Our Tiny Home Vacation & the Importance of Getting Away

A couple months ago, Heath and I decided to get away for a weekend to Lyons, Colorado for a mini vacation. We chose Lyons because it was a short trip, close to the mountains, and they have a tiny home hotel! Partly, it was a late valentine’s day trip, partly, I have a fascination with tiny homes, but mostly we wanted a “get away & get creative” weekend. Heath and I both have full-time jobs but we both are very passionate about creativity and have our own unique creative ventures & desires. Heath is a worship leader at our church and wants to dedicate more time to writing music. I also want to dedicate more time to writing (and one of the avenues is this blog!).  Even though some weeks I may have up to 4 days off in a week, I still find it hard to devote significant chunks of time to writing or any creativity. It is very easy for me to get distracted by my weekly chores, some pile of clutter I want to go through, or meal planning and grocery shopping for the upcoming week. These are all good things, but the problem is.. that if I were to make a list of my weekly tasks and any extra to-dos, I could easily end up spending my whole weekend doing the tasks and put writing completely off. I think part of me believes a lie that creativity is not “important” or “responsible” but the truth is, it IS.

By getting away from our normal environment, we are being intentional and focused on creativity. I believe this helps us to accomplish much more in our creative endeavors than we would at home in our rhythm of daily life. I hope to develop habits at home that foster creativity more, but for now, this is the jump start we needed. There are many places to get away from the city in Colorado, we are fortunate in that. Lyons is only an hour away, but we both said we feel like we are worlds away from Denver. Staying in a tiny home also helped us to focus more. While the tiny homes are cute and oh so trendy right now, they truly are very minimal plus we stayed in the smallest one! We only had room for a couple small bags and our journals and guitar— which further helped the focus factor. There were two beds, a loft bed upstairs and a single cabin style bed on the first floor. We had a small table for morning tea and lunch and a small fridge to store our Kombucha we scored for sale price! (I couldn’t help but feel like the ultimate millennial staying in a tiny home and drinking kombucha…). There were windows around the whole house which we opened at night to feel the cool air and during the day for extra light. We were feet away from the St. Vrain River as well as Lyons cute and friendly downtown. We arrived on Thursday night, had breakfast in Hygiene & coffee in Lyons early on Friday, came back to the house & worked out our respective creativity power sessions. For me, that meant strategizing what the first month of my blog would look like. For Heath, it was creating new lyrics to a song. We took a break for lunch at Lyon’s Barking Dog Cafe then came back to the Tiny House to get back to work. Heath continued to write lyrics and added some music to his song and I wrote a rough draft of a post before dinner.

We talked to one of the managers of WeeCasa, the tiny home hotel and she shared a bit of her background as well as her vision for the place. She and her husband raised their three kids on the road in an RV. They still live in the RV, but now her kids are grown and she and her husband help run the tiny home hotel. She has been into “small living” since 2001, and has seen the tiny house trend evolve. She hopes to have a tiny home boot camp in the summer for those who are interested in building or buying their own tiny home. She said she has seen many people come to WeeCasa super enthusiastic about getting a tiny home without understanding the realities of living in one. Because of this, she wants to have the boot camp- a week for those thinking about small living to come and experience some of the challenges of it. She said it’s definitely not for everyone. But for her and her family, she said the small space living of an RV was a wonderful decision that brought her family closer together. In their RV, they did not have the opportunity to hide from each other in their separate rooms or avoid one another when they were in a bad mood. They had to accept and be open with one another at all times.

In the same way that we have creativity as a goal in this season of being newlyweds, this family had quality time together as a goal in their child-rearing season. For them, the best environment to cultivate the family they wanted was leaving the “American Dream”, six figure lifestyle, and large house. They instead chose adventure together and small living as a means of cultivating their values as a family. Heath & I desire to cultivate creativity and use our gifts to bring light to the world around us. Our Tiny Home weekend proved to be a great environment for us to do this- to get away from our “day-to-day” and escape to a place that fosters inspiration and focus.

I want to know… How do you foster creativity in your everyday life? Why do you think creativity is important? Do you think it is sometimes necessary to “get away” to get creative? why or why not? Why else is it important to “get away”?