Family

Dad was an only child and Mom had one sister, so the sum total of my first cousins is quite small. The woman on the right in the photo above represents exactly one half of them, meet Cousin Louise, fledgling snowbird.

When we received her annual Christmas letter this year she mentioned that she was tired of the winters in Maine, so she was going to rent a house in Florida from a friend for the months of January, February and March. She had gotten her nurse’s license for FLA and planned on finding some work to keep her kind of busy and recoup some of her rent money. Turns out the town she was renting in was a mere 15 miles from where Donna’s sister Sandy lives, so we told her we were going down in February to visit Sandy and some of Donna and her cousins when they returned from a cruise* and we would stop in and visit. We also offered up a free night of room and board at Casa de Bogardus if her drive down brought her our way.

*Maybe we should check on those plans, as they may have decided on something different after the Costa Concordia thing.

And at the beginning Louise was going to pass right by here as she traveled from Virginia Beach to Atlanta visiting friends, but when we checked in with her the day before her scheduled arrival, she mentioned that she was getting anxious to get to her destination and was going to keep the car pointed south instead of jogging west our way. Seeing as she was going to have to pass right through South Carolina on the way. We plotted a likely point for her overnight stay on Friday and because we had that afternoon off we’d drive over and meet her for dinner.

Serendipitously, it turned out to be a town that we are intimately familiar with meeting cousins in. It is the same city where we usually meet Donna’s cousin Laurie at a Cracker Barrel in Florence, SC. So we made some reservations at a hotel that fit our one important criteria, be within walking distance of a restaurant that served wine. We each agreed to ask at the front desk to see if the other had checked in yet so we could get together.

Donna and I took our time on the way east on I-20 doing a few a few park & grab geocaches. When we got to the hotel I told Donna we would first circle the lot looking for a car with Maine plates before checking in. We didn’t get very far, there was a red Toyota Prius under the entrance awning. We did some catching up, then a lot more family stories over dinner. There was a bit more chatting at breakfast on Saturday in the hotel before Louise continued flying south for the winter and we geocached home vowing to meet again in February.