Kayak More, Worry Less

It has gotten warm enough here to take our kayaks out on Mountain Island Lake. I love that we can put our kayaks on their carts and roll them down the street to put into the water. It is one thing to sit in our back yard 100' above the lake, and another to actually be out on the water. We can cross the main channel to get into the back coves that are too shallow for anything motorized to enter. And there we can find the water birds and turtles. It is such a blessing to be retired in this little piece of paradise, especially during Covid-19. It is very easy to socially distance on the water!

kayaking on Mountain Island Lake

Catching Up

Sold!

Many things have happened since my last post. We had a house built within the 55+ community Imagery at Lennar in North Carolina, and sold the home we had owned for 32 years in Webster Groves, Missouri. Located on Mountain Island Lake in Mount Holly, NC we closed on our new home October 15th, and on our home in Webster on October 25th. The moving company arrived at the new house on October 28th.

Since then it has been a flurry of purchasing new furniture for the house (we sold our antiques as they didn't go with the new home feel), getting all the boxes unpacked, and adding the personal touches to make this house feel like home. Because the house and a lot of the furniture are new, we still feel at times as if we are staying in an AirBNB. Especially when we pause (which we do a lot) to admire the view from our backyard.

new house front and back yard

The community here has exceeded our expectations so far. It is brand new, so there are less than 100 homes that are currently occupied. That has given us an opportunity to meet our neighbors on a more personal basis, which has helped ease the transition. The neighborhood is about 40/60 in terms of those of us who have relocated from another state versus those who moved in from a different part of the Charlotte area. But everyone has the same outlook - they want to meet new people and form new friendships. Jim and I took a huge leap of faith moving from the city where we had spent our entire 41 years of married life to a new place where we do not have any family. But the leap was well worth it, and we are busier than we ever imagined.

Because it is a new community, our amenities are not yet complete. But our lifestyle director has made the best of the situation, and we have enjoyed tai chi, yoga, pickleball on our outdoor courts, hiking club activities, ladies lunches and mens breakfasts, cultural events, social events, and casual get togethers with our neighbors. We are so happy here!

We are looking forward to forging many friendships and enjoying many new adventures as we enter Volume II (this is way too big to be called a new chapter) of our lives.

Crystal Bridges - Eureka!

After hearing so much about the Crystal Bridges Museum of Modern Art in Bentonville, Arkansas my husband and I had tried on a couple of occasions to get down there to see it. We finally made it happen last week. After finishing our respective pickleball games on Wednesday and taking care of some business around the house (meaning everything had to look perfect in case a potential buyer wanted to look at it while we were gone), we took off down I-44. We found this amazing little barbecue spot in Aurora, Missouri to have supper. It was tasty, and the staff was so friendly!

Hog Tide Bar-B-Cue

In keeping with my new mantra of "Make the U-turn", when I passed the field of cows cooling off as the sun went down in southern Missouri, I knew I had to turn around. I'm so glad we did.

bathing beauties

We arrived at Crystal Bridges at 9:00 Thursday morning, though the museum doesn't open until 11:00. There are miles of trails in the 120 acres that make up the grounds, and from one of the trails you can walk all the way to downtown Bentonville. The museum takes its name from a nearby natural spring, and the bridge construction incorporated in the buildings. Thanks to Alice Walton of Walmart fame, there is no charge to enter the museum.

There were not too many people around, so we had fun exploring the trails, outdoor sculptures and water features. A Frank Loyd Wright house is there as well, so we secured tickets for a tour (also free of charge.)

Crystal Bridges

We had lunch at the museum, and then headed to downtown Bentonville, which has a lovely town square. It is also the location of the first 5 and 10 store owned by Sam Walton. The museum there tells the fascinating tale of the history of Sam and Walmart.

Bentonville

After resting a bit and having supper, we drove back to Crystal Bridges for some night shots. It was quiet and peaceful as we walked along the trails. At the entrance to the grounds there is a lighted sculpture called Buckyball. On this particular evening they were showing "The Wizard of Oz" on a portable screen. How fun!

Crystal Bridges at night

Friday morning we made our way to Eureka Springs, Arkansas. I had not been there since Andy was a baby, so it would have been 1985. We first stopped at the Thorncrown Chapel outside of town. What a serene, beautiful place. It must be something to attend a wedding there.

Thorncrown Chapel

We spent the rest of our afternoon in Eureka Springs, having lunch at the historic Crescent Hotel and walking around town. We stopped to visit Christ of the Ozarks, the second largest sculpture of Jesus at 67' tall, and then headed home to St. Louis.

Eureka Springs

Another bucket list destination off the list!

House for Sale

In anticipation of putting our house on the market, we began the process of purging months ago. Three truckloads of items have been picked up by various charitable organizations, our trash cans and recycling containers are consistently full each week, and many other items have been re-gifted to others. Let alone being married for 41 years, we have lived in the same house for 32 years! That is a long time to accumulate junk as well as treasures.

At first it was difficult for us to let some things go, but this has gotten much easier as time has passed. The reality of moving to a new home that has no basement or attic storage, and is 1000 square feet smaller to boot, has sunk in. We simply can't take it all with us.

Our realtor was upfront in telling us that this new group of house hunters does not want to feel as if they have walked into "grandma's house". Ouch! The quilts on the wall must go! Grandma's handmade doilies must go! The antiques should go, if possible. She suggested that any items we didn't plan on taking with us be removed from the house before listing. We took her at her word, and as we had no plans to fill a brand-spanking new home with antiques, we got rid of the antiques except for two heirlooms. We found an auction house who would come and pick up the items and then sell them at auction. They were all removed Mother's Day weekend.

What that means is that we have nothing in the dining room, and no dressers in any of the rooms. So where do we put our underwear??? As my husband says, it looks like a monastery around here. We each have a nightstand for socks and underwear, and a plastic bin under the bed for shorts and t-shirts. It has been interesting to see how little clothing we really need.

We found a couple who are on a mission to place as many free libraries as they possibly can in rural Missouri, so they were thrilled to take a dozen or so boxes of books off our hands. Another lady was happy to get a twin mattress for an AirBNB she was setting up.

We had set aside multiple bins of toys for our kids to go through, which they did the beginning of July when they came to St. Louis for a final visit of their childhood home. Whatever they didn't want was then taken to the Salvation Army. Our son had driven his pickup truck here so that he could take a chest of drawers that once belonged to his great-great-grandparents, so he had room to take some of the teak outdoor furniture as well. He looked like the Beverly Hillbillies when he left here. We will store a couple bins for our daughter as she had no way to take them back on the plane.

We know that we have to weed out more items, and we have hundreds of record albums to take to a record store and some collectibles that need to go on an auction site. But I'm incredibly proud that we have made so much progress. The house is on the market, and looking better than ever before. It's almost too nice to leave. Almost... Now if we can just get around the HGTV mentality where all the buyers expect to have the entire house in perfect condition with everything they desire in it, but without a large price tag attached.

On Retirement

My husband retired a couple of months ago after selling his portion of a design firm that he and his business partner had developed 20+ years ago. While he will remain on in an advisory role for 12 months, for all intents and purposes he is done working.  I have not worked in corporate America since 1997, though I did contribute to our organics company until we sold that several years ago. Since then I have been writing and doing photography, so I have been working out of our home for many years.

We knew that we would not want to stay in our 2 1/2 story Queen Ann-style home for much longer, so last year we began to talk about where we would want to move. We could stay in St. Louis, of course. But a lot of the work involved in moving would take place whether we moved a mile or thousands of miles away. That thought process opened up all kinds of opportunities to us.

When we moved to St. Louis in 1978 with our fresh college diplomas in hand, we thought we would be here for a couple of years and then would move on. Yet here we are, 42 years later. St. Louis has been very good to us, and was a wonderful place to raise our children. But they don't live here any more. We have got one on each coast of this vast country.

As we started discussing where we might like to live, several things became clear. First of all, the benefit of being with the same person for over four decades is that you do tend to think alike. We both wanted a location that has all four seasons - just a little less of the winter season. That automatically ruled out a number of retirement spots such as Arizona and Florida. We have zero interest in owning and maintaining two separate residences. Neither of us wants to live any further north than where we are, or to spend way too much of our retirement savings in expensive cities like Washington, DC (where our son and daughter-in-law live) or Los Angeles (where our daughter lives.) Being adverse to worrying about our house being demolished in a hurricane, the coastal United States was off the consideration table as well. That still left a lot of options to examine.

view from the community center

North Carolina made the top of our list due to its natural beauty. We had visited the state and loved it. It also seemed that anytime we wanted to fly somewhere out of St. Louis we had to go through Charlotte to get where we were going.

We thought we found the perfect place in a community called The Coves. Located in northwestern North Carolina equal distance between Charlotte and Asheville, the development would allow us to buy as many acres as we would like and to build a custom home. With 3,600 acres of land, it offered a community center, hiking trails, a riding stable, a vineyard and community garden, rivers, waterfalls and miles of hiking trails. On paper it looked perfect. For a number of reasons, it was not right for us once we visited in June of 2018 even though the mountain views were quite pretty. On that trip we looked at a several places in central North Carolina as well as the Charlotte area and didn't fall in love with any of them. We were back to square one.

After talking with a number of my pickleball friends who either travel extensively or own second residences, we began to think for the first time about 55+ active adult communities. In a million years, we never thought we would even consider such a concept. But the more we read about them, the more intrigued we became. People are drawn to them because they want to make new friends, have a variety of activities available, have their yard maintained, and be able to "lock and leave", knowing their home will be safe and looked after when they travel.

I decided to give the Charlotte area another shot due to its great international airport and good health care reports. Did you know that Charlotte has 38 of these kind of communities? Holy smokes! That says something about the area to me. I could eliminate a lot of them because they were too large or too small, or they focused on an amenity (like golf) that was not important to us. I was left with a list of 6 or 7. Through my search I found Roger Holloway, the YouTube star of 55+ communities in the Charlotte area. I reached out to Roger, who is a buyers agent, and we set up a time to go to Charlotte and see some of the communities. That happened in February of 2019, prior to our Southern Caribbean cruise out of Fort Lauderdale (because yes, we had to fly though Charlotte to get there from St. Louis.)

We were very impressed with the design and amenities of the Trilogy development, which is about 50% built out. All the people we met were friendly and gracious, and the community center and gathering spaces were incredible. The only problem was that the most desirable (in our opinion) lots were already taken. We were not interested in a lot that backs to a retaining wall, or the neighbors screened in porch.

Imagery by Lennar

Then we went to see Imagery by Lennar. It is the only community that is built on a lake - Mountain Island Lake, to be specific. So new that there were not even models built that we could take a look at, this 320 acre development is being constructed on land once owned by the Bechtler family, for whom the art museum in Charlotte is named. They had a home on the land as well as 6 or so large cabins, where visiting artists could live in residence while creating their art. When the Bechtler's sold the land, a commitment was made by Lennar to keep the "artistic" feel of the property, including the house and cabins which will become activity centers for the new community. While it is a little hard for some people, me included, to visualize what the community will become, fortunately Lennar has a similar community nearby that we could visit. Tree Tops is not located in a lake, but it gave us a good sense of what Lennar is going for in the new development.

As it is so new, lake view lots are available. Well, once you see that you cannot unsee it. We knew we would not be happy in a home that did not offer us a view of the lake from our own property. We just were not sure that we wanted to live through the pains (and noise) of a construction zone for quite some time. We headed off to our cruise, enjoyed going over all the pros and cons with our friends on the trip, and came back to St. Louis to think some more.

proud owners of Lot 33

After a couple of weeks we decided to make an offer on a lot and one of the house plans that was available to go on it. Following a little back and forth, we came to a mutually acceptable price. And just like that we were landowners - in a new land. With these communities, you must have them begin construction pretty much right away. While that pushed us some, we like the fact that people aren't buying lots and then just letting them sit, which is pretty much what is going on at The Coves. With a construction timetable of 5 months, we selected a closing date of October 31. Happy Halloween!

We quickly kicked into purging mode here on the home front. It has been a dirty, challenging, frustrating, and somewhat freeing process. The unusable has gone in the trash or recycling bins, but three truckloads have been picked up by the Salvation Army and a couple of other loads delivered by us in our pickup to their store. We will have at least one more load before it is all said and done.

The toys and games of our children were boxed up separately for them to review. They both came home recently and went through the boxes. Andy took what he wanted back to DC in his pickup, and Katie has 2 plastic bins that we will take with us and store for her. Her apartment in Los Angeles has no storage space, and she couldn't have taken them on the plane anyway. The remaining toys were taken to a charity.

I've also had some fun with a Facebook group called Webster Groves Buys Nothing. Local residents are always putting out a call for something they are looking for, such as the original "Home Alone" on VHS which I gladly re-gifted. On the opposite end, people like me are getting rid of things, so a simple photo on the site usually results in multiple people vying for the free item. It is fun to see that others will enjoy things that we no longer want.

Less fun has been getting the house ready to go on the market. More on that in my next post.

Reaching for Retirement

As my husband begins to prepare for retirement, we have been talking a lot about where we want to live. Staying in our house, much as we have loved it for the past 31 years, is not the best option. First of all, at some point the 2 1/2 stories will be too much for us. The upkeep and maintenance are already more that we want to undertake, and the taxes and insurance here are killers. So...if you know you will want to/have to move, where do you go?

While it is possible that we will remain in this state, we are exploring other options. We have eliminated places that are too hot, such as Florida, Arizona, and Texas, as well as states that are just too expensive such as California. We don't want to live any further north than we are now, but we still want to experience some of the four seasons. North Carolina and Tennessee have both made our initial short list.

Lambert St. Louis Airport

Last week we spent 7 days in North Carolina. Uncertain as to whether we would prefer lake or mountain views, I lined up an itinerary that offered some of both. We began in Charlotte for a number of reasons. It has a wonderful international airport, which we always have to fly through when traveling abroad. Why not live there and eliminate one stop on foreign trips?

Charlotte is a large city (population around 800,000) with many of the cultural institutions and activities we have grown to appreciate in our current hometown. With that comes great medical care, which will become more important as we age. We don't want to live right in Charlotte, but instead wanted to look at the six lakes that surround the area. After 2 days, we knew that none of these lakes were what we were looking for in terms of livability. They are located off of narrow, winding roads with no amenities nearby. I don't want to have to drive an hour to buy a loaf of bread, go to a store, or see a doctor.

Our next destination was the town of Lenoir, located northwest of Charlotte at the foot of the Blue Ridge Mountains. On the way we found the two remaining covered bridges in the state of North Carolina.

Pisgah Covered Bridge

Bunker Hill Covered Bridge

In Lenoir, a smaller artsy community, we stayed at the Irish Rose B&B. It was a huge, beautiful old home, and the proprietor made the most amazing breakfast that we have ever had at a B&B. The other guests we met were so interesting to talk to, and a couple from Maryland were on the same journey as us, so it was fun to compare notes. They were even looking at The Coves, a mountain gated community that we had come to see. Alas, with Lenoir being 1.5 hours from Asheville and 1.5 hours from Charlotte, we decided the distance was more that we would like to drive each time we want to fly somewhere. There were other reasons we dismissed this area as well, but the travel time to get to any cultural events or flights was a big one.

Next up was the town of Black Mountain, which had a couple of gated communities we wanted to see. We had an appointment with a realtor, and she took us to several communities but also to a few regular residences that were up for sale. She wanted to give us an idea of what our budget could buy us in the area. I have to say, Black Mountain will probably remain on our short list. It is less than 30 minutes from Asheville, the community is darling, we could purchase a lot with mountain views and build our own home, and we could be on Lake Lure in 30 minutes if we wanted a lake experience for a day or weekend.

Lake Lure, NC

After spending most of the day with the realtor, we drove to Lake Lure. I really wanted this area to work out as it is only about a half hour from Asheville, and the lake has wonderful mountain views so we could have the best of both worlds. Unfortunately the houses are very close together, which we are trying to avoid. Plus there are no shopping or medical facilities in the area. You would have to drive to Asheville for most things, on a winding road with a 35 miles per hour speed limit. It was a pretty and fun place to visit though, so we had a good time playing tourist for a couple of days as we explored the lake and Chimney Rock State Park.

Chimney Rock, NC

We worked our way back to Charlotte on Saturday because we had an early flight home Sunday morning. Though it wasn't exactly on our way, we made a second trip to Black Mountain so that we could see a little bit more of the town on our own. Despite the fact that it was a Saturday during tourist season, it wasn't too overrun with crowds, so that was good to see. If we decide to get more serious about settling in that town, I think we should go there for a couple weeks in the spring or fall and really get a feel for the area.

St. Louis

At the end of the day, while we were a little disappointed that nothing called out to us, it was a good experience and we learned a lot from this trip. We will be better prepared for the next one. We are in no rush, and we want to take the time to make sure this next move won't be the wrong move. We have been in St. Louis for 40 years, so we obviously don't take relocation lightly!