I'll try to be brief . . .

October, 2015

When we began this experiment, my wife (Ann), and I (David), were taking a twentieth wedding anniversary trip from our home in North Plains, through California, to Las Vegas. There we would renew our wedding vows. Our trip took us to Grants Pass, Oregon, Fort Bragg California, and Atuscadero, California, before we drove into in Las Vegas.

I could go on about this, but the trip was about celebrating having raised all the kids to eighteen years old and having achieved all of the goals we made together in the first few months we were a couple. Having done it all, and still having a bit more time, we decided to renew our contract and set up some new goals.

The conversation went on for five days as we slowly made our way south toward our date with Elvis and it started with the first question: "What do you want to be when you grow up?"

I am a creative person. Having loads of ideas is nice because you can think outside the box even if most of the stuff outside the box is useless. Ann is not especially creative, but being able to think inside the box is handy when things need to get done according to a plan. So we were a good team going into this project. We talked over about two dozen ideas before landing on the idea that what we really wanted to do was to open a wedding venue.

Both of us had been married before we met each other, had then married each other too, and all of this experience told us that the wedding venue business is happy, and also fairly lucrative. Some might say that we had weddings on the brain for a few months. Since we often over-prepare for projects, we had exhausted every wedding possibility before deciding to drive down to Vegas.

The answer to the first question (what to do) brought with it an long list of problems, each needing a solution. But we had five days to talk about it, as we drove south, and so it went that other questions jumped out the first. What sort of place? How large or small? Where? These were the type of questions we addressed and exhausted.

Eventually every conversation turned to the same thing: MONEY.

The fact of the matter is that I often dream a lot bigger than my budget allows. Nearly anyone can build nearly anything if they have enough money. So it seemed like an impasse, wanting a wedding venue which cost about a two million dollars, and not having two million dollars. It became blindingly obvious that we needed a plan to get us to the first million if we wanted what we thought we wanted. We have always said that the way to eat an Elephant is to start taking bites and eventually the Elephant will be eaten.

Many more conversations later we arrived on a what we figured was a path to success:
1. Go back into breeding Basset Hounds (we had done this before), and save up twenty thousand dollars.
2. Leverage the twenty into two hundred buying a property where we could eventually build the wedding venue.
3. Use the property to make more money and begin to build a place where people could come and experience our vision long before the wedding venue could be built.
4. Continue creating the conditions where the wedding venue would arise.
5. Seven years later get married in our own chapel.

Sounds simple enough. Step one: Collect Underpants. We need to buy dogs.