I couldn't remember at the time whether our son's first summer at the Killington Music Festival had been 2000 or 2001 (later I confirmed that it was 2001), but when I first noticed the sign, I felt a sort of personal historic attachment to it, as though it and we (my wife and I) had shared the years together. I felt especially connected to Woodstock. I felt that Woodstock had become a sort of summer home for us.
    At any rate, I did feel a little as though I were relatively home after returning from places we'd never been before: Baie-Saint-Paul (where we'd stopped for dinner on our way to La Malbaie, before it got too late to eat before going to sleep), Saguenay Fjord, Tadoussac,

Image from Francis H. Cabot's DVD presentation
on the maturation of his gardens at Quatre Vents
(pigeonnier is shown in the foreground, and across
the bay is the neighborhood and former municipality
of Pointe-au-Pic, where Cabot's great grandfather
George T. Bonner summered in the early 1900s)

La Malbaie, Les Quatre Vents. They had been unfamiliar places and we had driven many miles and spent quantities of money per day to visit. My head was buzzing from the 400-mile drive back (which included over an hours wait in the heat of sun and running automobiles and trucks at customs to re-enter the United States), and I felt the vacation fatigue that anyone would from staying in a hotel, waiting to be served in restaurants, eating more than usual, and struggling to comprehend a mostly foreign language.
    Yes, it was great to be back in Woodstock. I actually felt a tingle of excitement as we drove into town and approached The Woodstock Inn. The one night we'd already spent in Vermont before driving to Quebec hadn't included Woodstock. We'd stayed at an inn in Killington to which we had been planning to return after Quebec, but our bed had been too uncomfortable for my wife to sleep in, and I'm not sure how well I slept myself.

But however homelike Woodstock was feeling relative to Quebec, here we were for four more nights away from Siegfried. It felt to me as though we had already been away from our actual home long enough.