Happy New Year from our new home to yours!

Merry belated Christmas and Happy New Year!  We FaceTimed with our family back in CT over Christmas and had our Christmas dinner at the local Waffle House which suited us just fine!

We finally decided on a manufactured home in an over-55 community that fit the bill!  It is in Flat Rock which is a village within Hendersonville, home to Carl Sandburg's Historic Home and the Flat Roock Playhouse. It has two bedrooms, two full baths and a great three-season room.  I will let the pictures speak for themselves.

View of left side:

Front on...I think those may be boxwoods?

On the right side, currently having a nifty ramp being built onto it:

The right side again showing the carport:

We are currently painting the kitchen.

The sunporch!

My walk-in tub!!!  Oh yeah, baby!!!

This unit is the perfect size for us, and best of all we were able to pay cash and have NO DEBT!

First time for that for either of us, and it feels great!  We can even save a little each month. That's what downsizing and moving out of Connecticut did for us!  

Happy 2016!

Hendersonville, NC

We finally arrived in our new community about a week ago even though we don't have anything to live in other than our RV or a motel!  We have been looking at manufactured homes in a few communities.  There are not that many units available so we are weighing our options, deciding what is most important to us. 

In the meantime we have gotten a post office box and we joined the local YMCA so we can both exercise.  We are venturing out to start learning the roads around town.  We are currently staying in a motel because the temps are going to drop precipitously in a few days (20s at night) so we rewinterized the rig.  We are going to bring in our Christmas decorations so we can feel merry here in our motel room.  Luckily we can park the RV just about right outside our door so Steve can run out to get whatever we need.

PO Box 1689

Flat Rock, NC 28731

Old Sheldon Church Ruins, Beaufort, SC

We have been laying low at another Passport America Campground in Beaufort, SC while we continue to struggle with Packrat to get our belongings to Hendersonville.  It appears that worst case our container will be delivered on Dec. 16, but it could be sooner. Tomorrow we are going to start driving north and I found a Days Inn in Hendersonville that will give us a reduced rate it we stay for three weeks so that's what we are going to do.  We will be able to start settling into our new community albeit temporarily because there are no units available yet in the community we want to live in; however, this way we'll have a place for Christmas.

Back in the day I was very interested in archaeology and we discovered the ruins of the Old Sheldon Church in Beaufort yesterday.  It was was accessible via my scooter which was on its best behavior...no bad noises at all!

I will let our photos show the story, but following is some info about it from Wiki. This is a beautiful, peaceful place and you can tell you are on hallowed ground. 

Steve behind the pulpit.

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Sheldon Church Ruins
U.S. National Register of Historic Places
Sheldon Church Ruins
Location	Beaufort County, South Carolina, USA
Nearest city	Yemassee, South Carolina
Coordinates	32°37′6.7″N 80°46′49.7″W
Area	4.5 acres (1.8 ha)
Built	1753
Architect	Unknown
Architectural style	Greek Revival
Governing body	Private
NRHP Reference #	70000562 [1]
Added to NRHP	October 22, 1970

The Old Sheldon Church Ruins is a historic site located in northern Beaufort County, South Carolina, approximately 17 miles (30 km) north of Beaufort in the Sheldon area.^[2][3] Known also as the Sheldon Church or Old Sheldon Church, the pre-existing building was originally known as Prince William's Parish Church. The church was built in the Greek Revivalstyle between 1745 and 1753. Prince William's was burned by the British in 1779 during the Revolutionary War. In 1826 it was rebuilt. The following is from an article in the April 1969 Sandlapper Magazine by Charles E. Thomas, “The Picturesque Ruins Of Old Sheldon Church”. “The official South Carolina report on the “Destruction of Churches and Church Property,” after the War Between the States, described Sheldon’s second burning: “All that was combustible was consumed..., its massive walls survive the last as they did the former conflagration,” Bishop Thomas wrote, “Exactly as it happened a hundred years before in 1779, when General Prevost, marching from Savannah into South Carolina burned the Church, so now in February 1865, General Sherman marching from Georgia into South Carolina, burned it a second time.”

An alternative view has more recently come to light, however. In a letter dated February 3, 1866,^[4] Miton Leverett wrote that "Sheldon Church not burn't. Just torn up in the inside, but can be repaired." The inside of the church was apparently gutted to reuse materials to rebuild homes burnt by Sherman's army.

The ruins lie amongst majestic oaks and scattered graves.

Inside the ruins of the church lies the remains of Colonel William Bull, who "greatly assisted General Oglethorpe in establishing the physical layout of Savannah, Georgia. Bull surveyed the land in 1733 to form the basic grid pattern of the streets and squares."

The site has proven to be a popular site in the Lowcountry for photographers and wedding ceremonies in contemporary times. As of October 2015, the Old Sheldon ruins are not available to the public for hosting wedding ceremonies. An annual service is held the second Sunday after Easter.

1-800-PACKRAT Part 2

I haven't posted for a few days because we are in a holding pattern due to some Packrat issues.  We found a very small RV/trailer park called Art's RV Sites in Fayetteville which is Passport America so it is only costing $15 per night with full hookups, and it has been in the 40s at night so we haven't needed a hotel.

When I made the original contract with Packrat back in September, I gave them the wrong destination zip code...for Henderson, NC not Hendersonville, NC.  How this happened I cannot fathom, but I made them play me the taped phone call and sure enough, I did.  I did say the word Hendersonville several times, and the agent should have caught the discrepancy but she didn't so there is blame on both sides.

Evidently Packrat does not deliver to Hendersonville  because it's too mountainous so we wouldn't have been able to use them anyway. Our unit is sitting in Raleigh, NC and what we are all trying to arrange is for it to be transported to their Charlotte, NC facility and then trucked to Hendersonville (at great additional cost, I might add!) The supervisor in Raleigh is trying to reach the supervisor in Charlotte but has not been able to, so he has asked his boss to intervene.  We are four days into this negotiation!

We will stay here in Fayetteville tonight, but then the nighttime temps are going into the 30s so we are going to travel about 200 miles south to get to some nighttime temps in the 40s again, unless we hear from Packrat today with news that we should start traveling north towards Hendersonville.

In the meantime we have decorated the main living area of our rig for Christmas including a tree!  We have also finished our Christmas shopping and will start packaging up for mailing boxes.   Folks have asked us where to mail our gifts to, but right at the moment I have no idea! It will be to General Delivery at a post office where we land for the holidays, but it's too soon to say for sure.