It’s a good thing we are feeling good about what we’re doing, because it’s sure a lot of highly focused work. We haven’t taken a true day off in over a month, and our “days off” include doing at least two errands each time, sometimes more. Our long days are about fifteen hours; our short days are about six or eight hours.
Even when we promise ourselves that we won’t do anything else, we sit for a few minutes to take a break, talk over what’s remaining and where we are with each project, then off the couch we go, heading towards one more “We’ll just finish this up…”
It’s not been all work, work, work, though. We did manage two trips to South Beach to see an old friend of ours, and managed another two trips up to kayak on the Loxahatchee. But I can tell we’re about due for another break of some kind, because everything outside the house is seeming like a faint dream, even the memories of the trips to South Beach and the kayaking.
About the only times we go anywhere or see anyone are our quick trips to the post office, bank, and grocery store.
More great progress on downsizing and repair projects
Chelsea got the first FreeCycle posting up last week, a listing for some old Halloween costume pieces we’ve had for years. After looking at the ad online, she took it down for a few minutes to change the copy. The original ad had been posted no more than 3-5 minutes, and in that time, we got two responses. Guess we’ll be seeing a lot of people until the items are all gone! Let the wild romp begin…
We continued throughout the week to have instant response to our few FreeCycle items. Days after things were posted online as “taken” we continued to receive emails asking if things are still available. Our Craigslist listings have been much slower this week – we’ve had no inquiries for about a week now, until today. We have sold all but one of our Adventure Cycling map sets.
Chelsea has done most of the prep work for posting our final Craigslist items, and she’s pretty well finished getting the postings ready for crazyguyonabike. We hope to have everything posted by the end of today; we’ve already arranged to have a garage sale with one of our neighbors this Saturday.
We are very ready to be done with this stage.
The pool continues to limp along. I think we will have to call in professional help. We may have a leak somewhere which is causing problems, and we still can’t figure out why the shocks we’ve administered aren’t working. We are least maintaining a status quo, though – no frogs living in it, no fish, no mosquitoes breeding; that’s good step in the right direction.
A big success story from yesterday is the completion of the toilet repair project. That particular toilet has been needing attention for at least four years, but it was never bad enough to move to the top of the list until now. While we were on the most recent leg of our trip, some integral part of the flushing system died at last.
We managed to get a whole new set of innards for the flushing system, but fixing the toilet still wasn’t a priority given how much else we had to do. Now that we are set up on the laptop in Chelsea’s old room, right next to that bathroom, it started looking a lot better to use those facilities a few steps away rather than run down to my bathroom.
Sunday Alex started fooling with the toilet, but the mini-repair didn’t work, so I grabbed all the parts, the directions, and the tools, and settled in to get it fixed. After a fair amount of jockeying around, and a lot of laughter, we have replaced the entire flushing system on our toilet. It works beautifully, we are very happy to report, perhaps better than it’s ever been since we’ve lived here.
I celebrated by scrubbing everything down thoroughly; the towels and rugs are in the dryer now.
We also finished off the current backlog of packing, and it feels wonderful. We’ll still have more boxes to pack a few days before we leave, but we are no longer looking at piles of things to be catalogued and packed right now.
Being at home, being in South Florida
We’ve had quite an experience being home for the first time in almost a year and a half.
Green
Our first thought as we entered Florida in August was how green everything is, especially compared to South Texas. From the highway medians to the fields, from the lawns in the subdivisions to the downtown landscaping, everything is green and flowering.
We’d had a recent serious drought that lasted several long years, plus our trees and landscaping had been wiped out by four major hurricanes in two years. Trees and shrubs were surviving, but not thriving. The drought has now broken and trees are no longer stunned by the hurricanes; the changes are astonishing.
We have six oak trees, an orange tree, a grapefruit tree, a frangipani tree, a Hong Kong orchid tree, queen palms, and coconut palms in our yard, along with a variety of flowering vines, bougainvillea, fan palms, and shrubs.
After a number of years of no-growth, the trees and shrubs and bougainvillea have doubled in size in the last year. Our biggest sad story is our grapefruit tree, which received a major hit in Hurricane Wilma in 2005. As recently as last year we had hopes that it would survive, but it didn’t. We came home to a bare skeleton, covered on one side by an oak tree and on the other side by the bougainvillea overtaking it. We also lost a queen palm and a coconut palm, but we were pretty sure they were goners even before we left.
Everything else has doubled or tripled in size, providing us with privacy, green, flowers, birds, and butterflies. It’s heavenly to feel like our back yard is a little blooming slice of paradise.
Being home
The advantages to being home are glorious. For starters, the air conditioning has been fabulous. It’s so much easier to handle real-feel temperatures day after day of over 110 degrees when we know we can escape to a cool, temperature-controlled house. We used to dream of this on the road, more days than we care to remember, and now we have it!
Another plus is how good our water quality is, right from the tap (Palm Beach County has been an award winner for a number of years for its water quality). We’ve been on the road a long time now, especially when adding in our cross-country trip in 2006, and we’ve tasted a lot of different water over the months and years. Most of it has been pretty terrible.
All we have to do now is simply stick our water bottle under the tap and turn on the tap. It’s another thing we will really miss, so we’ve decided to enjoy it tremendously while we have it.
It’s hard to describe how nice it is to have our own space, our own bathroom, unfettered privacy, and lots of silence. Whatever we do is up to us; the house is quiet; we have virtually no interruptions ever; our cats are very affectionate, low maintenance, and well-behaved.
Living on the road as we do is like living in a privacy fishbowl, and having a break from that is very relaxing.
Birds
We’ve lived in this house for over eight years now, and we have never seen as many different kinds of birds as we have this year. With the dead grapefruit tree (it’s a bird magnet), the bougainvillea blooming, the oak trees with all their acorns, and a bumper crop of insects, we’ve got a bird’s paradise.
We’re also here for the beginning of the migrations from up north, so we are seeing additional birds because of that. So far we’ve seen quite a list: a ruby throated hummingbird; brown thrashers; blue-gray gnatcatchers; prairie warblers; male and female downy woodpeckers; a red-bellied woodpecker; a black-throated blue warbler; an American redstart warbler; a yellow-throated warbler along with black and white warblers; as well as our usual cardinals, mourning doves, blue jays, and mockingbirds.
Early in the morning as we sit in the hot tub at sunrise we see ravens, cormorants, ibis, egrets, wood storks, and the occasional blue heron, all winging their way to new feeding grounds.
We’ve made good use of our binoculars and the bird book JoAnn Nunez gave us. It’s well-thumbed by now.
Amazingly enough we’ve seen very few birds at the river – only limpkins, a few little green herons, and one huge majestic blue heron.
Traffic, roads, older folks
I’d forgotten how many sirens there are in a big city environment. For us it’s worse than usual, as we live only a few blocks from a major south Florida trauma center – it’s a local hospital that has its own helipad, taking patients from all over southeast Florida.
Traffic was easy when we first arrived home; the snowbirds hadn’t yet started their trek south for the winter. It’s picking up now though, and I’m sure we’ll be at our usual levels of frustration by the time we leave.
Adding to the snowbirds, we have an extraordinary number of older folks here; we are only about a mile or two from several very large subdivisions of exclusively over-fifty-five people (the average age is closer to late seventies). One of the subdivisions has a high percentage of older folks living on very thin Social Security budgets; they can’t afford much, and the housing is fairly grim – it’s been referred to as the ‘old folk’s projects’.
With so many of them living here, the older folks tend to dominate the area. Since many of them don’t sleep much, the local Dunkin Donuts stores are quite crowded around five to six-thirty a.m., especially with the men. The hours of ten a.m. to four p.m. are known as ‘old folks’ rush hour’, since so many of them go out during these times to do errands.
The older drivers are erratic; they’ll change as many as three lanes at once without looking and with no signals; they drive extremely slowly; they weave within their lanes and often out of their lanes; as a driver you’ve got to pay very careful attention (never mind being on a bicycle).
The lines are long in the stores and it’s best to have a good sense of humor, a great deal of patience, and a lot of time to wait. Many of the older folks are in wheelchairs or on walkers so they move very slowly and tend to take up a lot of space on the aisles; maneuvering your cart goes slowly, so it’s best not to be in a hurry.
A number of the ambulatory older folks are lonely, especially the men, so they’ll stop at the checkout counter and tell the checkout person a personal story, often a lengthy one. Meanwhile the lines are backing up behind them; no one wants to be rude and hurry them along, because it’s obvious they’re lonely.
Many of them seem to have a sense of entitlement, which can be really distressing. Many are cranky and aggressive. We’ve seen them hold up long lines at the grocery store arguing over an out-of-date coupon that would have saved ten cents. Even when the clerk or someone in line offers to give them the ten cents, they still want to argue it. Either the coupon is out of date, or they don’t understand the two-for-one sales, so they argue.
Local store owners report that the language of some of the older folks is awful (as in four-letter words), and they are known for stealing. One day I bought a package of refill cartridges for ink pens, and upon arriving home, discovered that the package had been neatly sliced open, one cartridge was taken, and the package was neatly taped up with a bit of scotch tape. When I returned the package, the customer service representative muttered, “Oh God, those old people!”
Obviously this isn’t true of all the older folks here, but there are so many of them that it’s a challenge sometimes to do errands and keep a good mood. It definitely flavors the lifestyle here.
It’s terrifying on a bicycle, because we don’t know if they even see us or not. If they do see us, they don’t know or don’t care if we have the right of way. One day we saw a ruckus at the local Office Depot in the parking lot, so we stopped to see if we could help.
An older guy, maybe in his eighties, in a huge American sedan, was stopped in an aisle of the parking lot, standing outside his car screaming at two younger Latino men. He wasn’t holding anything back. We checked out the situation – he had turned the wrong way down the aisle (it was very clearly marked) as the Latino men were leaving in their small truck. Rather than back up and go down the proper aisle, the old man stood and screamed at the Latino guys (who were being incredibly polite, and who had the right-of-way).
After living with this view of older folks for a number of years now, it was truly refreshing to be in south Louisiana and get a totally different view of ageing. We met a number of seventy-something, eighty-something, and even ninety-something folks who are still very active, in great health, good moods, completely clear-headed and fully functional in every way. We loved it.
On the upside here, most of the many-years-running freeway roadwork projects are at last completed, which has made freeway driving quite nice. There’s a new toll lane on I95 in Miami which has really smoothed out the horrible afternoon rush hour, and our beloved A1A now has shoulders that double as a bike lane.
Then again, the driving is so aggressive down here as to be almost unbelievable. Driving at 65 when the speed limit is 55 mph on the freeway is analogous to being a rock in a fast moving stream; cars are flowing around at 75-85 mph, often up to 90 mph.
Since I95 wasn’t built until after the area was well-settled, the state couldn’t get all the land needed to make a unified and standard freeway system. The result is that it’s impossible to know whether you’ll exit on the right or the left, and it’s impossible to know which lane to be in when you need to enter the freeway. That alone makes for a tremendous amount of last-minute jockeying on main entrance roadways.
The economy
The recession is quite pronounced in many areas down here. At Home Depot during a supply run for our home repair jobs, we got to talking to one of the guys in the garden department. We didn’t have the cash to buy a pool vacuum, and we didn’t really even have enough to buy as much chlorine as we needed. Hearing our dilemma, the guy told us to buy the vacuum and when we finished our pool-cleaning project, to just return it.
He told us, “People do it all the time these days, with the economy the way it is”. Apparently it’s pretty common for contractors to come in, buy a specialized tool, do their job, then return the tool. We were pretty shocked at how easily he accepted the practice.
The government is cutting back too – we now have only one guy on our recycling pickups on trash days, and they’ve cut the number of guys on the trash service back to one driver and one guy who empties the trashcans.
There’s a pronounced lack of spending in the restaurant industry – Alex has seen his earnings go down noticeably, and restaurants are closing everywhere, even big chains.
The downturn is even visible in the grocery stores – “rollbacks” are advertised everywhere, with “10 for $10” sales, “buy one, get one free” and more.
Our former Public Storage location is emptying – when we gave notice, the girl in the office told us that all she’s writing up are vacating orders. I’ll bet there will be great deals available when we put our stuff back in storage.
The housing situation is terrible if you’re a homeowner. Values and prices have plummeted, and there’s another huge wave of foreclosures that will hit the market this next year, further depressing prices and values. Unemployment is over 11% locally.
A friend of ours who’s a realtor owned two other houses. He lost most of his income when the crash hit, and despite working eighty-hour weeks, he couldn’t keep up the payments. When the crash hit, mortgage lending ground to a halt too, and though he was selling houses, the deals weren’t closing because of the mortgage crunch (even with clients who had credit scores over 700). If the deals didn’t close, he didn’t get paid.
Down here in South Florida we’ve seen property taxes and insurance double and triple in the last few years. Never mind adjustable mortgages, monthly payments have gone up so significantly that many owners were upside down even without adjusting mortgages.
In our friend’s case, one tenant lost her job and stopped paying rent for several months. In the other case, rent no longer covered the property tax and insurance increases. Rents have been dropping too; the combination of all this means that rental property owners are having to walk away from their houses.
Our buddy had to do a short sale on one property – appraised at $350,000 only two years ago, he just sold it for $79,000; he handed the other property back to the bank.
It’s good news for renters though. Alex’s girlfriend began realizing that other apartments as nice as hers were going for several hundred dollars a month less, so she started looking around. She found a good deal and gave notice at her current apartment. After several go-rounds, she moved into a nicer apartment in her same complex, for over two hundred dollars a month less. Her story is not unusual around here.
Website projects
Now that we are through the worst of the repairs and packing, we have settled in to some major website projects. We are moving our website hosting from one company to another, which is a big deal to us. We’ve been unhappy for two years now with our old host, and have been very much looking forward to an easier and more rewarding relationship with our new host.
Since the year’s contract is up next week, we can finally move with no penalty, so we spent yesterday getting things arranged with our new host to transfer our site. True to form, our old host has not been doing backups of our site (and never notified us of that) so we needed to make our own backup, and the new host needed to transfer the site manually. Grrr….
The data on our site has gotten so big that it was nearly twenty-fours of straight downloading before we got a full backup on our hard drive. Though initially frustrating and time-consuming, we are pleased because it now allows us to go through all the files and see what we need and don’t need.
The big challenge for us is that we are self-taught all the way on the website issues, and that’s been scary – we’ve already crashed our site at least twice, and we aren’t interested in doing that anymore. It takes a while to figure things out when you’re self-taught, and after crashing the site, we have gotten nervous about deleting anything. On the other hand, we’ve learned a tremendous amount over the last two years, so we feel a lot more confident about what’s needed and not needed.
Once our site has been completely transferred, Chelsea will take the time to go through each file and see if we really need it; if it can be deleted; or if we can simply keep it on our own hard drive, to upload later if needed. It’s a lot like the downsizing project for our personal possessions – need, want, archive (pack), or toss. We’re delighted at the thought of getting it done.
Meanwhile, it took our new host about eight hours to download our data; they notified us early this morning that they are now uploading to our new location. We think we may have it all finished by late afternoon today; we then need to change our DNS pointers so people can find our new location. Changing the pointers may mean our site is down for a day or two while the process is completed, but we are hoping that it will only be a matter of minutes.
After we finish our long anticipated move, Chelsea is then installing a new blog system (WordPress) on our site to manage our travel journals. We currently have 168 blogs with close to 470 pages (for only our current trip); it’s become really unwieldy to find anything. Our new system will look very different from our current site, and will have very, very nice organizational features.
You’ll soon be able to see the blog entries by month, year, state, and country, and you’ll see a list of recently posted blogs. As another two projects move up the list, we will be creating a “best of” selection; we want to be able to sort by content as well. It’s yet another two projects…
We’ve already selected a new WordPress theme, and as soon as Chelsea can get to it, she’ll get it installed and set up on our site. The new look on the travel journals allows us to have photos rotating through on the banner; we’ve wanted that feature since we started our site. Soon we’ll figure out a way to have that happen on the rest of our site’s pages.
After all the set-up is completed, Chelsea still needs to copy-paste and do the html code on all 168 blogs and 470 pages. That will take awhile, but we’re optimistic – we hoping it will only take until the end of this week.
Update on website progress: We’ve already successfully transferred all our data and the DNS servers have been pointed to the new host. Now we have a last-minute glitch in getting access to our site – somehow the administrator permissions have been changed or lost, and we need to get access as administrators. Chelsea has taken over working with tech support on that part. (Note: we got it solved, but now we need to update our php script on our site.)
We also successfully installed our new blog system. Chelsea is copying all of our previous blogs into the new system, and she’s getting the new system set up, ready to run. We’re really pleased!
It’s absolutely amazing how much time and close attention to detail this all takes!
Rosemary’s writing projects
Last November in Gueydan, LA, I worked for many days in a row catching up on nearly all of our backlogged blogs, getting them written and posted. I then started in with writing a book about out trip – answering all the common questions people ask about us and our trip, giving our background and history, etc.
I made great progress until Christmas Eve, when I took a few days break. Right after Christmas, Chelsea and I started four new blogs and domain names with the idea of developing our affiliate income and educating our readers. That meant I now had a daily blog to write about our journey, and 16 other blogs to write each week, in four different subject areas.
I started out well, writing furiously for almost three months, but it didn’t take long to realize that I couldn’t possibly write that much. We dropped it back to two subject areas, then dropped the posting frequency back to two days a week, from three, and we finally combined the last two remaining blogs into one.
Meanwhile the book remained only partially written, and our trip adventures were ramping up again (meaning I had even less time to write). Somewhere in early summer we dropped our additional blogs, transferring all my articles to our existing website.
Now that we have finished the huge bulk of the cleaning/ repairing/ sorting/ packing/ downsizing project, I am last returning to writing. Chelsea is happily settled on her laptop getting the website updated, after moving to our new host, and is getting caught up on a long list of things we’ve wanted to do for many months. With Chelsea settled and happy, it means I can finally concentrate.
My first task is to decide what I should write first. I have the book to write; that’s a whole huge project in itself. I have at least four articles for the site that are nearly done – I put a fair amount of research time into them, and I’d love to have them finished.
I’ve got notes and documents done for a good-sized book on the practical aspects of a trip like this, in case anyone else wants to try a version of it. There are several topics I want to write e-books on; and I’ve got a separate book about our adventures that I’ve got notes on, a book that is crying out to be written. Meanwhile I have the regular ongoing travel journal blogs to write, as well as writing updated content for some of our website pages.
The good news is that I have a private space; a great desk and chair; lots of silence; easy access to bathroom facilities and food; and I’ve got my music. I have at last gotten things lined up so I can write uninterruptedly for many weeks now. I won’t be doing much else, if anything, until I make a huge dent in my writing backlog.
Winter Silks interview
About a month ago we received a nice email from the woman who does the quarterly newsletter for Winter Silks – she had somehow stumbled across our website and found the article I had written on the Winter Silks shirts we got last Christmas. She loved our story, and wanted to know if we’d be willing to do an interview for their newsletter.
We had a lengthy telephone interview; her questions were some of the best we’ve ever had an interviewer ask us. It was a nice break for us from packing and moving. The newsletter comes out on November 1st, so be sure to check it out at www.wintersilks.com.
After the interview she told us she’d be sending a gift certificate; given how much we like our original shirts, it’ll be much too easy to spend the gift certificate. We’ve got our eyes on the silk tank tops, the long johns, and another spunsilk mock turtleneck for each of us (they are truly awesome).
I’ll be sure to write again and remind you when it comes out.
Signing off from Delray Beach, Florida…