Groveland Life by Kathryn Sibly
Overdue HoneymoonAt present I am in Australia taking my much overdue honeymoon. Since I am not in Groveland this month, I figured this would be a good opportunity to tell my story of how I ended up in “Groovey-Land”. And I will also answer some of your burning questions: Are you related to BJ Sibley? How did you get hooked up with the SMT? Story first, then I’ll answer those questions.
To explain how I got to Groveland, I need to back up about 5 1/2 years. A true “backpacker” at the time, I was traveling on a shoestring budget. I had already bought a round-the-world ticket with stops in Hong Kong, Australia, and New Zealand. I decided to visit Tasmania, but to get there from Sydney, the cheapest way was to go by ferry from Melbourne. I took a 12-hour overnight bus trip to Melbourne and needless to say, it wasn’t much fun.
The ferry to Tasmania left the following night. It was here that I met my future husband. After hearing my low budget story, he invited me to sleep in one of the empty bunks in his cabin for the night. After a night on a bus, a bed of any sort sounded great, so I took him up on his offer. Nothing happened, and in the morning he invited me to tour Tasmania with him in his rental car. We spent the next four days touring Tasmania as friends. Parting really was sweet sorrow, however. He continued on his trip, I continued on mine. We kept in contact by email.
Well, one thing lead to another, and about a month later I found myself flying back to New Zealand to join him for two weeks of touring the country….and then some. After New Zealand, we both returned to the U.S., me to Illinois and him to the Bay Area. Over the next many months we took turns visiting each other, but that got old after a while.
So in early January of 2005, we drove my Saturn and most of my worldly goods across the country to California. I first settled with him in Mill Valley and quickly realized I didn’t want to stay there (neither did he). We spent the next few months getting his house ready for sale, yet we still didn’t know where we wanted to live.
He had a vacation home in Groveland that I’d visited a time or two before. It seemed like a logical move, for there was a fully furnished house sitting there, unused. It also hadn’t had any real maintenance or upkeep in its 30 year life.
We moved full-time to Groveland in August of 2005. We did not (and still do not) plan on settling in Groveland permanently. It may be beautiful and quiet and all, but it’s small and quite far from everything. And, as Lynn at the Hotel Charlotte put it, I’m about a generation-and-a-half younger (if not more) than most of the full-timers in Groveland. Seriously, go to almost any local event, and you’ll find more white heads than anything else. If you like playing bingo, bunko, quilting, or country line dancing, then Groovey-Land is the place for you.
Now, to get to those other “burning” questions. I’ve never met BJ Sibley, though we did exchange emails during that month she was filling as the SMT Editor while Thomas was on vacation. She married into the Sibley family name, I was born into it. Offhand we couldn’t find a connection between my and her husband’s families.
In my quest to find a job at the beginning of the year, I was looking all over the place, including classified ads. In the SMT I saw an ad asking for submissions from readers. I sent in an article about running in the Chinese Camp Run, but it was received too late to be published. However, Thomas asked me to send more articles about local events I would be attending. I did so, and have had a few articles run in the SMT.
Along around May, Thomas asked me if I could deliver papers around Groveland. He and Marv (Dealy) had been delivering papers on the hill intermittently, and they wanted the delivery to be more regular. So now every week someone leaves a stack of SMT’s at Sonora Sports and Fitness for me to distribute throughout Groovey-Land.
As if that’s not enough, in July I responded to another SMT classified ad: looking for locals in surrounding communities to write monthly columns about where they live. I obviously jumped at the chance to be a regular contributor and to write about Groveland.
