Megan's welcome was edgy and peculiar – an elaborate hostess-ship, alienating in its generosity, almost lordly, like an aristocrat acting the suburban housewife in a game of charades, or a person on the edge of a nervous breakdown (grilled cheese? A bath? Anything you want! Spaghetti? Meat? ANYTHING).
I am now looking forward to many little things about home: a long soak in a scented bubble-bath, cheese, my CDs, decent coffee on tap (how can South America serve such awful coffee?), sitting in my little garden reading the Sunday papers, having a choice of clothes to put on in the morning, real Cadbury's chocolate.
Dozens of peacocks, turkeys and hens roam the property (which also houses a feed store), providing an Old McDonald-like backdrop for crowd-pleasers like eggs San Marcos, a cheese omelet in a bath of guacamole, beans and salsa ($12).
I wiped noses and made grilled cheese sandwiches and gave baths and put on Band-Aids and kissed boo-boos and read more bedtime stories than I can count.
Wine.com in Napa, Calif., packs $20 to $60 holiday baskets of wine with cheese, fruit and stress-relief bath salts.
And Peaches puts her dressing gown back on, and the penismen get back in the bath, and the cheese gets back to quietly judging everyone, and they all wait for the doorbell to ring again.
All guests partake in mulled wine, an evening meal of cheese fondue, a hot whirlpool bath in the snow and sometimes a nighttime snowshoe trip.
The moniker, Foxglove, has lingered on, even as her business evolved from paintings, to bath and beauty items, to cheese.
Surprise: an appetizer of apple slices, freckled with black sesame seeds, comes in a shallow bath of sheep's milk cheese thinned with sheep's milk ($8).
(Shout out to Carlena and Asha!) On our last night, they snuck into our room and surprised us with flowers everywhere and a fancy bath with a wine and cheese plate.
