When I put away the Christmas decorations for the last time, I divided them into six storage bins, one for each child and one for us. Over 20 years, I had accumulated so many decorations and because our trees were always so big, there was an abundance of lights, balls, bows and ornaments. Now everyone will have a nice assortment of festive décor for their own homes. We hope to use ours annually to decorate the motorhome or a rented chalet when the kids are able to join us wherever we are.

We had hoped the house would sell by April, so we geared ourselves for that being the case. We dreamed about the day when we would leave for good. We thought about where we would go when the day finally arrived and planned to go to the east coast again, then work our way across Canada to spend the winter and our next Christmas in BC. The Canadian dollar was not doing well and travelling in the US could be too costly.

Our real estate agent had been doing her best to market the house and we had several showings. One person came back three times and we were hopeful that perhaps an offer would be forthcoming. We were still running the B & B but I was informing our guests that this was possibly their last visit to "The Castle". I was going through keepsakes and qualifying them as such and those that didn’t qualify were sold or thrown out. The house still looked the same but the storage areas were empty. We thought that when an offer came in we could close in a month if necessary. And we waited……….