Bill Rumford was driving down Highway 101 in the San Francisco Bay area one afternoon at a clip of 65 miles per hour when a car behind him started honking and flashing its lights for him to speed up.
“That was the very moment I knew I needed to get out of the rat race,” he recalls.
Mr. Rumford went home that day in 2004 and dropped a bomb on his wife, Maggie. Remembering a bed-and-breakfast they had visited recently on Pender Island, a tranquil setting with 2,500 residents located between Vancouver on the Canadian mainland and Victoria Island, Mr. Rumford told his wife: “I think we should go up there and offer to buy it.”
Their B&B, called Oceanside Inn, sits on a bluff 50 feet above the water, with stairs leading down to a rocky beach. The Rumfords receive guests from April through October; the inn sits near their own home on the same property.
“Bill spends a lot of time entertaining the guests and maintaining the property, while I do the operations, so it works out well,” says Ms. Rumford, 59. She has become something of an expert breakfast cook, decorator and gardener, even though she didn’t spend much time on domestic activities in her previous life.
The couple, who are about to receive Canadian citizenship, make enough to live on from the inn, without having to tap their pensions.
The Rumfords say they’ve had no trouble adapting to a slower pace of life. Pender Island has no stoplights, but it does have shopping centers, doctors and even a small community theater.
If they need to buy supplies for the inn, the mainland is two hours away by ferry, and Vancouver Island just 40 minutes.
Photo by WSJ.
Tim Cannon on January 4th, 2008 at 1:24 pm
Well, that’s where you went Bill!….your mail gets returned, and you have really left the Bay Area for good it seems…our loss. I still drive by the house on Milvia and think of you and your great family. All the best up in Canada. I’m sure Ruth and George here in Berkeley would wish you well too!