Ringing and Singing with Mark Don McInnes in Sandpoint ID

Ringing and Singing with Mark Don McInnes in Sandpoint ID

I have wanted to talk with Mark Don McInnes, Sandpoint  for some time, for a number of reasons!

I have always enjoyed his posts, and have been following him for some time, and today I finally just picked up the phone and dialed. I’ll admit the Ringing and Singing in the Rain contest being sponsored by Debbie Reynolds spurred me to finally take action.

I shared with him that I had to look up on the map to see where he was in Idaho, and was surprised he was so close to the Canadian border. Now THAT makes me think COLD, but Mark said today was actually in the rather balmy 30s.

Still cold for me, now that I am here in SoCal for 11 years, but having lived in New England, and also MN, I got what he was saying.

I had to laugh about his stories about recently cleaning snow and ice off of tenants’ roofs – I did some of that back in the Boston area on my own homes to hopefully avoid the ice dams.

We had a wonderful 45 minute conversation, which of course touched on personal stuff like bike riding – if you follow Mark at all you no doubt know about one of 2 amazing bike rides he took last year, the WaCanId International Selkirk Loop Bicycle Race in September, and perhaps enjoyed his series of posts and photos. He invited me to join him next year – we’ll see. I know he also is considering the Chafe 150 bike ride, all in one day in 2017, having done the 80 mile ride in 2016. I think the most I have even ridden was about 120 miles!

I wasn’t aware of this, or if I knew it was lost somewhere along the way, but Mark hails from Southern California originally (e.g., Huntington Beach, Newport Beach), so while he misses the beach, there is a draw to the mountains and life in Idaho that has kept him very happy since his move there in 2006 (about a year after I moved from Boston to Carlsbad). This move followed a number of years in the Tahoe area and working at the Northstar Resort, so the leap from SoCal life to North Idaho was not a total shock!

Mark’s real estate career, beginning in 2006, is focused on residential and is about 60/40 sellers/buyers, with one commercial sale, but his heart is in residential. The economy in Sandpoint is primarily tourist and lumber, and prices have gotten to the point where some locals are priced out of the market, and it’s now more expensive to rent than it is to own a home.  Something we hear about other areas, too!

No conversation with Mark would be complete, of course, without talking about Halley, his big Newfoundland.

Followers of Mark’s will certainly recall multiple photos stories of this beautiful dog who clearly dotes on Mark, as he does on her!

Needless to say it was lots of fun to get to know each other some more on the phone, with hopes of perhaps a personal meeting some day (if I get to Idaho to bike ride or he comes here for a visit!!), and Mark was exactly as I expected from what I have seen and read here on AR.  

If you know anyone interested in the North Idaho lifestyle, for either a permanent or a second home, be sure to give Mark a call!