Category: Florida Breaks

Chelsea left in early February for what was intended to be one month in California, staying at her grandparents’ home in Lompoc, a small town just north of Santa Barbara. Both her grandparents had been ailing for some time, both in nursing homes up in the San Francisco Bay area.

Chelsea’s task was to clean out the home and get it ready to rent, since neither of the grandparents would ever be returning. She flew into the San Francisco Bay area, picked up one of her dad’s cars, and drove the three-hundred-plus miles down to Santa Barbara.

What started as an apparently straightforward task of one month turned into an exhausting but successful two and a half months sojourn. After being empty for over a year, the house needed a sizeable amount of rehab – Chelsea had no electricity for the first three or four days except in one small area of the upstairs. All electrical outlets needed to be replaced.

The front and back yards needed extensive work. The house needed painting inside and out. Plumbing leaks needed to be fixed. Pest control was needed (black widows had been having a great time). Fascia needed to be replaced and a garage door needed to be replaced. All the carpet upstairs was replaced.
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No more roommates

Back on the home front, our roommate of nearly a year and half moved out the last day of April. Tyler spends summers working in Boston anyway, and with the closing date on our house being so uncertain, he opted for saving rent money and putting his things in storage for a few months. He and Terry were out by midnight that last day.

The cats are thrilled to not have to share the house with an active little dog. We are enjoying the extra space we now have…Tyler’s bedroom is now our main packing and storage area, and Chelsea has her own room for the first time in four years. The interlude is much appreciated, especially since we’ll soon be back to sharing the very small space of a two-person tent.

We were on opposite schedules from Tyler, so that’s been another plus – not having to tiptoe around in the mornings, and not being awakened at night. We start work earlier and tend to work at odd hours now that we know we aren’t bothering anyone.

We’ve heard from Tyler a few times while he’s in Boston – he’s doing well, and will be back for work and school down here within a few weeks. We’re definitely looking forward to catching up with him and hearing all his stories.

Yard and leaf project

You may remember reading our stories from last year about the record pollen, leaves, and acorns from all the trees on our property. This spring continued the trend. By the time Chelsea got back from Lompoc we were nearly shin deep in leaves. Within the first few days we were out raking and bagging. I lost track of how many bags we went through, but it was impressive. I took us two solid days of raking and bagging to get through the worst of it.
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Thanksgiving through Easter

Holidays were notably quiet this year. We spent Thanksgiving at home with Tyler, with whom we joined forces to cook a great meal and no fewer than two pumpkin pies and three cheesecakes. Guess we had a collective sweet tooth that day.

Christmas was very quiet, too. Alex and Amanda invited us over for dinner on Christmas Eve, the last day of our Body for Life program. Alex cooked for us (he’s an amazing cook), while we got to sit around relaxing, enjoying Amanda’s Sangria. Besides the great food and drink, we loved having a chance to see the two of them by themselves and relaxed.

New Year’s Eve and Valentine’s Day slid by with nary a celebration, other than to quaff a toast to each other on New Year’s Eve.

St Pat’s Day we spent separately; Chelsea had corned beef and cabbage in Lompoc CA with her dad and uncle, while I dressed up in my Everybody Loves an Irish Girl shirt (much looser on me than last year!), had green eggs by myself for breakfast, and shared a car bomb with Alex when he came over for a short visit after lunch. A car bomb at lunch made for a relaxed afternoon for me…
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Movies

One of our favorite projects has been the copying of our somewhat extensive collection of DVDs to our much-appreciated portable hard drive. I researched the software and found a decent one, got it loaded onto Chelsea’s computer, and she’s been happily copying several movies a day for months.

We ran into a couple of stubborn ones, unfortunately our favorite movies, so yesterday Chelsea bought and downloaded a better software. We are waiting for their “chat” service to open (only nine p.m. to three a.m. our time!) before she can proceed, but we are very optimistic that our long project will be done in a matter of a few days.

Memories boxes

Most of us have a sentimental streak. We’ll save our first concert tickets, postcards from special places, napkins from a restaurant, matchbooks, little trinkets we’ve collected, love letters. As we get older we save our kids’ artwork, letters from friends and family, “breaking up” letters, old address books. Birthday cards, Mother’s Day and Father’s Day cards, old sports memorabilia – they all pile up over time.

Since I’ve moved so much, I tend to pick a box and fill it with all those little odds and ends. That’s a great idea until the boxes start multiplying. Then it’s time to sort and toss, time that never seems to come.
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Floppy disks

Remember floppy disks? Hey, I thought they were awesome when they came out; I still remember the original floppy disks that were twice the size and were really and truly floppy. But life and technology move on, and here I was, stuck with over a hundred of those pesky floppy drives and no way to access the contents.

I was in the midst of hunting for any and all documents relating to the books I’m writing and these floppy disks covered most of our years in the Czech Republic and before. How could I in good conscience just toss them out (tempting though it was)?

Back to the Web I went, searching forums for converting floppy disks. The process was easy enough, but talk about tedious. I first had to change the settings on my computer to allow the old file formats. Luckily, I still have an old “tower” that has a floppy drive in it, or I’d have had a much tougher time.

I then had to insert each of the one hundred and five floppy disks, one by one, into the drive, open it up, open up each document in each directory, then save each document into the current format after creating new directories for them.

I’ll save you the gory details of the process and jump to the final results: eighty-three new directories on my hard drive; one-hundred-ninety-two individual files; and a long walk down nineteen years of memory lane. Think tedious, emotional, time-consuming, and totally utterly rewarding.
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Life continues apace with our non-stop selling of furniture and household goods and with our multiple projects of digitizing everything possible in our lives. Last November I wrote about how our house was beginning to echo, but that was small peanuts compared to now. The house is now so empty that we can’t speak in regular voices inside the house; we have to deliberately lower the volume. Chelsea calls the new voice levels our “empty” inside voices, as in “use your empty inside voice, Mom!”

Selling all our furniture and household goods

In recent months we’ve decimated our personal goods – we’ve sold wardrobes, lamps, a bed, side tables, power tools, weight benches and weights, two generators (for hurricanes), hefty generator cords, a powered USB hub, life jackets, clothing, laundry hampers, yard and garden tools, dishes, all our bookshelves, and more, more, more.

We’ve gotten so good at FreeCycle and Craigslist and garage sales (with a bit of eBay thrown in) that we could write our own “Downsizing for Dummies” series.
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Riding in the rain

Chelsea and I have been very lucky with almost never getting caught in the rain. Well, it’s been both luck and careful planning. We have, however, wanted to be better prepared for riding in the rain.

I left before dark again one Saturday while Chelsea was in California, and hadn’t paid much attention to the weather forecast. It was definitely very chilly, enough to wear cold-weather clothes and my windproof jacket.

By the time I got to A1A I realized how dark the skies were, and soon began feeling the first drops of rain. I very much wanted to keep going on my ride, despite the increasing rain. By the time I got to the Inlet I was quite wet, so I pulled off and sought cover under the pavilions, hoping it would let up.

As I sat quietly in the dark, listening to the rain on the pavilion roof, who should wander over from the ocean side of the lot but our buddy Jungle Jim, dressed for cold, wet weather, carrying fishing poles and a lawn chair. He was amazed to see me under such inhospitable conditions, almost as much as I was amazed to see him in that weather with fishing poles and a lawn chair. We chatted for a while as I tried to decide what to do. Jim invited me to breakfast with him and one of his “sponsors”, strongly urging me to go.
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Daily surprises

Each day something different happens on our rides, keeping life interesting.

There’s a house on our route on A1A, off to the left at the north end of Delray Beach, with a tall two-story window in the front. It’s normally covered in gauzy drapes and the lights are out when we come by so early. One pitch black morning (Chelsea was in California) I could see light through the trees. Getting closer, I was rewarded with a spectacular view of an absolutely stunning chandelier, fully lit in the pre-dawn dark with each of its hundreds of crystal prisms shimmering and reflecting the light.

We look for it every day now, and we’ve seen it lighted since, but it’s always been covered by the gauzy drapes, unlike that first incredible day.

One early morning while Chelsea was in California I caught up with and passed another rider. He sped up to ride with me a ways. While talking, he made a bit of a sarcastic comment about my heavy bike and wide tires. I told him I knew I could get thinner tires, but why bother since I’m gaining strength and I’ll need it for our upcoming tour.

That got him asking questions about our tour. He was fascinated, and for the next few minutes he kept his iPhone up over his head, talking away and taking photos of me as we rode, telling me he can’t wait to post them on his Facebook page. That was a bit unnerving. I never did get his name and Facebook page. Hopefully I looked stunning in the photos.
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Chasing sunrise again

Perhaps what we love the most about riding here is the spectacular scenery. Sometimes we want to pinch ourselves to see if we are dreaming – we feel so lucky to live here! (And often we can’t believe we are giving it up to live on the road for eight years…)

Before we started chasing sunrise again, we’d reach the golf course on A1A above Delray Beach just after the sun rose. Huge pine trees line the road on both sides of the golf course, more of them on the ocean side, giving frequent glimpses through the trees of the ever-changing water. As the sun rises, the red-gold light comes in horizontally through the pine trees, lighting up everything in its path; it highlights the oncoming cyclists against a brilliant background of red bougainvillea, giving them a luminous glow. Seeing it takes my breath away.

We started chasing sunrise again in early January. At 5:30, in the pitch black, the world is nearly deserted. Mists rise from the great expanse of lawn in the cemetery on cold days. The full moon highlights the roadways, ducking in and out of tree shadows, dusting the white above-ground-graves in the cemetery with an eerie glow.
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Our riding territory

We wind through several neighborhoods on our rides each morning – some with wide ethnic diversity, some all white, some all black with a few Hispanics, then the multi-million dollar neighborhoods on A1A. Each one is unique.

Our two favorites are the sections on A1A for the views and scenery, and the all-black neighborhood in southwest Delray for the people. Besides having hands-down the most courteous and thoughtful drivers on our thirty-five mile rides, we’ve come to know a number of regulars in the southwest area.

There’s the thirty-something guy, deep ebony skin, at least 6’4” and 250 lbs, who’s often outside chatting with neighbors and friends on the weekend mornings. He always has a big smile for us and a booming “Hey, girls!” His voice is so resonant that Chelsea calls him “the pastor”. Like all our regulars, he was so used to seeing both of us that when I rode without Chelsea for several months, he regularly hollered, “Hey, your friend is missing!” “Hey, your friend is still missing!”
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