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Most 9-to-5ers have daydreamed about chucking office life to do what we love. Date published: 4/8/2007
By KIM BAER It was at the vineyard that they heard the story that changed their lives. In April 2004, Kipp Wright and Beth O'Connor seemingly had it all. The newly married couple had the jobs: Wright as IT director for usatoday.com and O'Connor as an event planner for the Smithsonian's National Air and Space Museum. They had the money: Wright made six figures, O'Connor made well into the five figures. They had the fancy condo: in Rosslyn, walking distance to Georgetown. But something was missing. Each worked 60 to 80 hours a week. On their rare vacations, Wright brought his laptop and BlackBerry. On event nights, O'Connor was at work from 8 a.m. to midnight. Her work often spilled into the weekends. "I started to realize that, hold on, my life is approximately two hours on a Saturday, if I'm lucky," O'Connor said. On that day at the vineyard, they started chatting with a woman having a bachelorette party. She was receiving grapevines as presents. Wright and O'Connor were intrigued. Turns out, the woman and her fiance had bought a vineyard. O'Connor had talked for years about running a bed-and-breakfast. She always figured it was something they would do "later," in retirement. Not when she was 34. But shortly after the vineyard visit, the couple began B&B shopping. They visited inns along the East Coast. They decided to look at an inn in Maine, a side trip on their way to another inn on Cape Cod. They thought the picturesque harbor town of Camden, Maine, was lovely. Fredericksburg is a metropolis compared with the small town of 5,000, said O'Connor, who grew up in Spotsylvania County. Then they saw Abigail's Inn and they were sold. They loved the 19th-century Greek Revival house with its big Southern front porch. The couple bought the four-guest-room inn in July and moved in that Labor Day weekend. Friends and family were surprised, and a bit worried, about their sudden shift from yuppies to innkeepers. "I think we all thought they had lost their minds," said O'Connor's sister, Meghan O'Connor, who lives in Fredericksburg. But Beth has always had an adventurous spirit, her older sister said. This was the girl, after all, who once took a job in Miami because she was tired of commuting from Fredericksburg to Washington.
Date published: 4/8/2007
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