About the Innkeepers 

From the Super Bowl to serving guests

Before they became innkeepers, Sam Chi and Jill Dorson Chi made their living interviewing the likes of Tiger Woods, Lance Armstrong, Tom Brady and Roger Clemens.

But as the dot-com bubble burst in 2001 when they were living in the San Francisco Bay Area — and Jill was laid off twice in one year — the two sportswriters began thinking about making a change.

            “There were no jobs in the Bay Area. All the newspapers were cutting back. Nobody was hiring. We started talking about living somewhere else and changing careers,” Jill says.

“After much discussion, we decided Sam wanted to run his own business and I wanted to own a bed and breakfast.”

The idea made sense: Sam and Jill both love to travel, having visited 15 countries together and another 12 separately.

They’ve also traveled to 48 of the 50 states and visited six of the eight Hawaiian Islands, so they know all too well how frequently lackluster accommodations can put a damper on an otherwise enjoyable trip. That led them to believe there’s always room in any marketplace for an inn that succeeds at making service and luxury its top priorities.

Sam and Jill also did a fair amount of traveling for their jobs as sportswriters at daily newspapers. Ironically, that part of their lifestyle also helped them decide to get out of the business they’d been in for a combined 31 years in cities like San Francisco, Los Angeles, New Orleans and Fort Worth, Texas.

Although it may seem glamorous to fly around the country covering professional and college sports, it can become a grind with late-night deadlines and quick turnarounds to come home.

Besides, they figured they’d had a pretty good run.

Between them, they’d covered the NCAA Final Four, the Master’s Golf Tournament, the U.S. Open, the Rose Bowl, the Sugar Bowl, the NBA All-Star Game, the College World Series, and the soccer World Cup.

Then, in January 2003, as they were in the midst of negotiating the purchase of the Ash Street Inn, they both covered the biggest sporting event in America, the Super Bowl.

It seemed like a fitting farewell.

“We call that our ‘swan song,’ ” Sam says. “Covering the Super Bowl, together, was one of the most exciting assignments we ever had, and the most stressful. It wasn’t hard to say goodbye to sportswriting after that.”

Not surprisingly, sports are what brought Sam and Jill together. They met in 1998 at an NCAA basketball tournament. They were engaged 18 months later on Kauai and married in July 2001 at the Hotel del Coronado on Coronado Island in San Diego.

Born in New Hampshire, Jill has hop-scotched around the country, as journalists are like to do, living in nine states and the District of Columbia. Sam was born in Taipei, Taiwan, and moved to the United States in 1984 as a teenager in search of a better education.

Guests to the inn who don’t consider themselves sports fans find out quickly that there’s more to the couple than you can see from their resumes. Fluent in Mandarin, Sam loves history and politics, interests that are, in part, fueled by his grandfather, who was press secretary to Chiang Kai-shek’s son. Jill has long enjoyed cooking and interior design, pastimes that she’s put to good use since the couple took over the inn.

Sam and Jill targeted Florida in their search for a B&B for several reasons: First and foremost, it has a more affordable cost of living than the San Francisco Bay Area, but it also has nice weather year-round, and plenty of golf courses (they both play).

In addition, Jill’s parents live near Jacksonville, which initially led the couple to consider buying an inn in St. Augustine. Fla. “We wanted a historic home that had charm and character, but we didn’t find what we were looking for in St. Augustine,” Sam says.

Instead, they settled on the more tranquil, picturesque streets of downtown Fernandina Beach, buying the Ash Street Inn in June 2003. Technically, Jill is supposed to handle “front of the house” duties, those involving contact with the guests, and Sam handles the “back of the house,” or all of the behind-the-scene business aspects. But the truth is they cross over quite a bit.

“Anything and everything at the inn, we’ve done it, from scrubbing toilets to negotiating a multi-million dollar deal,” Sam says.

And both of them believe they made the right choice to dramatically shift career paths.

“I don’t have any regrets,” says Sam. “I don’t think about going back to what I used to do.”

 Jill agrees: “I don’t ever get up in the morning and think, ‘I don’t want to go to work,’ ” she says, although she admits with a smile that she’s never been a morning person and sometimes wishes someone would invent a “bed and brunch” concept.