Christmas Homes Tour
Greetings All!
On last Saturday, December 8th, our house was a part of a new, small, local Holiday Homes Tour called the “Holly Trolley Tour”!
What was nice about this tour (for the tour-goers) was that all of the homes were in a few blocks of each other. The idea is that all of the homes were on or very close to Winner Road, where once the old trolley tracks ran.
There were four homes, a garden, and a church on the tour. And no, there was no real trolley for people to ride on. (This was the first official year for this tour. There’s talk of having a real trolley next year.)
All proceeds from the tour went to the Englewood Community Gardens, a non-profit organization that runs the Englewood Gardens at Winner and Hardy.
Our house was one of the homes on the tour.
And I’ve posted about 130 photos on this website of the various rooms of that tour:
http://www.myoldhouse.com/gallery/categories.php?cat_id=19
The weather that day started off rather bad. We had had some light snow and freezing rain overnight. I got up and went out on errands at 8 AM. I found the two state highways near us (24 Hwy and Truman Road) to be in great shape, as the State had already put sand out on them.
However, the City of Independence had done NOTHING to the roads by that time, even to their own Main Street / Independence Square area, which is a major tourist attraction!!
I did not see a sand truck go by our house until approximately 11:30 AM !!
Fortunately, after that, word must have gotten out that the roads were improving. We had somewhere between 50 and 60 people come through our home between 11 AM and 3 PM !
What was nice about this number of people is we had time to chat with most of them… plus there were natural “breaks” between groups so that we ourselves could take a break.
A big thanks to our four “helpers” who assisted us that day: Amy, Tina, Sherry, and Donna! They were there to help us monitor and assist our visitors. But we actually had a lot of time to talk and laugh with them during the day!
It was a lot of fun and we PROBABLY will do it again next year.
I’m going to encourage a few of my neighbors, as well as two Bed & Breakfasts on Winner Road, to add their own homes to the tour.
Go take a look at our photos! The first floor bathroom ones especially brought us a lot of smiles and positive comments!
Merry Christmas !!
-= Dave and Terry Raasch =-