Vacation's destination

Our son arrives later today, following his twelfth consecutive summer at the Killington Music Festival. Visiting him in Killington was the reason we went to Vermont two weeks ago, and the reason we have gone eight or so times in the years of his summer residency there.
    The summer that his wife and son came to Vermont with him (2002), we had lunch with her and our grandson at Bentley's Restaurant in Woodstock, a beautiful town of about three thousand east of Killington on U.S. Route 4. That might have been the first time we really visited Woodstock.

Front yard of the Woodstock Inn

This year, as you may know from my posts earlier this week about our sojourn among the baleines, the bohemians, and the botanics, we also went to Quebec.
    I had a comfortable feeling, when we arrived back in Woodstock on Sunday the 22nd, that we had come back home, and I would be sad to leave on Thursday. I would miss Woodstock.
    We went to Bentley's on Monday, even though we'd discovered the previous evening that its menu was severely limited because of a recent fire. From where we sat for lunch, I pointed toward a table below, where the mirrors came together in the corner. "That's where we had lunch in 2002."

Le Manoir Richelieu, terrace of
Restaurant Bellerive

During our few days in Woodstock I realized that, now, not only was I going to miss Woodstock, but I was also going to miss La Malbaie, just as we were both of us already missing home.
    In fact, after we collected Siegfried at the kennel the following Thursday afternoon and entered our house with him, my wife exclaimed, "It is so good to be home!"

Going on vacation seems to be a way of acquiring more places that, if you're lucky, will feel like home to you. And maybe no one would ever go on vacation if they thought they wouldn't be able to return to home soon.