Our blog is moving today and is going to become part of the Brewster Inn website.

Please go to http://brewsterinn.com/blog to catch up on whats been going on. Updates will be live in a couple of hours 

You will need to change your links and or re-subscribe to the new blog as its at a different web address. The widget for the email subscription may take a few days to put on so bear with us  but there is also an RSS too .. See you there!!!

In my home city of Gloucester in England today. Its a bank holiday just as it is in America and once a year they do this…

 

The hill they race down is steep as you’ll see and there are a lot of injuries from it. People come to compete from around the world. Heres the offical website that explains more http://www.cheese-rolling.co.uk/

 

Will be on Monday June 16th at 5pm ET. There will also be up to 5 repeats of it over the course of the next year as well. We are very much looking forward to seeing it at last and for people local to Dexter we will be doing an “Open House to coincide with the show at a date to be announced in the press and on here.

Also there may be changes happening to the blog in the near future. We have another version of the same blog that is actually written into our website and the plan is for that to be the blog soon when we’ve finished moving everything over to it. The www address of the new blog is slightly different to this one and as soon as its ready we’ll direct you to the new link. The reason we’ve done it is that with everyone clicking on the new blog, it will increase our search engine rankings on Google and Yahoo etc and make us even more prominent in Maine Tourism

See you soon

Mark and Judith

Ok, so its time to crack on and tell you more about whats going on here at the Brewster. I think i need to fast forward and take a couple of posts to bring you up to date so that i can tell you about everything thats happening as and when it happens like i’d always wanted to do. What i’ll do from now is probably jump back in time with a post every now and again

 

Time for some pics to start with (in no particular order) from February and March 2007 when we first arrived

Us on our “thrones” as people said when we appeared in one of the 2 State daily newspapers

Our first snowfall 2 days after we arrived. You don’t get snow in England so to find 12″ of it outside was interesting

Our snow plow guy Perry, Theresa and his truck. He is a BIG help when we get major snow

The snow has enabled us to have a little bit of fun

Some people go ice fishing where they get out onto the lake, drill a hole in it and then put a line down into the water. Then they sit in a hut and wait for the little red flag to pop up

Heres our “cable guy”

Heres our car. Like the plates?

Here are our logos done by a good friend of ours called Kim who also just happens to be a wonderful and very talented designer

In May just 12 weeks after we got here, we won an award from the State of Maine and Maine Tourism Assoc for all the work we’d done since we got to Maine. It was a very nice surprise

On the way back from Bethel and the awards function we found the border with Mexico!
And if you have stayed here in the past, you’ll know why i’m

In June once all the snow had gone it was time to get on with repairing the house. The 2 people that we gave that task to were Elijah and Ethan. They are great workmen both with their skills and their work ethic. In September Elijah left the area to take his wife and children to Missouri as they were going to be training to become missionairies over the next 2 years and so we then had their father Eric carry on the good work here with Ethan

These pictures are how the house looked in June once the paintwork had all been scraped and powerwashed prior to priming and brush painting

 

Just wanted to share with you the Pavement drawings of Julian Beaver. An amazing talent as you’ll see below with his 3D chalk drawings on pavements around the world . Check his website above for more of his work and just in time for Christmas heres what happens when you drop your letter for Santa through the slit in the post box….

We were just “little people” living in England. 2 little people with normal little jobs living in a normal little house doing normal little things.. you get what i’m trying to say here

Living in a big city we were just “faces in the crowd” getting up, working long hours, getting home, having dinner, watch tv and then go to bed. Repeat this cycle 5 times a week. We were working to live and that was all as everything is so expensive there.

Heres a few facts..
In the UK there are 60m people and that figure is rising at a significant rate due to the EU (European Union) and all the member countries which mean that anyone pretty much right across the whole of Europe can come to UK and live.. and they do too.

60m people is about one fifth of the population of the USA but with America being as big as it is, you could fit the whole of the UK into an area the size of Maine, Vermont and about a third of New Hampshire!
1/5 of the whole population of the USA living in an area about 1/20 the size of America. Its crowded and shows no sign of changing any time soon

Its expensive to live there too.

Gas (petrol) in UK costs equal to around $8.20 a gall
Cars in UK that are also for sale in the USA cost approx twice the price in UK. As an example the Toyota RAV4 costs $28k in USA and in UK costs about £28k which equates to $56k. I tried this little cost exercise with 4 makes of car or truck and thats how it works out every time. My SUV would of cost me equal to £12.5k and you can’t even get a 3 wheel car for that in UK let alone a 3litre V6 SUV!

In UK you have to buy a licence for owning a TV once a year at a cost of equal to $300. Thats right, dog licence, drivers licence and a TV licence! You can have as many TV’s as you like for that $300 though but you have to have one otherwise the TV licencing police who drive around surburbia in the middle of the night with their detector vans looking to pick up radio waves coming from properties that the computers in the vans say are not registered as having a licence. If they come across a property like that they are within their rights to take you to court where you can actually be fined equal to about $2k or sent to prison for a few months! Yeah i know.. “big brothers” alive and well in the UK but thats how it is. The licence money goes to the BBC (British Broadcasting Corporation) for making programmes, paying the wages of employees and presenters etc as the BBC is the only group of channels that does not have commercials, but thats not the point as the licence fee is outdated and should be got rid of in my opinion.

This is how it used to be in the early days

Nowadays things are more high tech as the following articles show

The old days

How it is now

Terminology of devices requiring a licence

According to the definition of TV receiving apparatus, a licence must be obtained for any device which is “installed or used” for receiving television programme services. This covers:

• Televisions
• VCR’s
• Set-top boxes
• PC tuner cards capable of receiving broadcasts (and similar devices).

Heres more from Wikipedia on the TV Licence

 Like i said, big brothers alive and well in the UK which leads me on to the next topic nicely.

CCTV otherwise known as “Close Circuit TV” is everywhere in the UK. On average you are caught on camera about 300 times a day going about your normal everyday business. Where ever you go you are being watched whether its bars, shops, train stations or just walking up the road. The UK is the most watched country in the whole world and there are approx 1 camera for every 14 people in the country. Another way to look at it is that one fifth of the worlds CCTV cameras are in the UK!  George Orwell who wrote the book “1984″ would be rolling in his grave if he knew what was happening nowadays. This article  in the Daily Mail (UK Newspaper) shows how many cameras are positioned right  around Orwells old home in London. There are even cameras on poles in city centres where the CCTV operator can shout at you via a microphone to stop riding your bicycle, pick your litter up etc. Heres a couple of “You Tubes” on it

 

So other reasons America is better than UK

Sales Tax! 5 or 7% in Maine and 17.5% in UK. Known as VAT (Value Added Tax) its already added to the price you see on the ticket so you don’t have to work out the cost of something as you do here in America. The only downside here is that for us Brits we don’t know what the final price is till we  get to the cash desk. When we first got here we’d forget that the sales tax wasn’t added to the ticket and we’d count out the exact money trying to give as much as we could in spare change and then the cashier would tell us “you forgot the tax” so back into the wallet goes the coins and out comes another $20 note and in return we got more coins to add to what we had before. We’d try and count out the money before we were served so as not to hold other customers up at the cash desk by counting it all out when we were being served. At last after a few months we’re getting quicker at counting coins but there are still times when my wallet is weighted down with coins and when i can find a nice quite shop i utter the words that all shop keepers/ cashiers dread when i come in to see them, ”would you like some change?”

Come to think of it, foods a lot cheaper here too whether your buying it from a shop or in a takeaway or restaurant where you get three times as much for half the price, free drink refills and doggy bags!

Homes are a lot more expensive in UK too. Our little 4 bed house sold for equal to about $377k and when we’d sold the house to fund the deposit for the Brewster Inn, we moved into a small one bed apartment that would probably fit into our living room now. The lady that owned it sold it when we had left for equal to about $300k and all it had was a bedroom, living room, kitchenette and very small bathroom that when you stood by the door you could touch all the walls of. It was a period property but thats still way too expensive hence a lot of people with good jobs just can’t afford to get on the property ladder in UK now

And i havn’t even got started on traffic light, speed and licence plate recognition cameras.. thats for some other day i think.

Are there any plus points about the UK you might be asking.. well its a nice place to visit, has plenty of history and lovely countryside but i really do prefer America. Its a great place to be

Here i am!!

Sorry for the delay in the updates but we kind of reached a “turning point” in the story. After chatting to friends over here “in the know” i need to leave a chunk of “our story” out. Shame really as i’d always planned  to tell the whole thing, leave no stone unturned etc etc but its for the best right now. A lot of guests and friends have said we could write a book about “our story”. Yeah we probably could but i don’t have time to read books now let alone write one hence the blog. Pretty much all our guests have asked us how we got here and so we tell them and then they begin to know and understand the whole story. The story has a long way to go too…..

Watch this space real soon

It was a busy day with a lot of preperation in the days leading up to it. On Monday (the day before) we had lots of help from people in town getting everything ready. Thanks to Laura, Judy and everyone that came for all your help. We also found we had supplies of flowers and pumpkins to help brighten the place up more with an autumn feel so thanks to Spring St greenhouse and Reny’s for that too.

After about a 16 hour day and a couple of hours work early on Tuesday morning we were ready for HGTV who arrived at 9am. We had Lori (producer) Jim (camera) and Scott (sound) here and it was busy busy busy the whole day long. Finally after a 10 hour day filming was done. Lori said it was one of the best ones she had ever done as we’d been fully prepared and that the house had so much history.

As well as HGTV we had 2 of the big State TV stations here WLBZ and WABI and the big State daily paper the Bangor Daily News as well as regional paper the Piscataquis Observer.

Below are links from the days actvities

The photos are from a very good friend in town called Judy (good luck in the council elections!!!)

Photos

Bangor Daily News

 WLBZ

We still have the State Sunday newspaper to do an article with and as soon as that happens i’ll post the link here. Its all obviously good for us at the Brewster as the TV show will be seen right across America again and again, but at the same time the publicity is great for Dexter as it will bring more people into the area and more businesses will benefit because of that.

I’ll update the next stage of the story on how we got here soon, probably by this time next week. Its been a busy 3 weeks getting ready  for and exhibiting at the State snowmobile association trade show thats was held for 3 days during the Columbus day weekend and then the days it took to prepare for the TV shoot but it was well worth it

Another quickie post for today just to let you all know that on October 16th we have HGTV coming to the Brewster Inn to film for their popular  nationwide TV show “If Walls Could Talk”!

This is something that we’ve been working on with “High Noon Entertainment” for a couple of months to spread the name of the Brewster Inn and the town of Dexter right across America as the more business we get here, the more people will come to Dexter, spend their money with businesses in the town and start to make Dexter a “stopping off” point rather than a “passing through” point which in reality it probably is right now

HGTV is the most watched group of channels in America after the main stations like NBC and Fox etc and the show will be repeated at numerous times in the future

 The TV crews will be here for around 10 hours on the 16th and we will be in series 9 of “If Walls Could Talk” which will air late Spring 2008. As soon  as we know the date, we’ll let you know and put it on the homepage at www.brewsterinn.com

Also while i’m here keep an eye out on the Brewster website as in about 4-6 weeks the 2nd version of the site will go live and even though we love how the site currently looks, there was always going to be a bigger more informative version appearing that will include all new photography, more information on Governor Brewster, Dexter and the area in general. I’ve seen “work in progress” and its brilliant!!

Ok, so i wasn’t planning on blogging tonight but i was surfing the net looking for some Nascar race footage from Darlington SC for a friend and i found these. They both pretty much explain it all. Its noise, colour and wind (generated from the cars kinda wind)