John's Island

Nancy and I visited Charleston, South Carolina about fifteen years ago and were impressed with the city - its beauty and its restaurant scene.  But that was in the middle of summer, and the heat and humidity were literally overpowering.  It was hard to imagine ourselves actually living under those conditions.

We're back.  And at this point we realize that it's possible to live anywhere in the south as long as you have really good air conditioning .. and the ability to travel to someplace else when you can't take the heat.  In fact, except for Santa Cruz and certain other areas along the West Coast, every place in the country suffers through a part of the year where the locals dream of fleeing to warmer or cooler weather.

To be more precise, we're not in Charleston itself, we're just in the general area.  All the RV parks anywhere close to the city were full, and so we're set up on John's Island in an equestrian center with RV services about 20 miles or so from downtown.  This is kind of a cool place.  We're the only motorhome here.  Everybody else came here with their horses, most of them in trucks pulling fifth wheelers that have been modfied to house both people and one or more horses.  In other words, the horses are in back, the human living area is in front, including beds for sleeping in the loft that sits over the truck bed.

That brings to mind the obvious question: Do horsey smells migrate into the living area?  A lady told me that the other day it was pretty rank at first, because her husband hadn't done a complete job of washing out the horse patties in back. Once here, the horses are put into stalls so that the humans have exclusive use of their transport vehicles.

Two years ago John and Sandy Bowers, friends of ours from the Santa Cruz Dinner Club, had moved into the Charleston area.  We had dinner at their lovely home in Mount Pleasant, a suburb of Charleston.  Their house overlooks a lake, and sitting on the screened porch in back, we could see and hear geese and other waterfowl flying by.  John and Sandy love it there, and we heard about the local entertainment options and other advantages of living in the area, including low taxes and great real estate prices compared to Santa Cruz.

They are foodies, as are we, and John has compiled a Charleston restaurant guide, which we have since used to eat lunch at a restaurant called S.N.O.B (Slightly North of Broad), which specializes in southern low country cuisine .. and we have made reservations at Zero George, a pricey high-end prix fixe restaurant.  John and Sandy's political views are for the most part similar to ours, so there was plenty to discuss regarding the current state of the country.

Lovely Savannah

Twenty years ago we watched a movie called "Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil", starring Kevin Spacey (since disgraced) and John Cusack (still well-regarded), directed by Clint Eastwood, set in Savannah, Georgia.  It was based on the New York Times bestseller of the same name about the true story of the shooting of a male lover by Jim Williams, a rich antique dealer and restorer of classic homes in Savannah.  Pleading self defense, Williams was tried four times for murder and was finally acquitted, then died of pneumonia and heart failure six months later.  We remembered the movie as making Savannah look incredibly exotic, and so in preparation for a tour of that city and to get us in the proper mood, we streamed the movie on our motorhome TV.

Our Savannah Heritage tour director and minibus driver was a very knowledgeable native Savannah lady who knew where the bodies were buried.  We heard about the founding of Georgia by James Oglethorpe, the preaching in Savannah by John Wesley (the founder of Methodism), the capture of the city by Sherman in the Civil War - but due to our inherent shallowness we were most fascinated by the tales about Jim Williams and his murder trials.  The Mercer-Williams house, shown below, was once owned by the prolific songwriter Johnny Mercer and later was the scene of the Jim Williams shooting.

Riding along on the tour bus through the Savannah neighborhoods, we were enchanted by the beautiful old homes, many of which had been renovated by Jim Williams.  There's something about the genteel southern aristocratic charm of the architecture that's very appealing.  Savannah also has all those city parks featuring huge live oak trees dripping with moss.  (The photo below doesn't do them justice.)  Surprisingly, Savannah is Nancy's favorite city so far on the trip.

And so before our dinner in the city we dropped in to a real estate office.  The mansions in the historic district sell for multiple millions but the newer construction in that area is somewhat affordable.  We learned that one should be careful walking the streets after dark, and that summers are hot and muggy and buggy.  But it's a real city with all that cities provide in the way of great restaurants, entertainment, and culture.

We ate at a classic downtown restaurant, the Olde Pink House (below), which had a wonderful, almost colonial atmosphere, and the food was good (though not memorable).

In fact, our best meal during this RV stop was on Hilton Head Island, at the Lucky Rooster Kitchen, which had one of the most creative menus we've ever seen.  The food, in the "low country" genre, was sensational, service was perfect, and it was one of our favorite dining experiences since we left Santa Cruz.

We sure had a great time at this stop.  We've added both Hilton Head Island and Savannah to the short list (so far) of the cities we might possibly consider as future home sites.  Both are phenomenal, but both also have a few drawbacks.

Nancy and Craig march in Savannah

Nancy and I have never ever participated in a march or demonstration.  Strong opinions, but not active politically.  However, our motorhome voyage has apparently done something to our brains.  When we read that Savannah, Georgia was one of the cities that would be participating in the "March for our Lives" movement, promoting common sense gun control reforms, we decided to attend.

We drove to Wright Square, in the heart of Savannah, where the march was scheduled to begin.

The crowd that assembled was large, though nothing like the enormous numbers in some cities.  Not surprising, since Savannah is in the deep south and is an open carry state.  In fact, one woman was packing heat as a friendly counterpoint to the gun control crowd.  (That's a pistol on her right hip.)

The route was about two miles long and took us through some of the beautiful parks that Savannah is known for.  We talked with a number of the marchers and found that many were visitors from blue states, many were local.  The participants ranged from toddlers in strollers to senior citizens struggling with the distances involved.  As we passed folks on the street, their reactions varied from applause to hostility.

At the end of the march we all assembled in a huge open park.  A speaker slowly read the names of each of the victims killed in the recent Parkland, Florida massacre.  We listened for a while, turned over a police car, broke windows, set fires, and began the long trek back to our pickup truck.  (For anyone who doesn't get my odd sense of humor, part of the preceding is untrue.)

When we began our explorations of the country almost four months ago, most RV parks were relatively empty, and we could wait and call on the day of our travels and find an available site in just about any RV park that was open.  However, as we entered the regions that stay warm in the winter and are therefore attractive to people up north, things got tighter.  And lately it's become more and more difficult to find accommodations in the parks we'd like to stay in.  We were determined to explore the legendary city of Savannah, but all their RV parks were full.  We felt lucky to find an opening on Hilton Head Island, an hour's drive to and from Savannah.

But what a park this is!  It's called Hilton Head Island Motorcoach Resort, and I consider it the Beverly Hills of RV parks.  They don't allow trailers or fifth wheelers, only motorhomes, so it's rather exclusive, expensive at $90 a day, and our modest motorhome is not among the most impressive units.  It's a truly gorgeous facility, beautifully landscaped and well maintained, with lots of tall trees and a large manmade lake in the center.

Each site here is individually owned, and there are sites presently available for sale ranging from $56,000 to $110,000.  We talked with a lady from New York who four years ago came here and stayed for three days, fell in love with the place, purchased a lakefront lot, and now lives in this park in their motorhome year round.  We could almost imagine ourselves doing the same thing, buying a site and living here in paradise - but frankly, for permanent residence we'd need a bit more square footage than our current motorhome provides.

St. Augustine

St. Augustine, Florida is the oldest city in America.  It was founded by Spanish explorers in 1565 and has been occupied continuously ever since.  We wanted to learn us some St. Augustine history, so we parked our pickup truck, paid for rides on the St. Augustine Trolley Tour, and climbed aboard.

Our driver/tour narrator sounded like Stephen Hawking's computer-generated voice, but with less animation and personality.  It was difficult to understand what he was saying, and we quickly regretted our tour choice, but we had to complete the circuit in order to return to our vehicle.  So we rode around for an hour and a half without receiving much useful information.  There were a number of interesting historical sites on the ride available to us if we had dismounted, but we remained aboard; the seats were uncomfortable and we simply wanted to get back to our pickup truck as soon as possible.

So not all our trip experiences have been A-Plus.  A bad one like this reminds us of how much fun the good ones have been.

St. Augustine's old town consists of St. George Street and the surrounding neighborhoods.  Many of the buildings are extremely old.  It's almost strictly a tourist area now but has some charm about it.

We visited the St. Augustine Alligator Farm, which remarkably has been operating continuously for over 120 years.  It's a large facility with oodles of alligators, crocodiles, and related species - hundreds, I'm guessing, of American alligators in large communal compounds, and then individual enclosures for dozens of other species from around the world.

Above are American alligators, enormous and prehistoric as you see them live, who don't seem to value personal space, and below are baby albino American alligators, the same species but with a genetic variation.

We observed feeding time at the old water hole, where chunks of meat were thrown out to the reptiles, and a limited number of dead white rats were offered to those individuals who could launch themselves high enough to snatch them.  Interestingly, there was no fighting even though the gators were almost on top of each other.

There were also marmosets, snakes, a Komodo dragon, and incredibly colorful birds.  This is a fascinating exhibit, and you should visit it the next time you find yourself in St. Augustine.

And so we leave Florida behind after a very nice five-week visit.  The verdict?  Florida is a beautiful state, lush and green, and it has a clean, prosperous look.  I'm a big fan of the palm trees that are so common there. The beaches are gorgeous on both sides, with a small advantage going to those on the Gulf of Mexico.  Housing prices are California-level ridiculous on waterfront sites, but very reasonable inland.  The weather is great in the winter, spring, and fall, but brutal in the summer.  And Florida is flat as can be.  As much as we liked our time here, it's unlikely we'll choose Florida for our golden years.  And that's because we like hills and mountains and a four-season environment, and we're not beach nor golf folk.  But that's just us.  Other people have different priorities and think Florida is perfect, and there's no one right answer for everyone.

Cape Canaveral

Our next stop along the Florida east coast was a beautiful county park called Savannas Recreation Area and Campground.  After RV parks in urban areas up and down Florida, the quiet there was delightful.  By definition a savanna is a grassy plain, and the tall grass along the waterways in this park was home to many species of birds.  Birds in Florida tend to be more exotic than those in California.  Most of them have long necks and long legs, and their song is much more musical than what you hear from those damn crows back in the Santa Cruz skies.  There were signs along the canals reading "Don't feed the alligators", so we made sure our dogs were leashed at all times.

We then drove north and stayed for a few days in a place called The Great Outdoors RV, Nature, and Golf Resort.  This is an upscale 3000-acre development of a type we haven't visited before.  There are some conventional houses here, but mostly it's an RV resort in which the RV sites - each of which accommodates a motorhome or other recreational vehicle - are individually owned, and when the owners are away, they may rent out their sites to paying guests such as ourselves.

We spoke with a gentleman originally from Canada who had been living in the resort for many years.  He said it was a wonderful place, with friendly people and great weather, but the political opinions of the residents there was not to his liking.  He said that he had a sign on his front door saying that guests were requested to leave their politics outside.  That could be an issue for us as well.

We noticed that in addition to the concrete pads for the RV's, many residents had built permanent structures on the rear of their sites.  We learned that the square footage of those structures was restricted to one quarter that of the property, and that construction plans could not include a bedroom.  The intention, of course, was for everyone to sleep in the RV's, not in the houses.  Some of the sites were for sale for between $100,000 and $200,000, which did not include the RV, and seemed a bit high for the area considering that we saw brand new homes along the highway advertised as being "in the nineties".

Just down the road from our RV resort was Cape Canaveral, home to the Kennedy Space Center.  I'm a big fan of space exploration and Nancy isn't, so I went alone.  The Space Center includes a massive visitor complex, which is kind of an amusement park for the public.  It includes a "rocket garden" that displays examples of many of the rockets that NASA built for their space programs over the years.  The ones displayed are actual rockets which could have have been used but weren't.  (If they had been, they would have burned up in the atmosphere.)

America's space shuttle program re-used its shuttles, which were carried into space on the backs of rockets and then re-entered the atmosphere and landed conventionally at airports.  This is the actual Atlantis space shuttle, which flew 33 missions over 26 years.

Former astronaut and retired aeronautical engineer Joe Tanner spoke about EVA's - extravehicular activities - and showed videos of his spacewalks (he did seven of them).

NASA is currently in a down phase due to severe budgetary restrictions and a lack of enthusiasm in Washington, but SpaceX (the brainchild of Elon Musk, the owner of Tesla Motors) and Boeing have active space programs and use Cape Canaveral as their launch site.  The next scheduled launch is by SpaceX on April 2, and you can sign up to view it.  What an experience that would be!  SpaceX's mission is to send humans to Mars and begin colonizing that planet within ten years.  An exciting prospect!

I spent most of the day at the space center, and when I returned Nancy said that she hated for me to be gone so long, and that she gets bored when I'm not around.

You buy that, don't you?

The Keys

We drove across the width of Florida on I-75 from Naples almost to the Miami area, which took us along the northern border of the Everglades National Park.  A number of shops advertised tours through the national park on airboats - those funny-looking craft fitted with giant fans on the back.  We stopped for lunch at a picnic area on the side of the road, and from a walkway there overlooking a body of water we saw alligators, turtles, fish, and the pretty anhinga birds.

Our current RV park, in Florida City, is not far from the beginning of the Florida keys - that dotted series of sand-covered coral islands joined by bridges, the Gulf of Mexico on one side and the Atlantic Ocean on the other, arcing more or less southwest and terminating in Key West. 

Key Largo, the first of the keys, has always brought to mind an image of beauty and palm trees and white sand beaches and marinas - and maybe that can be found off the main road, but driving through, Key Largo looked seedy and not well kept up, with souvenir shops dominating the landscape.  So we drove ahead, over more bridges, and the further we went, the nicer the scenery became and the prettier the drive.   

We saw evidence of the damage six months ago from Hurricane Irma.  Most of what we observed was on the left - the Atlantic Ocean side - as we drove down.  Whole neighborhoods were either barren or massive new construction was underway, all the new homes elevated on stilts.

We found a nice restaurant overlooking the gulf.  It was one of the few windy, cool days in southern Florida and the servers were wearing coats, but it was a beautiful sunny setting and a good meal, including a dessert of traditional key lime pie, which was invented in Key West and uses the tart key limes that are grown in these islands.

At our RV park we talked with a retired policeman, younger than us, who recommended that we check out the Hilton Head Sun City in South Carolina, where he and his wife and dog live.  Beautiful, lots of activities, easy to make friends, and reasonable prices, he said.  I think we'll go there in a few weeks, and it might be wonderful - but my God, how embarrassing it would be to tell people that we live in ... Sun City!

Naples

Naples, on the southwest coast of Florida, is one of the richest cities in America.  I've read that it has the second highest concentration of millionaires and billionaires in the country.

Our homebase in Naples, Neapolitan Cove RV Resort, is upscale and expensive.  We'll be here three days.  It's one of our favorite parks - not only very pretty, with lots of palm and bamboo trees between the sites - but also very neighborly.  The quality and price level of the RV's in the park is quite high.  Sadly, our motorhome is more modest than that of most of our neighbors.

Every week the managers host a potluck social for the guests, and one was scheduled for the afternoon we arrived.  Some of the appetizers contributed by the residents were quite tasty.  Again, we brought wine and glasses to the party, and again nobody else was drinking wine.  We're slow learners.

Most of the residents are folks from Canada and the northern states who stay here for several months each year.  So it's a true community, and one of the friendliest we've stayed at.  We felt very welcomed.  So far, the warmest and most congenial parks we've experienced have been the higher-end ones filled with these snowbirds, who are ecstatic that they've escaped the frigid temperatures back home.

Downtown Naples has a prosperous look about it.  Lots of nice restaurants and high-end shops.

As we walked along a street in the historic district, Nancy was somehow drawn into the D'Or 24K store by a young Russian man named Igor, who promised to show her an amazing skin care product.  He produced a syringe and extracted a couple of globs of a yellowish product onto the skin below her eyes, and massaged it in.



While we were waiting for it to cure, I asked Igor if he knew Vladimir Putin.  He said that he didn't.  After a few minutes, Nancy thought that her skin was noticeably smoother.  Igor told us that the regular price was $650 but that luckily it was only $325 today - half price!  Nancy said we would see how it worked overnight and would return if we decided to buy.  Igor offered to drop the price to $200 if we bought today.  We're gullible but not as gullible as Igor thought, so Nancy declined.  As we stepped outside, I checked my back pocket to make sure my wallet was still there.

Sunday is real estate open house day in Naples.  We were curious as to what money buys here.  Condos and standalone estates on or near the beach are hugely expensive, but if you're willing to live a few miles away, prices drop precipitously.  In many of the areas we've visited in Florida, including Naples, entrepreneurs have built a great number of impressive gated housing developments.  Most of them have attractive landscaping and inviting guarded entranceways.  We drove to an open house in one of these where a realtor we had met was holding court at a 3700 square foot home with four bedrooms and four baths, in a lush, pretty neighborhood.  The open floor plan interior was lovely, and the view from the living area was of a private enclosed lap pool, and beyond that, one of the development's manmade lakes.  The photo below doesn't do that view justice.  It's a spectacular property.  Twelve minutes from the beach, and fifteen minutes from downtown Naples.  The asking price?  $500,000.

On our last night in Naples we had one of our favorite meals of the trip at USS Nemo, a seafood restaurant.  One can eat well in this town.  We liked it here.

At the old ball game

Southern Florida is home to the Grapefruit League, where most of the Major League baseball teams east of the Mississippi go for Spring Training.  (Spring training for the other teams is the Cactus League, in Arizona.)   One of the Grapefruit League venues - the Ed Smith Stadium - is in Sarasota.  It's the winter and spring home of the Baltimore Orioles.  I dragged Nancy there for a little Spring Training experience.

We got in line at the ticket window.  A guy walked up and asked if we'd like, free, a couple of extra tickets he had for the game.  We accepted gratefully, since Spring Training prices aren't the bargain they used to be.  I think it was our good looks and snappy outfits that drew him to us.  The seats were out beyond first base, at ground level, in the very first row.  Our benefactor, sitting beside me, was a Red Sox fan from the Boston area, a snowbird who owns a condo in the area and who has season tickets for this stadium even though it isn't the home of his favorite team.  And remarkably the lady sitting beside Nancy was a retired nurse who had trained, as had Nancy, at Philadelphia General Hospital.

The game was between the Baltimore Orioles and the Toronto Blue Jays.  We weren't emotionally invested in either.  I just wanted to sit in the sun, drink in the ambiance, and enjoy the traditional meal of hot dog and beer - which cost $36 for the two of us, by the way.  Spring Training is a time of giving young players an opportunity to show what they can do, and of gradually working the veterans up to playing shape.  So the rosters were a mishmash of good and great and not so good.

We left happy and fulfilled after four innings of baseball, with the Blue Jays leading 3-1.  I never checked to see who won.

One day each week the managers of the RV park we're staying in here in Sarasota host a free dinner for their guests and customers.  Nancy was told that they would provide the food, and we would have to bring our own beverages to the affair.  Thinking that we'd share a nice California wine with our neighbors, we carried over a nice Napa Valley claret by Coppola, and a couple of big, fancy red wine glasses.  There were at least fifty people taking advantage of the free meal of pulled pork sandwiches, pasta with meat sauce, and salad - but we were a little out of place.  Not only did no one else bring wine, we saw only a few beer bottles on the tables in the clubhouse, and nobody wanted our wine.  Mostly these were water drinkers.  And we won't be here long enough to educate their palates.

Sarasota

One of the popular areas in America for retirement is the southwestern coast of Florida.  Tampa, St. Petersburg, Sarasota, Fort Myers, Naples, and every little beach town in between attracts folks who appreciate warm weather, beautiful beaches with warm Gulf waters, and lovely palm-tree-centric landscapes.  I do like this part of the country.  The people are friendly and welcoming, the weather is ideal (at least during this portion of the calendar), all the stores and services you'd want (Costco, Trader Joe's, Whole Foods) are readily available, and there's just not much to complain about other than traffic, the price of beachfront property, and the summer heat.

We are currently staying for a week at Sunny South RV Park in Sarasota, Florida.  Most of the motorhomes and trailers here and elsewhere in Florida are "snowbirds" - that is, people from Canada and the northern US states who fly south for the winter to escape the brutal winters up there.  Therefore this - not the summer - is the high season for RV parks in Florida and some other southern states.

Sarasota was the winter home of the Ringling Brothers' circus empire, and Charles, one of the brothers was also a real estate speculator in Sarasota.  Two museums were built by the Ringlings in Sarasota - a circus museum and a huge museum housing their extensive art collection.  We toured the museums and walked around the mansion built by the last surviving Ringling brother, John, at a magnificent site overlooking the bay.

Below is a scale model in the Circus Museum of what it was like when the circus arrived by train in a town and set up the tents for what was certainly the greatest entertainment spectacle available in the early part of the last century to the rubes out in the sticks.

Siesta Beach, on a key (a sandy island) accessible over a bridge from Sarasota, was voted by Trip Advisor as the number one beach in the country for 2015.  The water is gorgeous, the sand is pure white quartz, and the beach is incredibly deep.  This is the Gulf of Mexico at its beautiful best.

Nancy and I put on our bathing suits and stretched out on the sand to develop a little color.  No beach attire selfies will be provided to this blog.

The Villages

 "The Villages" is the largest age-restricted city in America, and one of the fastest growing.  It consists of a number of gated communities, and at least one of the residents in each home must be at least 55 years old - except for support staff and employees.  City-data.com tells us that the population is 118,000 (about twice that of Santa Cruz), and the average age is seventy-one.  We wanted to see what life is like for the folks who live there.

The Villages is an attractive city with gently sweeping streets and impressive, upscale architecture.  Driving along the main drag, we looked over to the side and saw a parallel road with a yellow stripe down the center of it and golf carts zooming comically along it.  In fact, it seemed that there were more golf carts on the move than automobiles.  We also noticed parking lots exclusively for those little contraptions.

Nancy and I had a fine lunch at The Lighthouse, a seafood restaurant.  The diners were mostly seniors, a few with canes or walkers, but there were younger people as well.  The ambiance was friendly and cheerful.

We dropped into one of The Villages' sales offices.  Patrick, a sales representative, sat with us and gave us the history of the city.  The families of the original owners are still in charge, and they make sure that there are unlimited opportunities for activities, support, learning, and entertainment.  The musical schedule for February included Tony Bennett and a number of lesser-known artists.  We were shown a list of hundreds of clubs available for participation - not only the expected ones like Tai-chi, bingo, golf, and yoga but also cheerleading, philosophy, astrology, freethinking, jazz, and a social club for the deaf and hearing-impaired.  The city has available a plethora of restaurants, some of them world class, plus golf courses, basketball and pickleball courts, and fields and courts of every kind of sporting activity anyone could want to participate in.  The medical services there are reportedly first-rate.

Patrick told us that home prices start at about $120,000 and go up into the millions.  Quite a few model homes were available for inspection, but only in the morning, and we were there in the afternoon.  Patrick offered to meet us at 10 o'clock the following day and take us around, but we decided against it - because our RV park was some distance away, the traffic to get there wasn't fun, the brochure pictures were not all that impressive, and to be honest it was unlikely that Nancy and I would ever decide to become village people.

And yet I think The Villages is an amazing achievement and offers a perfect solution for many retirees, as long as they are able to tolerate the hot, humid summers.  It is extremely easy to meet people and to become engaged in the community.  The list of available activities and opportunities is truly mind-blowing.  One could lead a varied and interesting life there.  But Nancy and I are not mentally ready to live in a city with so many old people, even though we are old people ourselves - although that attitude may change in the years to come.  And we want an environment that holds a bit of magic for us, which we just didn't feel in The Villages.

Below is a photo of the elegant lobby of the sales office we visited.  I'm disappointed that I didn't get shots of the golf cart parking lots and the golf cart freeways.  You'll have to check those out for yourselves.

Addendum:  In talking with a gentleman at the Tiki Bar in our current RV park down the road in Sarasota, Florida, we learned from him that The Villages has a reputation as a wild town.  Supposedly if you're available for swinging (an old term but a good one), you decorate your golf cart with a yellow flower.  We cannot confirm or refute this information, but it may increase or decrease your likelihood of considering The Villages for future relocation.