Our bed and breakfast guests of this weekend truly were very lucky to have such perfect warm fall weather for their fall leaf peeping trips on their getaway vacations. It was perfect weather for pumpkin patches, picking your own apples at nearby Crane’s apple orchards or a visit to our neighboring Fenn Valley winery for a tour of their vineyards and some sampling in their tasting room. I can’t imagine a more perfect weather setting for a fall getaway in West Michigan.

One of our favorite quick and close trips from the bed and breakfast is Holland, Michigan. Just a quick 15 minutes from the Inn, it seems as though this great little Dutch resort town of West Michigan isn’t all that effected by the economic climate of the rest of the country. It continues to show signs of development and business growth and expansion of businesses. On top of that, there is also a great variety of fun tourist activities and fun shopping especially in downtown Holland.

The wind storms of the past 24 hours here in West Michigan have been quite extreme and surely are not a good thing for the fall color season, but hopefully it is early enough in the season that it will not have much impact. Still, it sure does seem that a lot of leaves and branches have been blowing around throughout the area. Bits of sunshine are beginning to pop through now so hopefully the forecast for warm and sunny weather for the coming week is accurate so that we might all be able to get out to enjoy our early fall season.

With fall now officially beginning tomorrow, we at the bed and breakfast have brought back out our favorite pumpkin and apple recipes and have been once again been receiving great praise from our Inn guests for the pumpkin cobbler, the apple dumplings, baked apples and of course the hot apple cider in the afternoons.  It is also very fun to get back to having the scents of fall in the air as well with the hot cider simmering in the afternoons and the pumpkin baking in the mornings.

One of the things that is always noticeable at the bed and breakfast Inn this time of year, is the swings in temperatures that can mean running the furnace in the evening hours into morning and back to running the air conditioner again later in the day as the warm temperatures return by noon and into the afternoon.  It seems silly in a way to be running both furnace and air conditioner this time of year, but we do our best to make our bed and breakfast guests comfortable throughout their stay with us at the Inn.