Retreating

This past week was my Firm's annual retreat. Each year, usually in late January or early February, we leave town for a couple days and do our planning for the year.  We review and revise our agreements, our policies, our budget; simply plan for the year to come.  Spouses come along as well, we stay typically at a bed and breakfast, and enjoy lots of good food and drink over the couple days.  For several years, we have gone to the Union Pier/New Buffalo area in the very southwestern corner of Michigan, and for the past couple, we have stayed at a bed and breakfast called Goldberry Woods.

All the bed frames are made from real trees.
Ours was from a Silver Maple.

Room has this nice stone fireplace, along with a jacuzzi.

There's also a skylight!

Our stay there this year, just as last year, was terrific.  Great unique rooms to stay in, good breakfasts (potato pancakes with peaches one day, a chorizo egg salsa mix the next), good meeting area, and a comfortable great room to all hang out in.  The highlight of the retreat is always our dinners, and this year we went to the same places as last year, Skip's and Timothy's; each with great food.

We have gone to Timothy's for several years now, and it always seems to be a better experience than the year before.  This year, we were there on a night where they had a live singer, which just made the evening all the more entertaining.  He sang some country, oldies, rock.  The music, which by no means was overbearing (even with us seated right next to the guy (Jesse Lee)), created an even better ambience for the evening.

The ribs at Timothy's. Awesome.

The trip is very quick, Wednesday evening to Friday afternoon, and there is a lot of work and planning crammed into the day of Thursday and Friday morning; work that is often stressful and involves a lot of critical thinking and discussion.  But ultimately, I look forward to the trip every year, because despite the work, it always ends up being refreshing.

It's appropriately called a retreat, in my thinking.  We retreat from our community and our work lives and our everyday routines to a place, though only a short distance away, feels like a million miles away from everything, particularly in the middle of winter.  That retreating, and the seclusion of the bed and breakfast, the fine dinner and wine, all works together to strip you of those everyday concerns and allows you to relax.

Now, back to the grind.