Category: Florida Breaks

With the interwoven challenges of heat and roommates, our daily life continued on. For several weeks during the summer our Internet kept coming and going. When we rely so much on its easy accessibility (research, online bill-paying, bank reconciliations, communicating with others), being without it is very frustrating. After getting totally fed up with frequent annoying fixes that never seemed to last, Chelsea finally called the modem company. Turns out that the software on the modem needed to be updated, which Chelsea was able to do over the phone, and voila – no more difficulties. What a relief…

Interspersed with the Internet annoyance was trying to fix our washer (it stopped mid-wash one day in early July). With four of us in the household and a lot of laundry, that was definitely a hassle! We ordered a new timer and learned how to install it, but no luck. Knowing that any other fixes would likely cost as much as a new washer, I looked on Craigslist and found a perfect candidate for replacing our old washer. Alex agreed to pay the $150 asking price, we called, and within two hours the sellers had delivered it to our door, set it up, and took our old one. We now have a washer that is only about a year old, the same make and style as our old one, but much, much nicer. After a month of hassle and hand-washing our clothing, we are incredibly appreciative every time we use it…
(more…)

Having roommates is definitely a new experience for Chelsea and me. Alex grew up in our household, so having him as a quasi-roommate was pretty straightforward. We’ve known him his whole life, and we had worked out the issues of living together. Besides, he’s close family.

It’s been a new look at life to awaken to sticky spills on the kitchen floor from a roommate’s midnight raid on the kitchen, find food debris left strewn across the kitchen table after meal preparation, hear a dog barking and whining during the night at who knows what, be awakened at any hour of the night or early morning by a roommate coming in from wherever, and watch our carefully planned food supplies disappear precipitously with the advent of a new roommate.

On the upside, we have had access to a car often; we have a steady supply of coffee (from Tyler); there’s someone to share the small details of daily life; many nights are uninterrupted; the food spills aren’t every day; and there’s often a sense of community.
(more…)

“I’ll be back again next week, so adios till then.” I should know better than to end a travel journal entry that way. Given the unpredictability of our lives, a week could well turn into a month, or a month into three months. That’s what happened this summer. A few days turned into a week, a week turned into a month, the months rippled by smoothly. I look at the date on my last journal entry; June became late August, August slid right into late September, and now October is halfway gone.

It’s not been an uneventful time. We’ve had the hottest weather on record for five months; Tyler left for Boston for ten days, returned for four, then left for three weeks (he’s back now); Alex moved out, after nearly twenty-three years of sharing a house with us; we’ve put our house up for sale; we’ve seen Despicable Me (twice) and Shrek IV in theaters.
(more…)

Summer and blooming

Summer arrived early this year – May was noticeably warmer than usual, though it didn’t hit horribly unpleasant levels of heat. Somehow though, even with a late/non-existent spring, we’re having a record year for blooming. Remember the pollen carpet we had for weeks? Thankfully that’s been gone for awhile, but everything else has been blooming at a record rate – I’ve never seen our plants so lush.

After fearing last fall that our frangipani was nearly dead, it’s now been blooming for weeks at full foliage and with full blooms. Our little desert rose is so heavy with blooms that the branches are drooping. The oak trees are fully leafed, creating more shade than we’ve seen in ten years (they are also bigger by a factor of twenty!). From my desk I see a massive poinciana tree behind a neighbor’s house over on the next street; the huge expanse of lush, flame-colored flowers has been lighting up the skyline for weeks now.
(more…)

Getting exercise

Life’s been very quiet at the Inlet this last week. The winds finally died, and we’ve had increasingly higher tides, so fishing is non-existent. We’re expecting full-moon high tides on Thursday, which means the tides will likely swamp the seawall. That’s always a sight to see – water in the parking lot, fish coming up through the water drains, seaweed littering every possible surface.

Meanwhile it’s been quiet, quiet, quiet; today not a single soul was fishing and the parking lot had perhaps four cars.

We took a much needed break over the weekend – Chelsea was even more tired than I, and though we got up and headed out on Saturday, we got only three miles before I suggested we quit and return home. After only a moment’s thought, Chelsea gladly agreed. We’ve been doing serious exercise every day for over five weeks, seven days a week. It’s okay to let go now and then.
(more…)

Bike rides to the Inlet. Weight workouts. Daily tasks. Body for Life. Getting projects done. The last week and a half we’ve kept chugging along steadily.

The Body for Life project is taking over our lives, in a good way. Each day starts at six a.m. or shortly thereafter. Four days a week we head out immediately for the Inlet for a twenty-three-plus mile bike ride. We take about two hours for the whole ride, including a short break at the Inlet.

Riding and the Inlet

The Inlet never fails to entertain us. Last week we saw a local fisherman catch a barracuda. As Chelsea took photos, the fisherman worked to get the hook out; he’d already promised the barracuda to three other fishermen who wanted to use it for bait. I was front and center watching the whole process, and when the fisherman got the hook out, he handed the barracuda to me, on the line, telling me to hold it.
(more…)

Mother’s Day 2008 found us at Café du Monde in New Orleans eating beignets and sipping café au lait. We’d left the Lakeview District the previous afternoon with our Couchsurfing host Darryl Goodwin (and his dog Maria), bicycling eighteen miles through New Orleans, taking a ferry across the Mississippi, and spending the night in the Algiers district.

Mother’s Day morning we bicycled back through the same route, but wandered through the French Quarter on our return, stopping for the world famous coffee and beignets at Café du Monde before heading back to Darryl’s house.

Mother’s Day 2009 found us in Oak Grove, right on the Gulf in southwest Louisiana, staying with Jo Ann Nunez. By the time Mother’s Day rolled around, we’d been staying with Jo Ann for over a month and had begun to feel a part of the local community. Mother’s Day started at the Baptist Church, celebrating the first use of the main area of the church after its post-Hurricane Ike repairs.
(more…)

How it happened is not a big surprise, but Chelsea and I have both gained significant body fat over the last two years; I much more so than Chelsea. Stress contributed greatly – it’s not been an easy several years with the economy having wiped out our income sources – but maybe the fried fish, crawfish, shrimp po’boys, cracklins, deep-fried turkey, fried alligator, venison sausage, boudin, beignets, ice cream pistolets, funnel cakes, fried oysters, Blue Bell ice cream, and fried Snickers Bars we consumed on a steady basis during our year in Louisiana had an effect.

Whatever happened, the bottom line is grim. We need to lose inches, lose weight, and replace body fat with muscle weight.

We did well after arriving home in terms of “normalizing” our eating, but letting go of the Blue Bell Moolenium Crunch and Mocha Almond fudge was a struggle. We bought Alex a Ninja smoothie maker and started drinking healthy smoothies; I ordered the herbal formulas LeanCare (helps maintain normal processing of fats) and LiverCare (supports normal liver function); we started taking them regularly.
(more…)

The siren call of our trip is never far from our awareness – it underlies everything we do. Though we find ourselves currently in the midst of other projects, each one of them gets us farther and farther along the way to leaving for seven or more years, knowing that everything is shipshape on the home front.

We continue to work on the fundamentals of preparation for leaving. It’s been a combination of gradually acquiring the clothing, gear, and equipment that we need for being on the road; doing research for what we need; and doing essential organizational projects.

Research projects

Finding what’s out there to make our lives easier feels like a full-time job. That’s my job. I spend hours on the computer looking up products, reading reviews, checking prices, till I find some decent possibilities.
(more…)

One of the very best things about being home is seeing our family; on the road we missed them so much at times it was a palpable ache.

Paul and Denise and Chandler

My oldest son Paul lives with his wife Denise and son Chandler in Fort Lauderdale. Paul and Denise are extremely busy and that might be understating the case; they are real estate agents – Denise is also a mortgage broker. With the mess the real estate market is in here in South Florida, they work every day, often up to eighteen hours a day. Sunday is their only day off, and they are usually incommunicado, needing to recover to be ready for the week.

Chelsea and I don’t have a car, Paul and family live forty-five minutes away by car, and it’s a miserable long bike ride down there. That means we see them intermittently at best.
(more…)