I had a dream last night that I was still at DSS but getting close to retirement. I woke up thinking about what got me here. In a nutshell, what got me here was meeting Tess at the school for death and blind falling in love and getting married. That one change in my life, probably led to all the other changes that have brought me to this place.. Because it was by marrying Tess that led us to have Lauren Lauren grew up to be a very productive young lady and married this man named Sam now Lauren and Sam have two boys Nolan and Wes and these two boys are my grandchildren. I spent 30 years working for DSS, which gave me a retirement plan and a payoff at the end of $100,000 which I was able to invest in the stock market instead of spending it. I was able to continue working teaching at Spartanburg Tech and we did that until we moved here permanently to Hendersonville North Carolina. Hendersonville has turned out to be our greatest home and greatest place to live. We met a whole new set of people and made a whole new set of friends and I was able to spend a lot of time with my friends hiking and biking my two main hobbies over the last 15 years a few of the decisions that I or we made that made a difference were first buying our first home instead of renting so our first home was 120 Windon Court. We sold that house and bought 145 Dover Rd. several years and I realize that keeping Dover Road and renting it when we purchased our third home was a good way to finance our future. And we bought 125 Waterford Dr. we actually bought a piece of property in Waterford, a lake community and Inman and plan to build there but the a lot that we bought was unable instead of having a problem. The developer Atkins simply said pick out another house we debated over 125 Waterford, which was not a lakefront property and another piece that further up the road that was on the lake. It was probably about $10,000 more which was a lot of money so we stuck with the first house which did have four bedrooms and we felt provided a better neighborhood environment for Lauren and Eric and for ourselves when we first moved into the house, I realized that the kids really missed Dover Road. All of their friends were there and that’s where they identified themselves as being home so that was just something to observe that our dream house was not theirs. I spent nine years working at Sears part-time which allowed us to take vacations and allow us to really live the lifestyle that we were now gaining, but it was working all the time and Tess as well worked all the time she had her job at the hospital, then she started lecturing on the continual education service circuit and then probably the biggest statement that she made that was life-changing was I’m not gonna spend the rest of my life in Inman, South Carolina It was both funny and profound. I was hiking with a group of people that I had never met. Introduced by an article that one of my employees brought to me. I think it was bold magazine from Hendersonville anyway I met this group. The hike almost got rained out in fact it was rained out, but I had just started talking to some of the guys who were planning the hike and we went anyway we went to Hendersonville which I knew nothing about. we sat outside of Mast General store waiting for the rain to clear and then we went onto Dupont Forest in some ways that hike changed our lives. We have been looking for a place to retire primarily in Greenville Greenville was just a great city with the so for a while. I was driving back-and-forth to Greenville checking out different real estate opportunities as it turned out the homes that we looked at were much too expensive in downtown Greenville and the closer we got to affordability the further away we were from downtown so we reached a point where and we might as well stay in Spartanburg but going on that hike basically allowed me to discover Hendersonville and I said the test why don’t we start looking at Hendersonville and she said I don’t wanna live in Hendersonville with all those old people… That was so funny because at that point we were I guess approaching our 60th birthdays and retirement and I said to her well, would you rather be a young person in an old people town or an old person in a young people town so we started looking at Hendersonville we went to a development called carriage Park and it was an expensive neighborhood with home lots lining streets that went right up to the top of a beautiful mountain area. Well we bought a lot. They made it very easy to do with a small down payment which we did have available because of money that Tess had inherited from her parents so we started making payments on the lot and we planned on building a home there but as time went by, I started to realize that but building a home would cost more money than we really could afford and so we started looking at other places in Hendersonville basically that led us to buying our current home at 210 a watch Creek Drive, which is a townhome. At that point, we still own the lot at carriage Park and we were still paying homeowners dues at carriage Park so the pressure to sell kept increasing. Eventually, we sold that lot and we were able to move here to watch Creek Drive, which is now or forever home. I still say Our because it really was Pete and Tess that survived all these years and made the strides that we did in order to get where I am today.