The summer I was ten, we drove around the country, coast to coast, Mexico for an afternoon and Canada for, inadvertently, two weeks while we waited for a part to be shipped in to repair our family’s camping trailer while we were stuck at Moose Mountain Provincial Park.

We played volleyball over the little camping-friendly net we’d packed until someone mis-bopped the ball into the campfire. It did a slow zzzzzzzleflop.

There was a radio station that was holding a contest and first place prize was a week’s vacation in Regina, Saskatchewan. Second place prize? Was two weeks’ vacation in Regina.

Not quite sure how Regina felt about that.

But anyway.

At some point in–I want to guess Colorado?–we stopped by a cousin of my dad’s.

She was older. She lived in a stone house. It was perfect. I had never seen anything like it and I completely fell in love and promised myself that someday I, too, would live in a stone house. I’d still like to, to the point of having priced out adding such a facade to the front of ours and noping out.

My cousin Heidi sent this link. And yay verily it is indeed a stone house. And then some. I mean, I mean, just…wow.