Phew. I had thought I had plenty of time to get a house for Thanksgiving for this year’s “Meet in the Middle” in Deep Creek Lake. Not!

If you’re not familiar with it, Deep Creek is great … it’s in western Maryland, half-way between DC (where my sister and I live) and Pittsburgh, where the rest of the family is. So a few years back, I started getting a house for right after school let out. It’s always a challenge to rent a house from the Internet, but we’ve had pretty good luck.

The pic above was the “lakefront” of the house we had in 2006. What a hike … even the kids only made it down to the lake once that week. But the view was incredible, and the house itself was great for yakking, eating, and playing games.

Anyways, this year I thought that instead of Deep Creek in June, we would get together for Thanksgiving. And several weeks ago, I had even picked a monster house with indoor pool (but was debating if I really wanted to plunk down the several thou for it).

A moot point now. I had put it off long enough that, as of this weekend, there were only six houses with seven bedrooms still available. Yikes!

But in doing the math, I decided we could get by with six bedrooms, and after doing a lot of surfing, found a great house on the lake that should fit all 15 of us nicely. Yay!