The non-business side of those early years -

was interesting and busy too. When we started to build the motel in Carbondale, Dick and I found ourselves in the strange position of basically a 9 to 5 job, as once the construction workers had gone home, there was not much that we could do. We soon ran into our first 'tug of war' with Bob Brewer and it was over the colors for the motel. He wanted it to be blue and white and called something like Dutch Inn, which he said depicted cleanliness. We wanted to follow in the footsteps of Motel 6, with the stress on the price, and came up with the neutral motel with dark green trim and orange doors. Neither side wanted to give and Lowell and Don didn't seem to be able to visualize either one, so we decided to build a model of the motel with our colors on it. We had more fun with this project and I think it turned out amazingly well since we were just using material we could pick up at the five and ten! When finished we showed it to the partners and the vote came in for Best 7 Inn looking like the above model.

We were able to make the trip to California for Katrina and Jerry's wedding. We drove straight through (in our new 69 T Bird!) 2400 miles in 40 hours. We would have made better time than that but we decided to take a short cut over Tioga Pass - after all June should be no problem. But the pass was closed because of a snow avalanche and we had to drive down to the cross over into Bakersfield and then come up the Valley.
We ended up putting a huge amount of miles on our T-Bird and seem to burn up the tires regularly. The above motel in Huntsville is a trip we made many times - usually after a regular work day and we would take turns in driving. When I think of it now I have to admit to shuddering at the speeds we used to drive - and much of it was on 2-way country highways, before the days of the freeway system.
In 1970, I received the bad news that my father's health was failing and the doctors did not anticipate that he would make it through another winter, so (thanks for Dick and American Express!) I went home to spend time with him. The parting was tough as you can imagine, and I promised to go back the following year. This way neither one of us had to verbalize on the fact that we didn't think he would make it.
(As a side note, I should add that he lived another five years, and each year I, sometimes with Dick, would make the 'last visit').

1970 also brought us our first grandchild - Suzanne, born in Hawaii. At this point Dick was 39 and I was 33 - both very young to be grandparents. But it was fun in those days - I used to show the photographs and brag, and love it when they said "You're not old enough to be a grandmother". Later on, it was painfully obvious when they didn't say that!