A selection of B&B’s in Salt Lake…
Wildflowers
Anton Boxrud House
Saltair House
Ellerbeck Mansion
Based on this review at Splendid Table…
…it looks like Wildflowers for our impending trip.
I’m actually getting excited about this trip. And the Wildflower is just a few blocks from Mom’s house, which will make her pretty happy. Not as happy as if we were staying in my old childhood bedroom, but pretty happy.
Don’t get me wrong, I like my old room… but it’s a full size bed, and the door doesn’t latch. It’s all good; we’ll be comfy at the Wildflower, but will spend a lot more time hanging around at Mom’s.
She tells me that my old playhouse (Pop built it a year or two before he died) finally had to be taken down. Sad – he spent a whole summer building it for me and made many trips out to the lumber yard for “another bucket of nails… and maybe some surplus lumber.” Originally, he was going to build it out of castoff rose crates, which were free for the taking.
It ended up being a balloon-frame structure with siding, 3 hinged windows, screened soffits, a pitched roof, and a porch. It even had a Dutch door that he made out of the old cabinets that were thrown out after the kitchen was remodeled.
There are pictures somewhere of the playhouse “housewarming” barbecue(1967?), where the adults sat in lawn chairs, drinking beers and laughing their asses off at us. All my nieces and assorted guests and I were handed paintbrushes, and told “paint the playhouse!” Wacky hijinks! Get outta da way!
We swarmed over it in a mob. The taller kids worked the upper parts of the outer walls, the little kids wandered around underfoot, dabbed at the walls with their brushes at random, and got paint slopped on the tops of their heads (we were all wearing bandannas and Pop’s old workshirts, which were so huge they hung to the ground on the littler ones). We looked like a hobo production of the fence-painting scene in “The Adventures of Tom Sawyer.” I vaguely remember a fashion show or something where we had to get up on the picnic table and show off our painting attire.
That was a fun time. Ranny mostly recovered from sticking her paintbrush in her mouth (also the paint washed out of her hair eventually, after I got mad at her and thwapped her upside the head with my brush). Her kids seem not to have suffered any ill effects from their mother’s paint jones, anyway.
My playhouse was cooooool. I spent a lot of time out there reading comic books. I’m sorry that it’s gone, but the foundation was rotting away (the only use Pop ever made of the “free” rose crates”).
This will be the first of a couple of visits to Salt Lake this year – later on we’re planning a long roadtrip. The plan is to haul back some stuff that Mom says she can part with – equal parts “treasure” and “junk,” maybe.
