Good Times, Good Friends

We’ve continued to keep busy since I last made an entry here. Not all of it is of great interest to the reader, so I’ll summarize:

- We got the air conditioning fixed. What a relief knowing that we’ll be heading into hotter territory soon.

- Another couple who are our friends joined us for a week at Creekwood. That meant eight of us hanging out together.

- I completed a total of four web pages for the resale-by-owner group at Royal Highlands.

- The guys went to the car & motorcycle museum, while the girls went shopping one day.

- We had cocktails on the creek nearly every evening at 5pm.

- We’ve kept up with our walking for exercise.

- Heidi got her hair and nails done. (Happily, that’s out of the way for another 6 weeks.)

As mentioned in my last post, we had planned an adventure for the week that all eight of us were together at Creekwood Farm. We were going to do a rafting trip on the Pigeon River. (Do you hear banjos?) We had made the reservations, but they canceled it in the end – just not enough water in the river.

So instead, we all drove to Lake Lure for a tour and lunch. It was a beautiful drive, as are most drives in North Carolina. We took the boat tour first and saw some beautiful and costly homes. Lake front property there is several thousand dollars per linear foot. Even so, there was hardly an empty space anywhere along the shore. Here’s one of the houses on the lake.

This view is across the lake to Chimney Rock. We didn’t go up there, but the formations were pretty cool.

After the boat tour was over, we went up the road to the restaurant at Lake Lure Inn. It was a really good buffet. Here’s the whole crew after chowing down.

From left to right we are: Gary, Julian, Barbara, Donna, Larry, Kenny, Stacy, and Mary.

Here we all are again, that same day, for “cocktails on the creek”.

The next day, Saturday, we all went to Canton for the ‘Mater Festival. It proved to be much larger this year than we’d experienced before. Instead of in a vacant lot, this year they had the booths set up right down the main street of town.

We did buy some tomatoes, which were very good. We also got a slice of tomato pie. It turned out to be a lot like pizza, but in a regular pie crust. It wasn’t bad!

The following Tuesday, we took our last trip into Cherokee for some gambling fun… and I do me FUN. At first, neither one of us were doing very well. In fact were we playing together (our strategy when the money gets low) and were down to about our last $20 when Julian hit a Royal Flush! We can’t tell you how beautiful that was! A little later, on a different machine, I hit a four-of-a-kind for over $300. Both of these were won on progressive machines that had obviously not hit in some time. What a FUN day! (That will help pay for the coach repairs!)

On our last night at Creekwood Farm, we went out to dinner with our friends, Ken & Stacy. Once again we had a fabulous meal.

Yesterday we pulled up stakes and drove to Crittenden, KY, which is about 30 miles south of Cincinnati. We’re here for 2 nights and will leave tomorrow for Port Clinton, OH, right on Lake Erie.