Tales from Rabbit Hill: A Home Life Retrospective

Now that I'm back in the States, there are still a few more things I want to share from our time at Rabbit Hill outside Apeldoorn, Netherlands.

Firstly, you may be wondering, "Taylor, why would the family resort park be called 'Rabbit Hill'?"

The answer to that lies at the front entrance to the park:

But Rabbit Hill was much more than a small petting zoo; it was also our residence for an entire month.

Whenever people ask me about what I miss most while on the road, the first thing that usually comes to my mind is that we're rarely in a "home." It is so comforting to go home at the end of the day, take off your shoes, and feel carpet under your feet. When you live out of hotels, however, you arrive at your hotel only to take off your shoes, sit on some bed that someone else slept in the night before, and feel concrete through the incredibly thin (and sometimes grimy) hotel carpet.

Living at Rabbit Hill for a month provided this much-craved type of home environment. We had kitchens, refrigerators, living rooms with couches, a dining room table, and giant windows with views of nature. We had fireplaces. We had an entry way with wet, snow-crusted shoes and a coat rack. We had a mini-grocery store just a two minute walk from our door. We put bird feeders outside our windows and were visited by European robins, European blue jays, chickadees, marsh tits, Eurasian nuthatches, blackbirds, and woodpeckers. We were surrounded by young families that pulled their young children down the snow-covered streets on small sleds.

Even though Apeldoorn is 5,430 miles away from Mesa, it was, in many ways, the closest to being home I've ever felt on the road.

This type of environment was also very healthy in that it helped to cultivate our camaraderie because our days weren't filled with the normal tedium. We used our days off to prepare large group dinners and make our houses as homey as possible:

Some roses from a post-show bouquet we received. At one point in time we had received so many bouquets that we were fashioning vases out of cut water bottles and nearly every table surface was fully covered with vases.

Coming back to the States has been quite the shock to the system.

Though we were still "on the road" while in the Netherlands, we're now very much "on the road." We're back in the land of less-than-adequate hotel breakfasts, packed suitcases that never get unpacked, long drives between shows, chain restaurants, and free drink refills...okay, so I guess that last one isn't really a negative thing. It's actually one of the small things that tells me I'm home.

Home, that is, in the States.