Summer is here and I'm headed to Maine!!! Wow, I can't believe it. It's that time of year again and this year is going to be even more exciting. We are renovating our family camp. When my parents passed away, they left the camp to one of my sisters, my brother and me. At the first part of this year, my siblings decided they just didn't want to invest the money it was going to take to bring it back to its "glory days" so they signed their shares over to me. The ONLY drawback is that my husband, Jim, and I just purchased the camp across the street two months earlier. So now with two camps to totally renovate on a cash budget, we are perdicting that it will take three years to complete both places. Jim is a wonderful businessman but, well, let's just say that he lacks the skill set to get this job done. We are hiring professionals to do most of the work. Jim will only be around for ten days at the beginning of the summer and then drop in to check on progress at some point during the summer. That means I'm on my own. I'm looking forward to the challenge but I have to admit, I'm a little scared as well. Dealing with New Englanders is not always an easy thing. I can say that because I'm a Mainer through and through and when it comes to out-of-staters, we just don't like 'em. So I will be rampin' up my Maine accent and wearing flannel this summer so that I can get the best deal AND get the most cooperation. I'm going to post lots of photos throughout the process so I hope you will stay-tuned and join me in my journey. It's going to be an emotional rollercoaster for me because this camp is where we lived every summer from the time I was about 8 years old. My mother was a school teacher and my dad was a cobbler for Dexter Shoe (3 miles from the camp). So, once school was out, we packed up and went to the lake. When my daughter, Hillary, was born in 1987, I wanted her to experience the wonderful summers that I did as a child so when she was just four months old, she made her first trip to camp and then every summer after that, no matter where we lived in the country, she and I came to camp for five weeks. The memories we have all made here cannot be replaced. Doing a total remodel and preserving what makes this place "camp" is going to be a balancing act for me. I don't want to get caught up in making it a "resort". I want to keep the feeling of a simple family camp BUT without the need to carry water from town to drink and the smell of musty carpets. It's going to be interesting for sure!!