Nope. Did not take much of a honeymoon trip. We married on a holiday weekend (to get the extra day). Traveled about 100 miles away from the wedding site and stayed our first night together in a small hotel. Used the next day to take a leisurely drive back to our first apartment, and on the third day, set up our living quarters. I had started a new job fresh out of college 3 months prior ot the wedding was was due back on the job the next day following the 3 day weekend. My wife had one more year of college and she was busy registering for classes. We lived on ahoestring that first year. My wife graduated the next year and things began to look up economically. But her first year of work was an internship (required for state certification) that did not pay well. Two years later, we started our family and thankfully by then, my job had begun to pay better - enough to support us and new baby. Since that first year, we have taken a sight-seeing trip almost every year for vacation for the next 30 years. We still take trips, but the focus has broadened because we have seen many of the scenic places that were on our list.

Bringing this back up for consideration. We have enough interested members that Retreat will take place! We would love to have more join us!!! Remember that this year it is a holiday weekend which hopefully will help with travelling. (Columbus Day holiday-US, and Thanksgiving-Canada) We generally leave camp around lunchtime on Sunday (either eating first, taking a bag lunch with us, or we could plan not to have their lunch at all), but we could actually stay all afternoon if we wished. We currently have coming for sure: Toolgranny-Linda Jennifer in VA Teresa_nc Sunnycntralfl-Gwen & Rob Grammyp-Beverly & Tim Faye, Fran & Rosa have all expressed interest as well. Please email me with confirmation in you'd like to attend and I'll send my address for the deposit. Jennifer

I picked up a book from "New Arrivals" shelf titled Palace Circle by Rebecca Dean (I confess because I liked the cover and the setting --pre WWI) and it is rather awful. One-dimensional characters and plots that seem inspired by daytime soaps. I stopped reading around half-way. On a happier note I discovered a new (to me) historical author: Jude Morgan. Very impressed with her writing and comand of the period. Just read Indiscretion and An Accomplished Woman which are both obviously Austen-inspired, and I'm starting on Passion, which seems like a "heavier" book, the main characters being the women in Byron, Shelley, & Keats' lives.

I was a young girl married to my then young husband who was not much older. We were just a couple of kids and I was not even old enough to buy beer. or open a bank account in my own name. We lived in an old boarding house in the Texas border town of Del Rio. The building was old and run down and had been made into little apartments. It was basically what you might today call a "studio" .I think we paid maybe $35 a month for it. It was cooled with one of those big swamp coolers that occupied one window and it had little gas fired space heaters for heat. They were the kind that you took with you when you moved from one place to another and when you got where you were going, you just took a pair of pliers and hooked it up the the gas cocks that were there , checked for leaks with some soapy water. and that was it. There were no smoke or carbon detectors, no sprinklers, no safety measure of any kind. The whole place was probably in danger of burning down. One thing that it did have was ghosts. We both awoke one evening and there was the figure of a man standing there by us. As soon as we called out, he simply disappeared. He just absolutely disappeared and there was only one door into the apartment and it was still locked. There was a bathroom window that was also still closed and locked. There was no other way out of the small one room apartment. But, he was gone, gone, gone! It was a very old two story building probably from the time when this was part of the old west and had been some manner of a boarding house for a school or some such. No telling how many people's life stories happened there. We owned almost nothing that would not fit into the back seat of a small car. I was so young that I got an allotment paid to me that was a part of his salary with the Air Force. They did that because some on the enlisted men would spend their money and not take care of their families. So they made sure that the wife had some of his salary in her own name. Then in the same border town we rented half of a small house. The woman who owned it lived in the other half. Her family went generations back in this small town and the house had been built by her grandfather back in the days of the old west . It still had a buggy house in the back. She remembered old west style shoot outs in the yard. The road sign out front said, "Mexico, 2 miles". And , indeed it was. She collected bird songs and Nat Geo magazines and had been a teacher of spanish speaking children. She was old in the late 1960s so I guess she was born sometime may be around the turn of that century. After a tour of duty overseas, we returned to Texas, to Dallas, where we rented a small apartment attached to a small house for $25 a month. Considering that we had no jobs or income, that was all we could afford. We had to supply our own stove and space heaters. Hook them up with a pair of pliers, test with soapy water and there was never any ventilation for the burning gas. We found an old gas stove at a flee market that was probably from about the 1930s. It had a top that you could close on it and I used it for some years. We were poor and all we could afford was a small fan for ventilation .It got really hot in Dallas. We were young and resilient and still had no more than would fit in the back seat of the car. We progressed upwards with college via the GI bill, a career and an upwardly mobile life, with kids and now grandkids. Each house that we bought costs more than the last, and here we are. So much has changed since then, the world changed and we changed. One irony is that now, in my later years, I am trying to get my material possessions back down to that minimal amount that we used to have. I aspire toward living a simple life for the rest of it. This time it is a choice and I have resources and much nicer options.