Happy Holidays! We hope 2014 has been very good too you!

This has been a very busy year for us, both in helping to get the inn going and building our own house on property adjoining the inn’s.

In spring we sent out over 700 postcards to former guests at Lake Shore Farm Inn, letting them all know we were back in business. In addition the inn was listed on booking.com and that brought in quite a number of guests. Three weddings and various reunions and birthday parties were held here during the year and some great former guest showed up. One particularly great group even brought their own spectacular fireworks show one evening!

Improvements included a beautifully redone event center and queen sized beds and new bedding in many of the rooms. Lots of people enjoyed the swimming and kayaking in this beautiful place. Picking blueberries by kayak was a unique experience and the berries made a welcome addition to morning waffles. Photos can be seen at lakeshorefarminn.com if you’d like to look. And we’d welcome you to become a friend of Lake Shore Farm Inn on Facebook. It’s an ongoing adventure with weddings, events, reunions and old friends already booked to return next year.

Dick painstakingly designed the new house we’re building. The windows and doors are in. Shingles and siding and kitchen cabinets have been chosen and ordered and it will be great to see how they look when we’re finished. We have the woodstove up and burning and that’s giving the workers a bit of heat on frosty days. We hope to move in in early summer.

In the meantime, the work on the house has kept us up in New Hampshire most of the year. We did get down to participate in the ice storm last winter and spent a lot of time clearing up and burning broken tree limbs that came down. Bob and Rob came down to spend a week when the debris was gone and weather improved. But we headed back up in April to meet Heather as she came back from Nepal. Other than that, we escaped down to North Carolina for one week this fall to enjoy the beaches and lovely weather.

Dick’s house in North Sandwich has a very nice family living there on a rent-to-buy agreement. And the condo in Dover also has a nice family in it, but they may have to leave it, and if so, it will go on the market in April. We can easily use the money for the present building project!

Other travels included a wonderful week on McGee Island off the coast of Maine with Dick’s ex-brother-in-law and his great blended family, a trip to Tuscon to see Heather, and Sandy’s trip in November to see her sister on Kauai- with a luau and lots of snorkeling. We hope to resume more exotic traveling once the house is built.

The families are doing fine. Christy continues to expand her psychotherapy practice, John heads The Atlantic Salmon Federation in Maine, and Liam and Gracie are 5 and 3 now. Liam is in kindergarten and reads with the top first grade reading group. Gracie is a bright lively little girl who charms everyone. Rob is doing contract work for the State of New Hampshire in Geology with this latest contract going through Sept. of next year.

Rick is very busy as manager of the inn and his many talents come in handy when pipes leak or the furnace goes out. Michelle is having a good year at school. Ricky is a senior and Randy a junior who works part time at Sears to keep up with the expenses of his car.

Cindy and Chris continue to enjoy life both at Apple and at home in Half Moon Bay, CA and Heather will be up to spend Christmas with us.

We hope your holidays are wonderful and that 2015 will be a great year! All our best!