A Quick One

We forget to mention that this past Friday (between Maya’s days at work) we went to a mansion just down the street from us. It’s called Goodwood. It’s a former plantation - at one time the center of a 5,000 acre operation. Oddly enough, it seems that while it was a working plantation with slaves, cotton picking, sugar cane burning and the whole bit, operating it was not a source of income for the majority of the owners. Most where already wealthy when they acquired the farm, I guess they would have to be to buy hundreds of acres. They just lived in the house while the work went on around them. It was first established in the early 1800s. There were a lot of improvements made in the 1920s and 1930s by a very rich widow who had parties all the time. She put in a roller-skating rink and (allegedly) the first swimming pool in Florida in an attempt to amuse her nieces and nephews. Maya loves seeing old houses and she quite enjoyed the various bedrooms (each dedicated to one particular former owner) and the various “amenities” of past times. Overall it’s pretty great to live in the twenty-first century and not the nineteenth. Matt liked the vast collection of paintings on the walls. No big-name masterpieces, but more than one piece he wouldn’t mind having a print of.