The Idea
First, the first installment in the story on how we came here.......
The Idea. The very idea!
There we were. Sitting in our living room on Kinsey Ave. in Kremmling, Colorado. Circa 2017...ish. I'm not entirely sure on the date.
Bryan had been working for the grocery store for roughly five years. I had been with the paving company for 2 years, and I was off for the season. (As you know, I had four months out of each year off, Thanksgiving through the 3rd week of April, every winter.)
Bryan was working too hard. His arthritis had been in remission, but was starting to creep back in. He was stressed and tired and sick and cold and discouraged.
I had done a little research about retirement and what we needed to do to get ready. So of course my "feed" online had retirement stuff in it. An article popped up about the 10 best states to retire to. Hmm, I thought.
We had started to feel like we were stuck where we were.
If you recall, we moved to Walden Colorado from Fort Collins in roughly 2006. This was our gold ring. We bought our gas station, what we thought was a thriving business, in a rural area of Colorado that we loved. The kids were all graduated from high school, and were moving on with their own lives, and moving on with ours seemed like the thing to do. We called it, "The Crazy Idea" as kind of a code name when we talked about it.
We were going to work our gas station for 10-15 years, sell the thing, and retire nicely. And live happily ever after.
But things went drastically wrong. The gas station wasn't as stable as we thought. We took it over with too much dept. We were naive and didn't know what we were doing most of the time. Then 2008 hit. Fuel prices went up over $5 per gallon. During haying season in Walden, our fuel provider decided they needed paid for the outstanding tanker we had riding on their books. $80,000. We didn't have it. There was no way to recover. The economy killed us.
We were devastated. All our retirement money was gone. Our livelihood gone. Our home gone. We lost everything. We were going to have to pay rent. We needed jobs. Where in Walden were we going to get jobs? There were none at the time, and it was frightening.
Lucky the pellet mill in Walden opened its doors right as we were going under. We eventually both ended up working for them. I worked there 4 years. We rented a house. We were poor, but we managed to pay our bills and keep our heads above water. We actually came out of bankruptcy enough to get a loan for a car, and we were starting to establish credit again.
But the pellet mill success in Walden was short lived. I could see the writing on the wall, because I did the bookkeeping for them. I knew at some point that they would run out of money and close their doors. There were NO jobs, and I mean NONE. My friend Betty had gone over to the competition, another pellet mill in Kremmling. She talked them into hiring both of us. It was scary, because it was an angry competitor and a hostile environment at both places, and we really sweated the move, but we took a leap of faith and we went. We moved to Kremmling.
The pellet mill in Kremmling wasn't much better off, and I didn't work there long. Again I followed my friend Betty to another saw mill, and then she got me in good with the snowmobile dealer in Granby. Bryan went to work for the grocery store in Dillon, mostly for the benefits.
But the landlord we hooked up with in Kremmling set us up to fail. Her carefully worded lease bit us in the behind (we found out later that she did this to nearly all of her tenents). When we left Range Ave, she tacked on a huge bill for cleaning and damages, neither of which was warranted. We were in the process of buying a house in Kremmling, and she tried to put a lien on it. We had to hire a lawyer. We lost the case because of the wording in the lease, but she was unable to put a lien on the house, and that was our small win.
Right when the landlord case was coming to a head, I got laid off at the snowmobile dealer. My hopes were once again dashed. I liked it a lot there, and thought that maybe I would retire from there. Nope.
The whole situation soured us to Kremmling. In a small town, especially when you are new, you don't know who is on whose side. So we did not feel comfortable making friends or even talking to our neighbors. We never did like Kremmling, as long as we lived there. And the whole situation set us back because now we had the landlord's bill and the lawyer's bill. We were almost back to square one, although we were able to still get our loan and keep our house.
A devastating blow in Walden. Another series of devastating blows in Kremmling.
But we dragged ourselves back up. I started working for the paving company, and because we had those giant bills to pay, I worked the winter at the ski area medical clinic. Bryan got promoted at the grocery store, and we were able to pay our bills and build back up.
But at what cost? Bryan's health was not great. Mine was....OK...at the time, but starting to falter.
So, with all that history in the back of my mind, and my poor husband sick and unhappy, I saw the 10 best places to retire to. To be continued.......
Update:
More parts for the John Deere came yesterday. At some point we will find the right combo of switches and will quit burning them out. Someday the John Deere will work. Not sure if my hope is misplaced or not, but for now, that's all I got.
The planters are assembled. Bryan said it was 336 fasteners total. Zoiks! Not placed permanently yet, but they are in approximately where they are going to go.
Can you tell where we shop? Chewy and Amazon boxes. It looks like mostly the CDs and DVDs.
That's it for now. Please comment and share! Love you all!
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