Nicole, Troy, Brooke, Brad Bucci
Old Car & Farmhouse, Virginia Photo by Barry Epstein
Judy and Hugh Press
Mimi, Barry, Marcelle
Pete, Linda, Meghann, Barry
I flew out to Boston the next day to meet up with my clients and attend a big conference for the week and Mimi headed over to Washington DC to spend the time with my sister Linda and her husband Pete who were living about an hour South in Virginia. They have a fabulous house in a gated retirement community that offers so many activities and friends. Soon I joined them and had so much fun together playing golf and tennis and eating all our favorite foods like Italian sausages, pastas with thick red sauce, hamburgers, Prime Rib Roasts, etc. that we could not really get in Australia. I got to see my niece Nicole, her husband Brad and their two children Brooke and Troy. It had been awhile since we had caught up with everyone and we all had fun. We even caught up with our very old friends, Judy and Hugh, our exneighbors from when we lived in New York State. They had two girls almost the same ages as our boys and we had visited their house on a previous trip when the kids were smaller and they shot BB guns in their large NJ backyard which was a very big deal at the time.
After about a week, we flew down to South Carolina to visit my other sister Marcelle and her husband Mike. They also live in a beautiful house in a big retirement community with even more facilities than Linda’ s and they have a golf course onsite. It is quite an amazing concept that allows residents to take advantage of so many activities. Marcelle invited 60 of her closest friends to meet us and made us feel like celebrities. I played tennis on the nicest clay courts one morning as they allowed me into a round robin competition. The quality of players was quite low and no matter how easy I hit the balls, most people could not return my top spin. At the end of each round people would come up to me and ask me, you are not considering moving in here are you? I chuckled and commented that I was just a visitor. One guy I played against was wearing a knapsack. I was curious so I asked him why he was wearing it and he said that in it was his oxygen! I chuckled again. The golf course was amazing and I had a good round with some of Marcelle’ s friends. They warned me at the beginning that if I was too good that they wouldn’ t enjoy playing with me and I assured them that I was
Lone Cypress Tree, Carmel, California Photo by Barry Epstein a solid 18 handicapper, which they were comfortable with. But when I hit a long drive
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