The cosmopolitan, fast paced world we left..... the suits, executive cars, 4 holidays a year, the courteous taken-for-granted intellect of folk understanding your circumstance enough to allow you to do what you felt was right within your own life so long as you offered the same courtesy to them....was now going to become a thing of the past.
I take you back to 2005.... hurtling rapidly into 2006 (our first full year) and we were still enjoying the niceness of the newness of our new rural life..... the bills hadn't started to come in yet and we didn't think that we would have any problem making ends meet.
But remember we were new to this world.... not just rural life but the hospitality industry of which we were now a bonefide member! This wasn't playtime.... we had invested a mammoth amount of our hard-earned savings into making this business a success.
We came from city life; nipping out to the city shopping, to meet friends, to have parties.... to be invisible.
All of a sudden we were acutely aware we were being watched and it was curious and strange to us and wierd demonstrations of our building paranoia emerged; we really didn't like the negative attention we seemed to be getting.
We've all read the papers and journalistic offerings of rural life being harder than anything you will ever imagine if you are a newcomer..... an incomer.... an outsider.....make that doubly so if you are trying to build a business there.
It was cripplingly difficult..... we missed our friends and family and we were coping with a new way of life, a new business, a new industry to fathom out and the rather startling reality that we had, in 13 years of marriage up to this point, never spent every waking hour (and those asleep) in each others' company!
We aged...... very rapidly.... in that first full year!
But we found our feet..... found a great head chef and got ourselves on the ridiculously competitive foody map in the area!
No bumps so far..... just the difficult adjustment to a different kind of folk was obvious...... we couldn't understand why people were so unfriendly.... bordering on nasty in some instances.... but we lifted our chins and carried on.... we had a job to do... even if it was going to be made a little more difficult than we had initially thought.
I wont dwell on these difficult times in the early days.... or on the difficult people that crossed our paths and made them very bumpy, but they will definitiely pop up from time to time during the blog.....
..... look out for them.... they're certainly interesting enough!!
TTFN
M
