was living. We enjoyed being a part of Uncle Ben's 98th birthday party, and whereas we normally stayed with Margaret on these visits, there was so many relatives coming in for the party that Margaret and Ben had paid for us to all stay at the local Hampton Inn, which was VERY nice.
It was my turn to go to Britain again, and this time met up with Mair in London and spent a great time being shown some new sites again by our nephews that have always been so wonderful to us and so generous. Among the highlights was Moltisfont Abbey:
A beautiful country home with magnificent gardens. It is owned by the National Trust now and open to the public.
I had been to Hampton Court before (on the Thames), but it had been some time (actually when I went with Debbie in the early 1980's). The magnificence of these rooms is amazing.
Martyn took us down the docks at Southhampton and wanted us to go up the new tower built there had has a glass-floored balcony at the top, but both Mair and I chickened out and finally convinced Martyn, that we would both be on our knees and he would have to carry us both down!! I was really interested in the fact that our brother Gerald who was in the Royal Navy, did his submarine training here. If you look at the picture just right of the middle you will see a square building. That is a tall (deep) water tank where they trained how to escape from a sub under water.
Salisbury Cathedral was awesome and it was the first time I saw the original Magna Carta document that our legal system is based on.
The timing of this trip was so that Mair and I could attend the wedding of Ian and Liz. It was a second marriage for Liz, but our nephew Ian in his late forties had never married. Their wedding and reception was a spectacular affair held in one of the ancient manors.
Mair, Kitty and I thoroughly enjoyed being together and here we are singing a song from an old radio show, "Enoch, Ramsbottom and Me".
40 years of marriage for us and we attended the wedding of Katrina's youngest, Joe and Debbie:
This year Dick started to really slow down and was experiencing a big problem with his hip. Taking care of our property and acreage was quite a job, and he knew he would have problems building the house we had planned for the back of the property (to go with the garage already built), so we made the decision to follow up on something we had talked about for years and that was to 'retire to a condo on a golf course'. I went on the web, we drove to a few that interested us and eventually settled on the Falconhead Golfing Community in southern Oklahoma, just 1/2 mile from the Texas border. We made the deal, sold our single-wide and moved around New Year.
I'm sure these neighbors missed him terribly. They had shown up at our house twice a day, to get their 'treats' from Dick and often just stayed hanging around with him:
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