About 8 months into my relationship with Tom, I was invited by his mother and him to celebrate is father’s (who passed away 3 days after Tom and I started dating) memorial up in Bar Harbor, Maine.  I jumped at the chance to visit the North Atlantic seaboard and in exchange I got to meet the rest of his gazillion family.

We flew into Portland, Maine and then took the 3 hour drive to Bar Harbor.And totally fell in love with this town on Mount Desert Island.  Full of picturesque cottage homes, inns, shops, taverns and restaurants all at the edge of the Atlantic Ocean was all I needed to know for me to announce to Tom that I wanted to move there.  By the third day there, I informed Tom that this is where we would get married, buy a home, remodeled it to a cute B&B and spend the rest of our lives living by the water, eating the lobster, whale watching, kayaking, hiking the Acadia National Parkand stuffing ourselves with the popovers from the Jordan Pond House Restaurant.

He simply said: “ok” (smart man, catering to my every whim, even then).

Then one of his brother’s (the one that lives in Bar Harbor) informed me that during the winter they get temperatures in the 20’s and sometimes in the 10’s, with, a lot of snow.  He then showed me proof with a picture of his house, where the only thing you could see was his rooftop – because everything else was hidden by a blanket of white snow.

I mentally moved my B&B dream, living by the water, lobster eating and whale dolphin watching to a coastal town in Florida.