So You Want to Run a B&B?

Teacups rest on the dining-room table just before breakfast at the Inn Victoria in Chester, Vermont, an eight-room B&B owned by Dan and Penny Cote.
Credit: Ian Aldrich Dan’s laughing, but he’s not joking. He is out of shirts—which is why he’s pawing through stuff normally reserved for guests and the B&B’s small gift shop. His own shirts are clumped together, freshly washed but still in need of ironing—something his wife, Penny, with whom he owns the Inn Victoria, an eight-room B&B in downtown Chester, Vermont, just hasn’t had time to tackle. “Oh, we’ve been getting dressed in the freezer room for a long time,” she cracks later. Dan, fully accustomed to this reality as well, grabs a shirt—a women’s shirt, he’ll eventually find out—and slips it on. Minutes later, Dan is in the living room, greeting a guest named Woody, a retiree from Orlando who’s seeing the New England foliage with his wife and eight other Floridians. “Good morning!” Dan calls out, striding toward his guest. “How was your sleep?” The bed was comfortable, Woody replies, but then he launches into how the hot-water tank must be busted. “My wife ran out of hot water while trying to fill the bathtub,” he says. Woody’s not indignant—he’s more matter-of-fact than anything—but also proceeds to tell every guest about what happened. It’s like a tape on automatic loop: Good morning! Boy, you’ll never guess what happened to us. Dan apologizes after the first round of the story, then heads to the basement to check on the hot-water heater. He does a quick inspection, but he knows there’s nothing wrong. Just too many people trying to take a bath all at once, he says. “This has probably occurred only a couple of other times,” he notes. “Each of those tubs can take about 60 gallons—it can happen.”