2008

Well, we broke a record this year - we moved twice.    This wasn't the usual itchy feet motivation, but being on the 'inside' with events that were happening in the park.     A highly successful investment group had bought considerable land at Falconhead and were developing some very nice homes, especially around the golf course.    They had plans for condos near the golf course and at one end of the lake and had invested a huge amount on the upgrading of the golf course.    John Travolta was part of the group and was going to have media events to kick it off.    First Dick and I bought a second condo and moved into it, renting the other one out.

We made another investment on a two bedroom townhouse which had been repossessed by HUD.    It was quite a mess inside, but the price was right and Dick set to work to remodel it.     In the meantime another townhouse became available, a three bedroom corner unit and we bought it, and subsequently sold the condo at a profit.    We and others who were doing similar things were really excited about the future of the park and of the real estate prices which had been stagnant for a while, were beginning to rise somewhat and it was anticipated would explode when the big project was complete.

 This was the view from our new townhouse.     The one we were remodelling were just a little to the left of this.

But if you remember, Fall of 2008 brought the crash in the housing market.    The big investor company went bankrupt, the houses remained unfinished and the prices plummeted.    Dick and I had put all our hard earned money from the prior few years in remodeling and building and we were sitting with three properties, two of which were worth considerable less than what we had paid for and the HUD one looking as if it wouldn't even give us back the additional money we had spent on it.

We hadbad luck with the condo rental, lost some more money there, but did then get a good renter for it.     We also rented the HUD townhouse and it worked fine for a while, but then typically, we had trouble getting paid.    No wonder I had always been against rentals!!

The year did have its highlights though, with Uncle Ben's 100th birthday party.    One touching moment was when Aunt Lucille flew back with cousin Bob and Ben and Lucille reunited after many years:

There wasn't a dry eye in the room.

Dick had kidney failure that late summer.    He had been getting weaker and weaker and we went to the doctor.     Tests showed that he was dangerously close to a heart attack from the potassium in his system that wasn't being processed by his kidneys.     He had to take some very strong medicine and be tested every day for almost a week until they got the numbers to an acceptable level.     We saw a kidney specialist and he basically warned that Dick could be on dyalisis soon and in the meantime changed a pill and put him on a diet.    The result was that Dick being Dick and sticking to the diet, his numbers continued to go up and up and other than being re-tested twice a year, he is holding his own on this disease (as with the diabetes, again for sticking to the rules).

Come Fall, we took a trip I had wanted to take for a long time.    The plan was to go to the North East, into Canada and visit my nephews in Nova Scotia and Montreal, and do a lot of sightseeing and genealogy visits along the way.    The first change came with the slipping finances and we decided that we had to cut a couple of weeks out of the trip and not see my nephews, but would do the rest of it.     The night before we left, I got 'eaten alive' by a swarm of buffalo gnats, we got a speeding ticket twenty miles from home and had the car hit in the rear when we were in a restaurant, breaking the light!   What a start.     We visited with cousin Ruth and Larry in Indiana, went to Pennsylvania and saw where the Toppers had lived for many years outside Gettysburg, visited Gettysburg itself:

That visit was amazing and we encourage all who can to make this trip.    We went through the Amish country, to Rhode Island (more genealogy), to Cape Cod (history and genealogy), to Plymouth, on up into Vermont and New Hampshire going through the Adirondacks which would have been glorious this time of year, BUT AND IT IS A VERY LARGE BUT,  we had sunshine in Gettysburg and the one day in Cape Cod, the rest of the time we had rain, rain and more rain.    We saw nothing of the Amish - just a window washer slapping right and left.     We drove through the glorious Adirondacks with my saying "This is so beautiful out there, Dick, honestly it is!!".    By this time we had had about ten days of vacation and had seen little else but wet, wet.     We decided to call it quits and headed for home.    To add to the misery of the trip, my bites had progressed to the point that my face was swollen, I had open sores and hid my face from people and ended up in an emergency room and going on heavy duty cortizone!

We did some serious thinking on this trip and in the following month or so.    Finances now were tight.   We had two mortgages, were paying out Falconhead dues on three properties and they kept going up and there was no relief in sight.    Dick's health, although improved, was still not good - he was not able to do too much and after the experience with the buffalo gnats I was reluctant to continue living with the bug situation there and the humidity was making my breathing more difficult every year.
We had to do something, and started thinking seriously of moving closer to California and family - probably Arizona.......