Feeling At Home In Florida

Since before Christmas, we’ve been anchored in Northern Florida, and we’ve felt increasingly comfortable here with each day. So comfortable in fact, that we decided to buy a condominium in St. Augustine to have a permanent (?) winter escape from the snow and cold. Even though we’ve experienced temperatures in the teens (at night) during our time here, we still feel that overall, it would be mild enough for us, and we won’t have to shovel the precipitation.

One of our objectives on the MIA trip has been to identify such a place for the winter months, and while we found many desirable cultures and climates in various parts of the U.S., each seemed to have some element that kept us from feeling comfortable enough to select it. Whether it was distance, government, earthquakes, finances, weather or housing costs, no place inspired us enough to seriously look at real estate. Until St. Augustine.

Soon after we arrived, we spent several days with a local real estate agent, first trying to identify where around St. Augustine we were most drawn to (we were all over the map at first, literally), then what kind of property, size and features we wanted and finally, just as we were getting discouraged and time was running out, we found several possibilities that intrigued us. Two were houses located right on the beach, and one was a condo, also right on the beach, just north of the St. Augustine downtown. In the end, simplicity won out, and we decided to try our hand at owning a home where you could just lock the door and leave, without having building exteriors and grounds to be concerned with. Time will tell whether we will adapt well to living in a condo in close proximity to other residents and having a Homeowners Association to contend with. But we love the views and the location. 

Interspersed between property showings with our agent, we explored around St. Augustine, north to the city of Jacksonville, west to Palatka and south just above Daytona. We found that Jacksonville was a pretty happening city, with professional sports teams, industry and crowded highways. There were charming neighborhoods near the St. John’s River and some derelict neighborhoods as well. Also, a couple of art museums, some theaters, vast suburbs (Jacksonville has the largest footprint of any US city) and urban problems (like violent crime), not unlike the NY area we lived in for many years.

Palatka (west) and areas south of St. Augustine were much more rural in nature, with palmetto forests, abundant, lush marshland and stretches of quiet, sandy, duned beaches. It was like being out on Fire Island in NY, but only minutes from the tourism bustle of downtown St. Augustine. The downtown area, which is comprised largely of early 1900’s buildings erected by magnate Henry Flagler, is dominated by his namesake Flagler College. Tourist trolleys zig and zag through the narrow streets, shops mostly sell souvenir items and the local economy is very apparently driven by visitors. We enjoyed the “Nights of Lights” Christmas decorations, a New Years Eve chili cook-off and fireworks display, the weekly Farmers Market and the Castillo de San Marcos fort that guarded the harbor during its period as a Spanish colony. Most of the rest was ticky-tacky-tourist-trash, which we tried to step gingerly around.

We attended the local Unitarian Universalist Fellowship while in town, smaller than the Huntington Fellowship at about eighty members and lay-led. We were welcomed and felt right at home, so we believe we have a new religious home to look forward to as well (hard to imagine that it could replace Huntington in our hearts, though…). An unexpected surprise was a rendezvous with friends from Islesboro who were sailing to the Bahamas on their catamaran, and put in to port at St. Augustine. Their journey is similar in scope and challenge to our motorhome adventure, but with the added unpredictability of the ocean, and it was fun to compare notes.

While we wait for our condo transaction to close, we’ve moved inland west of St. Augustine towards Ocala and Gainesville. These areas embody the Old Florida you might picture in stories, with “cracker houses” shrouded under majestic oaks that drip with Spanish Moss. We strolled through charming small towns like Micanopy and McIntosh, former booming citrus towns which today epitomize picturesque, relaxing and laid back, absent the hustle-bustle found on the coast. We toured the historic homestead of Pulitzer-Prize-winning author Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, restored to it’s original charm from the days when she wrote “The Yearling” and other books about life in early, rural Florida. Life is simple in these small, quaint towns, and it’s not a bad life at that. Maybe we’ll get more of a taste of it from our new St. Augustine base when we finally are able to settle in next Fall.

While Patty toured some of the older sections of Ocala, I tested my reaction times at the Don “Big Daddy” Garlits Museum of Drag Racing there, and relived days of my youth, nose buried in "Hot Rod" magazines. We spent only a few hours in the college town of Gainesville and were astounded at the size of the campus and how it dominated the town. Not much there besides U of F – Go Gators! Next, we head further south and west in our new home state to be.

Bye for now…     Bob