Starting in December the closing date for our short sale became a rapidly moving target.

First came the big news that everything was approved and we’d be closing right after Christmas. That was discouraging, as we still needed time to finish, and we hated to be on the streets, so to speak, right during the holidays. We’d been hoping for a closing nearer to March first.

Then we heard that we’d have to close December twenty-fourth. That was a truly dismal prospect. But before we had a chance to process leaving on Christmas Eve, we heard that the whole deal was in jeopardy.

Thus ensued weeks of steady, intensely focused, stressful rounds of meetings, strategies, phone calls, emails and paperwork, punctuated by long periods of silence. Questions and anxiety hung in the air. Would it work? Could we really pull it off after all this time? Would it really fall apart after three years in process?
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Our bird watching this year started out slowly, but we more than made up for the late start with the richness of our sightings. Not only do we have the daily viewing exposure of our bike rides, but our living room has a triple sliding glass door which opens out onto a large screened-in porch, which overlooks our pool and our backyard.

Directly across from the pool sits a ten-foot long, eight-foot high cluster of old thick bougainvillea bushes. Our couches inside look out over all this, so our binoculars and camera are always right at hand, ready for bird sightings.

Thinking for months that we’d be leaving “next month”, we put off weeding the bougainvillea for a month or two. It’s a nasty thankless job with all those thorns, but it does give a nice clean look to the yard.

After a month or so, Chelsea and I noticed a profusion of butterflies, all of them hovering around the weeds in the bougainvillea. We loved all the colors and flight patterns, and thought, well this is good! Then in November the unbelievable happened.
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As if the universe was sending us a pat on the back for learning the lesson from Attila the Hun, our sale of the sideboard, our very last piece, was the exact opposite experience. Though our nerves were still shaky, we had the resolve of steel to make sure this sale went smoothly. The good news is that we didn’t need the resolve.

It was one of those dream sales.
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Finally, after many months of effort, we were down to our last two pieces of antique furniture, a wardrobe and a sideboard from our time in the Czech Republic. As luck would have it, they were also the two biggest.

The prices we’d set were heartbreakingly low for us, but South Florida is not the place for the types of antiques we had, and the antique furniture market in general was way down, never mind how depressed the local economy has been.

We became resigned to keeping the two remaining pieces, and began looking at storage places big enough to accommodate them. Then came an email from our Craigslist posting about the wardrobe. The woman who wrote was another one of those now-you-see-me-now-you-don’t kinds of folks. She’d write and set a date, then not show. Then she’d call and set a time and not confirm.
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You may wonder what getting wisdom teeth extracted has to do with our extended bike trip, but if those wisdom teeth are flaring up into pain frequently, and we’re in difficult physical situations, suddenly getting them removed sounds like the deal of a lifetime.

Over the length of our bike trip Chelsea had been consistently mentioning the discomfort with her teeth but we didn’t have any straightforward solutions.

Then in September, out of the blue, Chelsea and Alex’s dad offered to pay for the extractions. It turns out Alex’s teeth had been bothering him quite a bit, so it was a win-win for both Chelsea and Alex. They were thrilled to accept their dad’s offer.
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Holidays, Thanksgiving and Christmas

Thanksgiving came and went for us, obliterated by work. We did get a turkey and the fixin’s, but the turkey was still frozen on Thanksgiving so we ended up cooking our T-Day meal a full week later. Then of course Christmas slid right in on the heels of more work, work, work.

Chelsea and Alex’s dad Ralph came out this year, for the first time in many years, bringing along Oyunaa, his delightful wife of a just over a year (she’s Mongolian).

Since it had been forever that Ralph was here, he wanted to see as much as possible, and they managed a respectable itinerary over their ten days here.
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Birthdays

Though it’s going on six months ago I can’t fail to mention my birthday in early September. We started the day with a great bike ride and stopped by Old School on the way home. Check out “Green Flashes and more riding stories” to hear about our Old School adventure.

We spent the late morning swimming, then had dinner with Alex and Amanda at their new apartment. Alex, who’s an incredible cook, tried out a few new recipes; they were a total hit.

It was such fun to just sit and relax and have great conversation! What a difference from our regular days of work, work, work. We wandered out for frozen yogurt later in the evening, even having a chance to see Amanda’s dad’s new boat, before calling it a day.

A day later Amanda followed up on my birthday by sending a wonderful fruit arrangement, set up like a floral arrangement. I’d raved about the one she’d sent the year before, so I was thrilled to have it again. I was secretly hoping she really would send another one. The fruit didn’t last long with both of us devouring it. Thank you, Amanda!
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We’ve gotten so caught up in our downsizing projects that it’s been difficult to remember how far we’ve come, and we’ve been so busy for so long that it’s been easy to lose perspective.

Though it frequently seems as though our non-stop downsizing is sucking the life out of us (yes, it’s been brutal lately), we are always pleasantly surprised when we do take a break, look back over the months and realize we’ve actually done something other than pack, sort, write ads, and deal with Craigslist.

In the late fall we took up swimming again in our pool and loved it. We are so going to miss our pool. We’re already missing our hot tub now that the weather is cooler.

For entertainment we spend an evening or two a week looking through Hulu for our favorite shows – we rediscovered Remington Steele from the 1980s – and of course we have our Castle episodes to watch.
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Views offshore

After so many years of riding the coastline we’re pretty used to the great views, but that’s not to say we ever tire of them. The colors are always changing, the air is always different, and each day is a guessing game as to what we’ll see.

One early morning we saw a huge ship close to shore, headed north, breathtaking in its size and nearness to shore. The ocean was a striking sapphire blue while the pale blue sky was backlit by the pinks and golds of the approaching sunrise, turning the huge ship into a black silhouette against the sky.

Ranging from Gulfstream up to West Palm Beach, we’ve had a record number of dolphin sightings this year, from large pods of dolphins swimming and fishing close to shore, to small groups of three or four a bit farther out.

One incredible morning at Gulfstream we watched a small pod cavorting happily just offshore, showing off some spectacular twists and turns and leaps and jumps and double back-flips. We couldn’t bring ourselves to leave until they’d finally moved on up north.
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In the midst of the chaos and emotion of downsizing, our riding keeps us on an even keel, giving us time out of the house, providing beautiful sights and scenes, and imparting a wonderful sense of well-being from all the exercise.

For most of the year we’d been riding every other day, doing thirty-five miles, four days a week. In late August however, we decided to change up our system and increase to five days a week, in a row. We figured it would give us great practice for riding five days a week on the trip. To make up for getting up so early five days running, we shortened the length of each ride to twenty-five miles, allowing us time to get used to a new system.

We’ve also used the rides to do errands on route – bank deposits (our favorite errands), grocery shopping, trips to the post office, and everything else that needs doing.

The rides themselves are unfailingly gorgeous. We ride so often that we’ve seen many full moons come and go, and we’ve had mornings so dark, especially before the time change, that we’ve been star-gazing with our Google Sky app at six-thirty in the morning, overlooking the ocean in Manalapan.
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