I have lots of favorite things.  I love chocolate and wine and coffee.  Are you sensing a theme here?  Okay, so I love other things besides food.  Really.

Let me tell you about my favorite place on earth… my Grandpa’s camp in Maine.  Now, for the record, it’s NOT camping.  It’s just that everyone in Maine who has a summer house on a lake calls it camp.  I don’t know why; they just do.  Like everyone who vacations at the beach in New Jersey says they’re going Down the Shore.  But that’s a different topic.

The camp in Maine is a little slice of heaven here on earth.  It’s not extravagant, but it’s comfortable and spacious.  When my grandpa bought it over 10 years ago it was small and dark inside, but he opened it up and made it bright and light and airy with an open floor plan and three walls of floor-to-ceiling windows that overlook the lake.

I’m not a morning person, but I love nothing more than to get up at dawn (which isn’t hard to do since one of my three children invariably wakes me up at about this time) when we are at camp and sit in a big easy chair in front of the windows with a mug of good coffee and watch the sun rise over the lake.  See, had to sneak that coffee in there.

Then there is the sunset.  We sometimes sit on the dock, where the Hub and D can usually be found at this time of day with their fishing poles, watching the blaze of orange and red and yellow sky slowly fade and disappear into the horizon of evergreen trees as the sun goes down for the night.  Then we return inside for a rousing game of Spades.

We spend most of our days being pretty lazy.  I usually bring a truckload of scrapbooking paraphernalia and about 10 library books with me.  Some days I don’t even leave the house — with the view from the windows, it isn’t even necessary to venture outside.  In fact there is usually a lovely breeze blowing through the open windows, which is about all the out-of-doors I need to feel at one with nature.

Other days we’ll take a ride in the motor boat, and Hub will water ski or ride on the tube with D.  And then some days we leave the camp altogether and go sightseeing on the coast.  There is so much to do, we never get to everything we want to do!

And best of all, there’s the lobstah!  And you MUST pronounce it as the locals do – lobstah.   Now y’all knew it would come back around to food, now didn’t you!?   We make it a point to have lobstah at least twice during our Maine vacation.  There’s nothing quite like eating a sea creature with his eyes staring rightatcha and melted butter dripping down your chin.  But somehow I manage, even though I’m pretty squeamish about that sort of thing.

That’s a little bit about my favorite place to be.