Bringing up Biscuit: Don't tread on me

We took our annual long-weekend family trip to the mountains this past weekend. We rented a house that I actually found last year, right after I had booked the house for last year's trip.

It looked like a really cool place with enough beds for all 10 of us.

The house was built in 1931, and you can tell because there are weird stairs and steps to get to the rooms, and there are light switches all over the place. The switch for the upstairs hallway? It's down the stairs and through three rooms, in the kitchen.

I'll try to describe the layout.

The front door is literally steps from the busy street that runs through the little touristy town. So the door to get in and out of the house is on the upstairs covered deck.

Walk in the door into the living room. Walk straight from there into the dining room. Take a right and walk down three steps into the kitchen.

Back at the door, if you turn right, you go into a bedroom with an en suite bathroom. That's where my parents stayed. In front of that room, is a staircase. Here's where the weirdness begins.

Walk halfway up the stairs and take a right. That's where Jeff, Biscuit and I slept. From our bedroom, you have to walk up four steps to get into a small room with a shower, vanity table and big mirror. Walk through a door on the other side of that room into the rest of the bathroom - big corner jacuzzi tub, toilet, bidet and sink.

If you leave the bathroom through another door, you walk straight into my brother and sister-in-law's room - no stairs to go up or down. There's another bedroom with two twin beds on that level. Then there's another set of stairs that goes up to a room with one twin bed where my nephew slept.

So I guess my parents were on the first floor, Jeff, Biscuit and I were on the 1 1/2th floor, my brother and sister-in-law and nieces were on the second floor, and my nephew was on the third floor. It seriously took the first day or so to figure out how many stairs to go before you got to each person's room!

The kids absolutely loved it. They ran and played well together the whole weekend.

My Mama has to have back surgery in a couple of weeks, so we purposely planned a low-key weekend. We didn't have much on our agenda except to hang out and relax. And that's what we did.

Relaxing wasn't the only reason we stayed at the house, though. We were held hostage by snakes. Yep, snakes!

We saw four snakes on the property, one of which we had to walk right past to get to our cars.

The first one was spotted by my sister-in-law out the kitchen window during breakfast Friday morning. He was just a black snake, and we didn't really need to use the door in the kitchen anyway.

The second one was another black snake that my brother saw as he was walking from the car to the house. Again, it was a black snake, so no big deal.

Then I walked down the two flights of exterior steps to get to a pretty grassy area near the river and saw what I believe was a copperhead. I wasn't really sure until I talked to a local lady at a store, and she said that copperheads and water moccasins, two snakes they don't usually see a ton of there, have been spotted more often since the winters have been milder. The climate has become more agreeable, so the snakes are moving farther west than they usually go. Lucky us!

And it just so happened that I saw Mr. Copperhead right near the fire pit. There went our Saturday night ritual of building a fire and roasting marshmallows.

It wasn't a total loss, my Daddy and brother got out their guitars, and we did our singing on the covered porch, safe and sound away from the creepy crawling critters. And I made s'mores for everybody in the fancy oven.

I forgot to mention that even though the house was built in 1931, everything in it has been updated. There's a a French door-style fridge and a huge six-burner, double-ovened stove in the kitchen. I sure did hate to have to cook on such a thing!

The fourth snake was the one we had the most contact with.

As you walk from the parking area to the house, you pass a stone chimney (it might have been usable at one time, but now it's just decorative), then go through a gate to get onto the covered deck. They drilled a hole into one of the chimney rocks for the gate latch. And we saw the fourth snake at the base of this chimney, sunning himself. Then as the sun moved, he crawled into the rocks to hang out for a while. He would also slide under the edge of the porch.

He wasn't aggressive at all, so we tried to leave him be as much as we could. But the problem was that to get to our cars, we had to walk right past him. And he didn't seem to be bothered by that fact one bit. He just laid there and watched us pass.

I think we were all a little creeped out by the snakes. The only one we were truly afraid of was the copperhead (and I didn't bother getting close enough to him to get a picture!), but with one on either side of the house, we sorta felt surrounded.

We still had a good time, though. The kids all got along really well. Saturday night, while the adults were hanging out on the deck, I stepped inside to check on the kids. All I could hear was giggling from my nieces' room. They were putting on sock puppet shows with silly voices for Biscuit, and he was loving it. I started to go up and talk to them, but I figured if they were all getting along that well, I wasn't going to tempt fate and meddle.

We all visited the ice cream shop a couple of times and did a little bit of shopping.

We also took the kids to the beach. There's a man-made lake near where we were staying. They basically dammed up either end of a valley to make it, and one end has been set up like a sandy beach. It's weird to see the kids playing in the water and building sand castles with the mountains in the background.