The Resort Years - 5

Shared Expenses

Being a condominium was definitely advantageous when repairs to our shared infrastructure were needed! Our very first concern, twenty 26 years ago, was a septic system, which made smelly puddles in the bottom of the circle roadway whenever we were fully occupied for a few weeks.  The baking soda from the pool supply storage “covered up” the smell.  WHY, we all asked ourselves, did we even have the problem when it was a newly engineered system just prior to our ownership?  First, we decided it was the melting snow behind the four upper cabins flooding the leach field on its way to the river, so the president of our Homeowners Association - who was an engineer with experience getting things accomplished in the business world - contacted the engineer who had done the septic system design and his liability insurance paid to have a French Drain installed behind the upper cabins to channel the melting snow away from the leach field.  That was good and the melt still runs out of that drain without going through the leach field!

However, we still had the puddles of escaping sewage when fully occupied so another solution was needed.  Perhaps the original engineer had been given the YEARLY occupancy number to work with when, at the time at least, we were FULL for the nearly three months of summer!  Totally different scenario!  A DIFFERENT engineer suggested a complimentary leach field with a device to alternate between the two on a rotating basis.  Dave Graham, the excavator, was happy to trench in five more lines and the “carousel” device.  AND, the very conservative Homeowner’s Association had the funds in hand to pay for it.  That Homeowner’s Association fee each month was so helpful.

My husband, having been in the excavating business when we lived in Colorado, noticed a few years later that the carousels – now two of them – were loading up with grease and suggested strongly that an additional tank be installed with filters on the outflow to not only cool the outflow but to catch the grease before it was pumped up to the leach fields.  We contacted Dave Graham and his time was all taken up that year, so Tom secured a backhoe and our son Tom helped dig a hole in the drive between Units #4 and #3.  The handyman, Leni, and his pre-teen son, Wiley, helped with the parts and pieces that Mr Bell, the engineer, had designed for the installation.  Some of them were extraneous since the “as built” drawing of the previous system wasn’t exactly “as built” (;-) This bit of infrastructure DID cost us each some money, but not nearly as much as if we had had to pay an excavator, footing the bill individually.  The owners all appreciated the expertise that Tom brought to the problem.  It was an interesting couple of weeks as we had guests in the Resort at the time.

We still had a continuing problem of smell by the Unit #10 deck, which was not solved by an air filter.   It was finally sorted out where that was coming from – the Store leach field under the shed and above Unit #2.  Solution there was forcing a new leach field on the owners of the Store since it was a disclosed situation, just waiting to be a problem.  The previous occupants of the housing above the Store were an elderly couple who did their laundry at their daughter’s house!!  The new owners were a couple with FOUR teenagers, producing a lot of water usage!! 

Then there were the small problems – the map showed that the corner of #3s new deck was in the “OPEN SPACE” so if they had to replace it - ???  “Open Space” when Strawberry is surrounded by thousands of acres of National Forest and Wilderness is just five miles away?  Such is life in the USA!  Then there were the folks who couldn’t seem to see the importance of signing the official map.  Seems it took over a year to complete the last of the “official duties” of purchasing into a condomineum resort. The CC&Rs had some redundant phrases, and some conflicting ones.  Some of the By-laws didn’t apply in our situation…small issues, sometimes made larger by the egos involved.  Did we want the Resort to look like a “planned community” or leave it more natural?  THEN the water company was purchased by Del Oro Water out of Chico!!

The Resort Years - 4

Go West, young man, go West!

One of the hardest decisions that Tom ever had to make was about leaving the security of IBM for the job in San Jose with a new “start-up” with a chance of “making it big!” when it succeeded or losing it all!  But when the FOR SALE sign brought a buyer in less than a week, we chose to see it as God’s Will that we up and move back to the West Coast.  Our stay in Poughkeepsie was exactly SIX MONTHS!  We also found a home in west San Jose near the mountains in three days - again under amazing circumstances.  And during nearly seven years in San Jose I never once wished for any other home, despite some parties and church functions in some really NICE, up-scale homes and amid growing success in the “new start up” in Sunnyvale.

So he had a six-mile commute to work, unless he was traveling and then we took him to and from San Francisco Airport and he traveled the globe working for Amdahl Corp, manufacturers of the next generation of computers.  It was an exciting adventure complete with stock options and the need for “tax shelters” and again the need for mountains.  “You can take the boy out of the mountains, but you can’t take the mountains out of the boy!”

After six and a half years of growing children and growing faith in God, volunteering at school, Cub Scouts, and church I was amazed to discover that we were going to buy an INN in the Sierra Nevada Mountains – a mile high hamlet called Strawberry, and I had never even WORKED in a restaurant, let alone a gas station, bar, hotel or trailer park!!  Tom had been reading ads in the papers:  ”How about a wine and cheese store in Santa Cruz?”  “How about a furniture manufacturing company in Idaho?”  I remarked that refinishing the credenza in the dining room and painting the boy’s room were the extent of my furniture making experience, (and I could see a cloud of sawdust around my head!!)

So Tom’s parents were visiting and the REALTOR who had gleefully met our airplane at the Columbia Airport several weeks before had called about TWO Inns that had come on the market recently.  Tom and his dad took the plane to check it out since I had a wedding to help with for the Church ladies and Mom could go with me.  Son Tom was fourteen, going on fifteen, so he could watch the other two siblings.  You can read all about THAT CHAPTER in “Three Weeks on a Hide-a-Bed – diary of a would be Innkeeper!” 

PRISONERS of a too cheap rental

The year that Kathleen started High School we were able to move to a small three-bedroom house in Strawberry from the apartment at the INN, turning our apartment into another rental unit or two!  The owners were renting the house to us at the rate of $425 per month, and we lived there for nineteen years!  Like our renters in South Pasadena we were able to change owners and still be the faithful renters, taking blocks of snow off the roof whenever the suspension shower rod crashed down - demonstrating that the weight of the snow on the roof was dangerous!

During our stay, besides changing owners, we helped to rebuild the front and back steps, painted all the rooms at least once, helped to take down the chimney and replace the fireplace with a bay window and a free-standing wood stove.  Most people thought that we OWNED that house, it didn’t look or feel like a “rental.”  The Shasta Daisies and other flowers still bloom each summer and we enjoy them on our walks.

Then ten or eleven years ago Tom felt the call to ministry and in our Methodist tradition lay people can and do become ministers – either ordained or just licensed until ordained if so desired.  So we moved to “another rental!” this one next to the Sonora United Methodist Church where Tom served as pastor for nine years while I wore the usual pianist and Sunday School teacher hats, doing services in the local congregation that I had done for most of the 52 years of our marriage.  I even got to preach a couple of times when Tom was down with the effects following a small seizure!  Again, we fixed whatever was broken, and treated it like our own home.  Leaving that for the one bedroom apartment in Strawberry brought back all the Colorado mountain memories.  Thank GOD that we still had this place to “fall back on” in our semi-retirement!  Thank GOD for the sons who helped and provided storage for our STUFF as Mom and Dad Weathers and McKee did while we lived in that little 12x24 mountain cabin above Denver, at 9600 feet.