family business Archives - Opossum Creek Retreat

Want $100 Off Your Next Stay?

UPDATE, JULY 17, 2013: This promotion is now closed; we had a great response to our question. Thanks to everyone who provided feedback to us. We’ll be in touch!

Our first Boy Scout reservation!

YES! Direct economic impact. One of the groups helping run the 2013 Jamboree booked 2 cabins for their VIP’s. This is our first reservation related to the Boy Scouts Summit Betchel Reserve.

The event is just 4 weeks away.

This raises lots of questions in my mind. Not long ago, we would have people call and book (pay a downpayment) months, if not a year ahead of time. That time frame has been shrinking and shrinking to the point we have had large, multi-family groups call the same day and book for a week.

Yikes!

Bribe time.

I am hoping you can help us understand this phenomenon. If you are so inspired to answer any or all of these questions we have, or pose some of your own, we will happily give you $100 off your next stay at OCR.*

No fine print. $100 off.*

So this is the strange part: why did they wait until now, the very last minute, to make a reservation?

Okay, it’s not completely last minute; we have 4 weeks to go. But they had to take cabins that we had, not the ones they wanted. And, well, we just do not, not, not like not being able to give people what they want!

Has our society as a whole become last-minute planners? Are you?

Or might it be that you have done your research, and just do not pull the trigger on a reservation until the last minute because, well, who knows what might come up?

What would compel you to pull the trigger and confirm a reservation well in advance?

If a national organization that has been hands-on involved with the Jamboree for years waits to the last second, why shouldn’t you?

UPDATE, JULY 17, 2013: This promotion is now closed; we had an great response to our question.Thanks to everyone who provided feedback to us. We’ll be in touch!

Consumed, Devoured, Hit by a Train, Chewed Up, Spit Out, and Left for Dead

And that was from the family reunion, not the “Derecho” storm!

About the derecho – we suffered no damage from the storm at the Cabins or our home. Our neighbors and friends were not so lucky. We were without power for 8 days, but everything is back to “normal”.

The family reunion was a huge success! Really, it was “Ossum”.

I had every intention of giving regular updates during the week of my Familial-ish reunion; what we were up to, how it was going , who liked what best and why.

But then reality set in: TOO MUCH FUN! We were too busy ‘reunioning’ for me to talk about it. So a month later, here goes.

All week people were movin’ and groovin’, making themselves happy doing any number of activities (we will talk about ALL the great activities in a future post). Hanging out with each other, getting away from each other, and even fixing stuff. Fixing is always more fun when you have help!

photo (49) — Here's Luke helping me fix a toilet

The single best part of the week (although I was not excited about it at first) was the daily group meal idea. It turned out great. We kept it simple. No one got over stressed (that I saw) about putting on the dog for 40 + people. And because we did not try to outdo each other with fancy dishes, serving standard fare, that made it all the better.

The first night we ordered pizza from Pies & Pints. WARNING: This is important!There are two phone numbers for two locations on the website; one is in Fayetteville (304-574-2200) only 10 minutes from the cabins. The other is in downtown Charleston, WV, over an hour away. Do not call the Charleston location and order 20 pizzas! Like we did.

Now, this could have been really bad. But fortunately, we are a lucky bunch. When the group standing at the bar in Fayetteville got blank stares when asking for 20 pizzas plus all the other good stuff, some brilliant detective work quickly revealed the order had been called into Charleston.

This is the lucky part: The Brits arrived at Yeager Airport in Charleston a few minutes before the pizza was coming out of the oven at the Charleston Pies & Pints, so we just swung by and loaded up. This makes me laugh and started the week off with a great “TOP THIS MESS UP” story.

For the rest of the week, family groups took turns satiating the masses from The Meadows Kitchen. Nothing fancy: frozen lasagna, chili, hamburgers and hot dogs, mexican grub, and leftovers made up the menu for the week.

Maybe the simplicity helped take some of the stress out of cooking for 40 people down a notch or two. The emphasis was on sharing a meal and some conversation with loved ones, and this was going on in abundance all week. It was magical.

It is a monumental task to organize a family reunion. Let us help you make yours as wonderful as ours was.

See you at the Cabins!

How Not To Have The Family Reunion From Hell: Part 2

Panic has set in.

The last-minute barrage of questions is in full frenzy.

This is not unusual behavior; it’s just that this time, the zeal my family is demonstrating at this point in the planning has caught me off guard. I don’t know why, because they do everything like this: OVERBOARD.

What you need to understand is that each event (no matter if it is a couple getting away for the weekend or a wedding for 100), has phases.

We're more like friends once you've stayed with us!

1. Inspiration

2. Research

3. Planning

4. Scheduling

5. Planning

6. Reservations

7. Planning

8. Packing

9. Forgetting all the planning

Then calling someone who might remember what was planned.

And then finally calling anyone you may have had contact with because, “OMG I cant find the map”!

This is an excerpt from an actual conversation about our reunion:

“I found the MAP”

“Good.”

“How do we get to where this map is? What State is this in?”

“West Virginia.”

“WEST VIRGINIA? HONEY YOU NEVER SAID WE WERE GOING TO WEST VIRGINIA! Does this place have running water?”

This illustrates that no matter how hard you try, some communication just doesn’t get out to the whole group.

Communication in all its forms is the cornerstone to a good event. Our family has had hundreds of communiques over the past months and addressed each issue more than once.

However in the excitement of the waning hours before departure the brain does weird stuff! People start blurting out questions before they even ask themselves if they might already know the answer. Grown adults become completely helpless and need someone to hold their hand while they decide what to pack.

Here at Opossum Creek, we answer these questions and go through all the phases for total strangers everyday. And then they are not strangers anymore. But if it’s your family you’re dealing with, then they just become ‘stranger’.

The strange people who are my family start arriving on Saturday. I half expect to wake up and they will be sleeping in their car in my yard a day early. It has happened before.

I will keep you posted as to how the chaos progresses and when Murphy shows up.

How Not to Have “The Family Reunion from HELL!”

I am planning for my family to arrive in June. This is a true story and is happening as we speak. Okay, we are not technically speaking, but you know what I mean. Or did you?

That is the really challenge at the heart of a family reunion: communication. Even though everyone in my family speaks English as a first and only language, getting them all on the same page is like herding cats with a pressure washer. If you are lucky it is very exciting and rewarding for a brief moment, but the overall effort is usually futile.

Here are a few things we are learning (this time around):

Practice makes perfect. We do not plan a family reunion on a regular basis and it shows. Those families that we see here at OCR who make an annual or biannual tradition out of it have the advantage. Expectations have been managed through repetition.

I hate to say this, but someone has to be the point person. This seems to work best if there can be several point people, actually. Food, Lodging, Group activities; all of this must be arranged. Ultimately, someone has to be large and in charge. Personally, I love chaos and mayhem, especially when they show up together! So for me not knowing who is cooking dinner and what it will be are not big questions. But others’ happiness depends on knowing every detail long before it happens, like what type napkins will be in the dinner roll baskets at each meal. So you’ve got to plan.

Knowing the differences that make people tick is helpful because it allows everyone to get the details they need. A Google doc spreadsheet is a great place for all this to evolve. Remember, not everyone will feel safe entering info in this format and you’ll need another method for them to get ideas out to the group.

Also, we are using a Facebook group page and it has been great. It makes for wonderful conversations taking place before the event even kicks off. Still, some folks will not bring certain things up until they confer with others in the group. This helps put things in place that may have otherwise been overlooked, such as who is driving Grama? Because last time she farted and ruined my new car seat…..

We all need to spend more time with those crazy people we are linked to by family ties. Reunions are the perfect way to do just that. But remember, planning is key

I will report back as we get closer to our own event and during said festivities. Until then remember: women are a bowl of spaghetti and men are waffles.

4 Reasons You Shouldn’t Choose Us for Your Corporate Meeting (And 5 Why You Should!)

Corporate meetings. Everyone has them from time to time. Not many actually enjoy them. Lots of time sitting in a chair, plenty of artificial light and often terrible catered-in food. Face it, the thought of another corporate meeting is painful.

Know what’s even more painful? Planning them. The logistics, the meeting space, the food, activities. Just another side of corporate meetings that most folks don’t like.

Are you in charge of planning your next corporate meeting? If so, we like to think we can help (and psstttt….make you look like a star!). Before we tell you about why you should consider us for your next meeting, I’d like to save us both some time and tell you why you shouldn’t choose us. Simply put, we aren’t for everyone.

Why You Shouldn’t Choose Us for Your Corporate Meeting

No valet parking
No cabs
We don’t have much of a club-scene or “night life”
Our Meeting Room isn’t art deco, euro or feng shui

Why Opossum Creek is Perfect for Your Next Corporate Meeting

NO Suite NO Shoes No Problem!
Personalized Service

We provide personalized service with attention to detail (Yes, we can do that for you!)

The Only “Traffic” is at the Deer Crossing

You can park your car at the door of your cabin rental and you won’t need it again until you decide to go home. A stroll through the woods to your meeting? Yes.

A Better Kind of Night Life

We have very little light pollution which makes for great star-gazing around the campfire (Ever finished a day of meetings with a S’more?)
Insert pic / link to facebook post.

Natural Surroundings

We do have a beautiful Timber Frame Great room with big windows that actually open! Sunlight and fresh air…at a meeting?

Recently, we had the pleasure of hosting a corporate meeting with a group of folks that wanted to truly “step outside of the box”.

“This is not the hotel setting we are used to working in and just the setting will require us to think differently.”

We think they did just that. Take a look at their itinerary and decide for yourself.

Day 1
Arrive as flights permit. Dinner is on your own. Simply choose from any of the great local restaurants in Fayetteville. We will provide list and directions.

Day 2

7 to 8 AM fresh homemade Breakfast
8 to Noon meeting
Noon to 1 break-outs over fresh homemade lunch
1 to 5 Zip line Canopy Tour
5-7 happy hour with fresh homemade snacks
Dinner. You get the idea every meal is fresh-made with seasonal local ingredients
Campfire

Day 3
Same plan different adventure:

7 to 8 AM fresh homemade Breakfast
8 to Noon meeting
Noon to 1 break outs over fresh homemade Lunch
1 to 5 River trip in The New River Gorge National Park. Everyone can do this section of the river.
5-7 happy hour with Fresh homemade snacks
Dinner, fresh-made with seasonal local ingredients
Campfire

Day 4
Departure day

7 to 8 AM fresh homemade Breakfast
8 to Noon meeting
Noon to 1 break-out sessions, fresh homemade Lunch
Depart or not. Insert a team building program add another adventure and a night out on the town. Or have your family join you for a mini vacation after your successful Corporate off site meeting.

Where was you last meeting? Was it memorable?

The Most Important Thing About Birding (Hint: It’s Not Birds)

The most important thing about a birding trip is not the birds. Really.

Here’s why: All kinds of things can influence the birds you see and hear. So let’s focus on stuff that really matters on a field trip: the people.

It’s like soup; too much of one ingredient is boring. I love time alone in the outdoors, to be sure, but being with a group of fellow bird nerds/naturalists when everyone gets a good look at a fun bird? And it’s a lifer for someone in the bunch? And everyone is smiling and giddy? You can’t help but be excited too.

The fun of birding in a group comes mostly from these moments. They’re contagious. People are dancing smiling laughing when they see something that’s -how can I put it- exotic for them. It’s fun to share these moments. Who you’re with is way more important than what you might see.

I’ve been on dozens of field trips under every type of circumstances, from research and banding to formal surveys and counts to paid private guided field trips. And with the most bizarre groups you can imagine. By far the best groups have beginners in them; If you go out with a bunch of really good birders it can get boring real fast. I think it’s because they all know every peep and who made it and why. There’s no give and take about what is going on around you.

Also sometimes I think they are afraid to say anything because they might (heaven forbid) make a mistake. I promise you if you are on a trip with me I will miss ID a bird at some point during the day, every day. And it’s usually something really obvious and easy like last year when I called a chirping Cardinal a Chat (this is a major bird nerd no-no). Everyone looked at me like I had lost my mind, and by that point in the week, I had.

But I’m not a hired gun. No degree. No life list (that’s another story). So maybe it’s okay for me to make mistakes. Personally I like to see the pros make a mistake once in a while it shows they are human too. Perfection is way overrated.

When you have a good field guide, and some beginners, and you mix them in with other levels of interest and experience, it’s more fun. Makes me smile just writing about it.

The most rewarding bird trips for me are when we’re giving back. You don’t have to be a great birder to be a ambassador for nature. You don’t have to be great at anything. “Showing is better than telling” a 4 year old told me, as I was talking too much to a school group I did a bird presentation for. She wanted more action.

I get really excited when out on a field trip and I see a new bird or bug or critter of some kind. Even plants. But when I see someone, young or old, really getting excited about what’s around them, maybe for the first time ever? That’s a wonderful feeling.

The New River Birding and Nature Festival sponsors hands-on learning experiences for local schools. These are the trips that give me the best feelings of all.

Share what you know, right?

How To Accidently Get Into The Cabin Rental Business

15 years is a long time. I know, because I am old.

After the first 10 years of building the business and the cabins from the ground up, I started to notice I was not being as good a host as I once was. Go figure- I was burned out!

The Ruffed Grouse. He just laughs at us.

I’m not complaining. I just noticed it, and it was effecting my interactions with guests. I knew I had to make some changes. Either hire more people to clean and do maintenance, or hire a secretary, or hire a reservationist, or all of the above and go crazy. (Some say crazier, but that’s another story.)

“Now I’m not a highly metaphysical man but I know that you can bump into someone”… Lyrics by ??? I can’t remember the tune (post a comment if you know it), but it seems appropriate, because that’s how I met Keith.

Sometimes if you are paying attention and open to it, really good things will happen. I had been invited to go grouse hunting with a couple of regulars and a new guy (no grouse were harmed. Maybe scared, but not harmed). As the day wore on and we were riding out, I commented that I needed a “Mini Me”, someone who was a Jack of all trades…

And the new guy on the hunt said, “I’ll do it.” Just like that: “I’ll do it.”

Really?

Sure.

But you don’t know what it involves.

That’s okay I’ll learn.

Really?

Sure.

Really?

We met for lunch a few days later and Keith started shadowing me. Keith saved my sanity and maybe the business. Most of you who have called in the past five years have talked to him and know why I am so grateful. He pretty much runs the place know and I just sit in my office and get fatter.

So when you call and talk to Keith, know that he can help save your sanity too just by making your vacation planning easy and relaxing. Fun, if you want to know the truth.

It’s been a great five years. Thanks, Keith, for all you do.

How We Accidently Built The Best Cabins In The New River Gorge

Well, I never would have guessed I’d be living here in West Virginia.

Really. I was too cool (obviously!), and West Virginia is, well, ah, let’s see… how do I put this… it has some stigmas attached to it, and some of them are true.

Two decades ago, I wasn’t in the mountain cabin rental business. I was a guide. I was just stopping by West Virginia for Gauley Season, on my way to guide the Bio Bio in Chile. What happened was, see, I met this woman, and… well, that’s really another story.

But I’ll say this: after two years of showing her all the cool places someone might want to live like Chile, Costa Rica, Montana, Utah, and Arizona, she wanted to move back to the New River Gorge!

I was a carpenter/odd jobs guy to make ends meet in between raft guiding seasons. One day, there was an ad in the paper for a house and two acres for $12,000! It looked like we could fix it up and sell it, or rent it to raft guides. How can you go wrong for $12,000? Seriously!

My father-in-law, ever willing to see me work harder, gladly put up the money. Partway through the tear out (we took it down to the studs, pulled out the wiring, and gutted the plumbing too) we saw a brochure for Mill Creek Cabin rentals. I can remember thinking, if we furnish it and fix it up nice we could rent this old farm house to just about anyone!

After talking to the raft companies to see if there was any demand for those types of rentals, we decide to fix it up and rent it nightly to rafters visiting the New River. We knew right away we wanted to do more, and two years later, a house and 20 acres became available just around the corner. The land was laid out perfectly for my vision of providing a secluded little place for people to relax, surrounded by mother nature.

Now, I’m the first to admit that I was never a very good carpenter. But I was lucky to have some very good ones help me. The one who helped (?!) most was Whitey. Whitey is as close as I’ve ever seen to a “master” carpenter. He once said to another carpenter working on the job after seeing me up and down a ladder in the same spot for the better part of the day, “You know, I believe Geoff will keep %$#@ing it up until he gets it right”.

I was too much of a perfectionist, and nowhere near enough skill. Story of my life, right? Anyway, I was very happy to have Whitey, and Craig, and lots of lots of others make my ideas take shape. The first two cabins where designed on the proverbial bar napkin over a few beers, and went up with the help of great guys like them. They were ready to go at the beginning of our third year in the cabin rental biz.

That’s how things started. But I had no idea what was coming next.

(TO BE CONTINUED…)

The (Secret) Green Story Of Opossum Creek Retreat

Here in the New River Gorge, our rental cabins were green before green was cool.

Wouldn't it be cool to find out where this goes?

I’ve been called a tree huggin’ Hippy. I don’t know about the hippy part, but, yes, I’ve hugged a tree. Okay, many trees. I have also cut them down. It feels great to see it falling right where you had hoped, to hear the thunder as it hits the ground, the back ache from sawing it into lumber, the smell as it is drying in the kiln. The roar of the planer as the board begins to reveals its character and beauty, all the while hoping that our finished piece will do justice to that tree, and stand for as long as or longer than the tree would have if we had not interfered.

Let me explain. Back when we got started we didn’t know that we were building green or being eco-friendly or practicing the triple bottom line. We were just trying to be good neighbors, good stewards and good business people.

Giving back to your community, hiring locally, buying locally and using local materials all makes good sense. And for us, building the cabins to last and be efficient cost more up front. (Building a cabin with full grown trees just inches away from every side is much harder than using a bulldozer to clear a flat spot). If all it takes to make a difference is just a little extra effort, a little extra money, then we’ll continue to do that because it has served us very well so far.

I’ve wondered, though: can you be green while you are soaking in a hot tub, with the A/C on and the Game on the Satellite? Not totally. I’d like to put a pile of coal on our property to show how much coal it takes to make an average guest happy at Opossum Creek Retreat. It’s a big pile, I bet.

I guess the point is we’re trying to make a smaller foot print and maybe you’ll see that you can do it, to and still have all the comforts of home and then some. So, we’re glad to be a part of this “new movement” and will continue to be good neighbors, good stewards, and hope to make some good friends along the way.

Yes, I hug trees.