Casa De Los Olivos

This beautiful and enchanting place is where we stayed in San Miguel De Allende. Its called Casa De Los Olivos and comes highly recommended! I mean, just look at how beautiful it is!

We pulled up in the dark of night to the non-descript entrance on the cobblestone street; I worried half the night about being able to find it again once we went out exploring in the daytime. It opens, like so many of the places there do, onto an open-air courtyard. The rooms - all four of them - feed into the courtyard where we ate breakfast ever morning.

It's like no place we've ever stayed before. It is lovely and old, and nothing like I had imagined our stay to be.

The wooden shutters on the windows seemed to be origional, or close to it - they smelled like two hundred year old wood. In the shower there was a cutout for the window which puts the walls around a foot and a half thick.

Bernardo, our "host," explained that the walls are purposely thick so that they retain the coolness of the night during the heat of the day, and the warmth of the day into the chill of the evening. The influence of the environment was all around us; even the architecture reflected the realities of the climate and worked effortlessly to make the best of them.

I love places like that; I love people like that too. People who recognize the reality that life has limitations and just adapt to them, working to make the best of them.

Author Jennifer Louden says in The Comfort Queen's Guide to Life that it is our limitations that define us. I love the majority of my limitations because if I really had to embrace every possibility in the whole wide world I'd never move from overwhelm!

Some days its enough to walk down a cobblestone street, turn around at the public square and walk right back to the hotel, knowing that being able to find it again (and quell those fears from the night before) is the exact perfect thing. There is always another journey in a few minutes, to broaden the horizons and find that neat little cafe you saw in the guidebook just in time for lunch!

What in your environment influences who you are? What limitations define who you are in a good way?

Our room door - on the night of the eclipse we left the door wide open and ran out every 20 minutes to stand in the street and see how the shadow was progressing! Our hosts came out too and we'd stop people on the street and point out the wonder of this half shadowed moon in a brilliantly clear night sky.

This is the four poster bed in the master bedroom - a soft and squishy place that the kids had a ball on, running from their room and launching themselves onto it. Up above are natural wood beams, partially hidden behind linen draperies. Absolutely beautiful!

The kids each had a day bed to themselves. The nightly ritual involved setting them up in just the right way, with the proper placement of pillows, individually chosen for personal preference, of course! Years from now I bet that's what they'll remember of Mexico - those really cool beds. *sigh* Hot springs , old haciendas and all kids really need is a daybed and pillows for a memorable trip - the irony of modern day parenthood.