Chapter 4 of our search for a retirement location.
We had been slacking off in our search for a retirement
location. Two weeks in France in May,
followed by about a three week recovery period, featuring a really miserable
cold and cough for me that Jody caught and devolved into pneumonia for her, slowed us down. In July, we got going again.
The theory is to visit a potential retirement location at a
bad time, weatherwise, to see if we can handle the worst it can offer. When we went to Port Townsend in January, it
was dark, cold, and damp. No snow, no
heavy rain, but just unpleasant. When we
left, we had a hundred mile drive to the Seattle/Tacoma airport, and it was
just awful, right on the edge of being undrivable, raining so hard. So we were discouraged from pursuing that option.
This trip was inspired by one of my cousins living in the
Fort Myers area and another thinking about moving nearby, to Cape Coral. Rather than focusing on only one area, we
tried to explore a place on the Atlantic coast, a place on the Gulf side, and
given the very cheap air fares into Orlando, a place in the middle. The first place we decided to check out was
Port St. Lucie, on the Atlantic coast, where the New York Mets have spring training. I'm sure the local bail bondsmen welcome the Mets every year (thinking back to Doc Gooden and Darrell Strawberry). This town is north of the really expensive places, but seemed to offer a
certain amount of charm. We contacted a
developer (Kolter) who has a new community being built on the west side of
town, called Verano. They offered a
stay-and-play package, where we could stay three days and two nights in the
community to get a feel for what it would be like. But we were flying into Orlando, which is a bit of a
hike to Port St Lucie, and we decided to schedule our two nights to begin the
second night after we got there, or we would essentially be wasting the first
night.
Our trip got off to a good and bad start. The good part was running into our dear
friend Anne at the Admiral’s Club at DFW (there are four of them so we beat the odds). Anne has been our French teacher for a long
time, although we are not currently enrolled in class. She was on her way to California for the
weekend. So we had a chance to catch
up. But then we were a little pressed
for time to get to our gate. I was proceeding through the crowds making pretty
good time, and looked back over my shoulder to see if Jody was keeping up,
which she always does. But she wasn’t in
sight. I looked around, and she was
slowly catching up. There had been a
problem with her Rick Steves rolling bag, something caught in the wheel. She got that straightened out and promptly
fell behind again, complaining that the bag wasn’t rolling right. One of the wheels was coming apart. I handed her the handle on my bag, and asked
her to roll it, while I carried hers.
We’ve had those bags for a long time, but mine has endured far more
abuse than hers, since I’ve made a lot of business trips with it. But hers failed first. It wasn't rolling worth a damn. (After a while the debris from the 'tire' fell off and the bag rolls okay, at least for now.)
Our flight was uneventful. We had reserved a car, but had
some difficulty figuring out where to go to get it. Every airport is
different. At Orlando, the rental cars are in a multi-level garage across the street from the terminal. Hertz has a
person standing out in front of their counter to intercept people like us, who have #1 Club Gold (like O.J.?) and don’t have to check in, but don’t know where to go. So we got directions, headed outside over to the garage and then it
hit us. Florida is really, really
hot. We worked up a sweat in no time. It was breathtakingly hot.
I had asked for a Corolla but got a Jeep Compass. I guess you would call this a small SUV. It had Texas plates. A sign?
Our drive to Port St Lucie went okay. Florida has a lot of long, straight roads,
and is really flat. You would think
someone from Texas wouldn’t notice, but we have much more in the way of changes
in elevation in our part of Texas than Florida does. We used
Jody’s iPhone for navigation, having previously captured in Contacts the
addresses we needed. Siri took us over
to I-95 and then down to Port St Lucie.
We found our hotel without too much trouble. It was a beautiful Hilton Garden Inn, with
everything shiny and new. Our room was comfortable. We ate dinner in Chili’s, probably taking the
easy way out instead of trying to find something local.
The next morning we left the Hilton to go to the first of
the communities we were going to investigate. With Jody’s roller bag being
disabled, I took both our bags out to the car, but as soon as I stepped
outside, I was blind. The humidity was
so bad that my sunglasses, cooled from the air conditioning in the hotel,
fogged up immediately and completely. I’d not seen anything like it. A bright,
sunny, hot and humid day awaited us.
The Kolter PGA Verano development was our next stop. We got
past the gate guard, but the office was not open yet, so we drove around the
development checking things out. We noticed a couple of things right away. One was that everything was very uniform –
the yards were immaculately maintained and the grass was all one color. Trees and shrubs were harmonious. The other was that we saw some new
construction, and they use cinderblocks or concrete blocks for building, not
wood with brick veneer as we are used to in North Texas. I guess it makes sense. If you are encountering hurricane-force
winds, you need a hurricane-resistant house.
Verano has an association with the Professional Golfer’s Association
(PGA) and is the only development having it.
This development is not age-restricted, but it sure seemed like it was
mostly for retired people.
We got the information on the home where we would be
staying, and the salesman came out and introduced himself. His name was Lee,
and he was Australian. Lee basically
gave us an overview of the development, and let us walk around through the
model park. They have models set up in order of cost, from lowest to highest,
and you help yourself. Since we were so
early, we were the first ones there, and had the place to ourselves.
The models were very impressive. We have a fairly large house for only two
people, and downsizing is a goal. Some of the houses seemed to fit our goal,
but the layouts were sometimes problematic. I do not like having kitchen,
dining, and living rooms all together, for example. Two, yes, three, no. Most were that way. Jody is looking for a big new kitchen and a
pantry, and wants to have a tub in the master bath, or at the very least, a tub
somewhere. Those are not universal.
Lee caught up with us to answer questions. One interesting
thing is that in Verano all the houses have what he called ‘impact’
windows. This is not a term we
knew. An impact window is strong enough
to withstand hurricane-force winds without requiring shutters to be put
up. We also learned that the uniformity
and excellence of the yard maintenance was because the homeowners don’t do the
maintenance – a landscaping company does it for the whole development. There’s a monthly charge (more than $400)
which includes yard maintenance, security, internet and cable television.
We liked Verano, but there were two problems. One was it was
hot as hell there, although the air conditioning in the borrowed home worked
flawlessly. Even first thing in the
morning, it was too hot to go out. The
second was that there was nobody there.
We went into the clubhouse to see what was there, and two or three
people were at the pool. We went into the exercise room, and there were two
bored physical trainers helping each other work out. I said, can I ask a question: Where is everybody? The answer is that many of the people in the
community leave for the hot months and go back wherever they came from. Some
have a place at Verano as a second home, and some live there but leave in the
summer. One of the advantages of Verano
is that it is set up as ‘lock and leave’. If you go out of town, someone does
your yard and unless you leave food to rot the house will be the same when you
get back. We even saw collection points
at various places in Florida for people who are leaving for the summer to drop
off food items for donations to the needy.
Two major pluses for Verano:
1) a very nice supermarket was right outside the entrance, and 2) one
exit on I-95 brought you to West St Lucie, a booming area with lots of
restaurants and shopping, not all of it national chains.
Two major negatives for Verano: 1) it was deserted. 2) no
on-site restaurant, not even in the golf course.
While in the Port St Lucie area, we ventured over to the
ocean one morning. There are barrier
islands off the coast, and entry is only at a causeway at each end of the
island in St Lucie county. We went to the beach, but no one was in the
water. A few people were fishing.
Generally it was deserted, probably because it was so hot. There is a long, lonely road down the island,
and as you get to the southern tip it is more built up. Lots of high rise buildings, with all the
windows covered by hurricane shutters. I
guess they aren’t planning on returning until fall. One disappointment was that the island
contained a huge nuclear power plant.
Hmmm, nuclear power plant, only two narrow bridges to get you out. Maybe not the best plan.
We chose a couple of floor plans out of the seven or eight they have at Verano that we thought might work for us, and went back the next day to check them
out. Then we got Lee to take us to some
empty houses that were available with those floor plans. We got the idea, but the extreme heat and the
absence of any people worked against Verano.
Our house backed up to a golf course, but we never saw any golfers. All the homes backed up either to water,
golf, or nature preserve, so there would never be a neighbor behind you.
While we were there I touched base with my cousin Mary, who
lives in Fort Myers. We had a terrible
phone connection but the house had wi-fi, so I called her back with Face
Time. I later learned that the phone
connection problem was my phone itself, not AT&T. Face Time is fantastic. Mary sent a message later about a place
called Pelican Preserve, another development near where she lives, which she thought we might like.
We left Verano fairly early the next day, and started across
the peninsula in the direction of Fort Myers.
The drive across Florida was interesting. Some areas were covered by a canopy of trees
over the highway, making it cooler but hard to see. Other places we saw
farmland, grazing, citrus, etc. Lots and
lots of trailer parks. When we got past
Lake Okeechobee, never having seen it, we lost the cellular signal, and Siri
lost her mind. We had to pull over and
study the Hertz map for a while to determine which way to go. While we sat
there, a sheriff sat in his car watching us, a couple in a car with Texas plates,
obviously not supposed to be there, obviously up to something. He followed us for a while. I
was particularly careful to signal every turn and not to speed, thinking of Burt Reynolds in "The Longest Yard". Welcome to
Florida! Eventually the sheriff turned off.
When we got to Fort Myers, we just happened to drive right past one of the
developments we wanted to check out, a place called Verandah, also by the
Kolter company. We grabbed a quick bite
at a Taco Bell, and went back to Verandah.
Verandah was a lot more attractive than Verano. At Verano, the homes were all built with a
faux-Italian design, with Mediterranean tile roofs, and the interiors had faux-Italian styling. Verandah was more
traditional, and each house had, guess what, a veranda on the front. The floor plans were not all the same as Verano, although they were definitely cousins, and they had more of the smaller floor plans available. We currently have a four bedroom house with
three bathrooms, for two people. Smaller
would probably be good. This development
had golf available (not mandatory) and lots of winding, treed roads and
walkways, a rarity in this part of the country.
Florida has long, straight roads, but Verandah was not like that. We viewed the models and went back and looked
a second time at our favorites.
Verandah had the same ‘lock-and-leave’ setup as Verano. It
had the same high ceilings and hurricane-resistant windows.
The problem with Verandah is where it is. One one side is
undeveloped land or agricultural land, and on the other side it seemed mostly
industrial, and beyond that was a poor neighborhood. So the question becomes, where do you go
shopping? Our salesman didn’t know. Male sales people aren’t interested in that. And it seemed like Fort Myers was even hotter
than Port St Lucie.
We planned to visit two developments the next day, one being
the Pelican Preserve mentioned by my cousin, and the other the Del Webb Tidewater
development. We were getting up early
and Pelican opened earliest, so we went there first. It was off a beautiful, relatively empty,
multi-lane divided highway. We filled
out the forms and a nice lady named Pat showed us around. We really liked this place. There were lots of people staying there over
the summer, although some did not. The common areas were busy. They had a
couple of on-site restaurants. It just
felt like it would be a nice place to live.
The homes we looked at were intelligently laid out and
landscaped. Every home seemed to have a
screened in lanai in the back. They did
not have impact resistant windows as a standard but it was available as an add-on. The way all of these developments work is to
present a floor plan for X dollars.
There is a lot premium, which may be quite a bit, or could even be zero. Then you work on what you want in the house,
and upgrades are available on everything.
It seemed that a typical house with two bedrooms, two bathrooms and a
den would go for, say $325,000. With lot
premium and upgrades, nicer granite in the kitchen, nicer faucets, bigger stovetop, it sneaks up to $400,000 pretty quickly. Then there is a monthly charge for yard
maintenance, and possibly a community development fee for road maintenance and
the like, which can sneak on up there as well.
After checking out Pelican, we decided to forego
Tidewater. It seemed to have similar
floor plans to what we saw in the Sun City Texas development, also Del Webb,
except everything was $100,000 more expensive, and any attempt I made to
contact them to make an appointment was unsuccessful. I guess things are good at Del Webb. So we decided to drive over to the Gulf, and
see what we could see. We made it as far
as Sanibel Island, and the fun part is going over the causeway to get
there. It is quite spectacular. (It's also $6.) Sanibel is low-keyed, with smaller houses and
resorts, and it is virtually impossible to get even a glimpse of the water
anywhere without paying an hourly parking fee.
I imagine Sanibel is crazy during high season, but it was not crowded at
all on a cloudy afternoon in July. We
did get over to the lighthouse to snap a few photos, and got a few more on one
of the islands used by the highway to get back to the mainland. Later we stopped by Mary’s house and visited
briefly. It looks like they just moved
in and haven’t unpacked yet.
The next day we left Fort Myers for our next destination, a
small town north of Orlando called Mount Dora.
A ‘mount’ in Florida? Every person
we met was proud to tell us that Mount Dora was 180 feet above sea level. By way of comparison, our house in Richardson is 600 feet above sea level. The drive up there was long and mostly
boring, except for where the construction crews had reduced I-75 down to one
lane. When you get further north in
Florida, the topography is a little more interesting, the roads have bends in
them, and there are some changes in elevation.
It was a bit shocking.
We found the office for Pringle builders (everyone has to
have a name, what can I say) but my contact was out sick. The guy who filled in
for her was kind of frazzled. He put
together a packet for us and led us over to the Lakes of Mount Dora
development. But it is different. They
had no models, only the guest house where we were staying. The guest house was a home they had sold and leased back for use for prospective buyers. They build
everything custom, off a base floor plan to be sure, but the house where we
were had been expanded considerably off the floor plan to make some of the
rooms larger. We liked our house,
although the furnishings were not comfortable, the cable TV didn’t work and the
icemaker wasn’t making ice. But they had
a huge bucket full of snacks, including, you guessed it, some Pringles.
Our host (named Jim, he called me Jimmy once but I didn’t kill
him) said that if we were interested in any of the floor plans, he would try to
get us into a house to look at it. I
assume he meant an occupied house where they had agreement from the owner, who
was probably away for the summer, to have a look. We picked out a couple of floor plans and
agreed to meet with him back at our guest house at 10 the next day.
We were then taken to dinner by a couple living in the
community, actually about 6 houses away.
For some reason, they chose to go to a chain restaurant (Olive Garden)
instead of one of the many very interesting restaurants in the town of Mount
Dora, which we found out about the next day.
But they clearly love Mount Dora and love living in the Lakes
development. They had moved from the south side of Chicago. Their house had extensive customization - a six burner gas stovetop, very high ceilings, expanded rooms of every kind. It was really nice but way more than what we would need. After dinner, we sat outside on their screened in lanai, which included a pool, and the temperature was comfortable for the first time for us in Florida. Of course, there had been a pretty good thunderstorm right before we went to dinner, which cooled things off.
It seemed to us that the Lakes of Mount Dora lacked the
critical mass we were looking for in a community. It was nearly deserted, and did not have the
club space and activity space that other developments had. It seemed that the location was in fact a
touch cooler and less humid than Port Saint Lucie or Fort Myers, and the
topography was a lot more interesting.
The other attraction is that Orlando is not too far away. Their literature said 40 minutes but our
experience was more like 60.
We expected to meet up with Jim the next morning, but he
called and said Ann (our supposed contact) was still sick and he was tied up with a
client. He rescheduled for 1 PM.
We took the opportunity to drive into Mount Dora to explore
the town. It is a walkable town, but it would have been a lot more walkable in a different season.
We wandered down to the lake, and saw a rare lighthouse on fresh
water. Lots of signs about snakes and
alligators. We walked back into town,
thoroughly soaked in sweat. A coffee
shop was open that featured cold drinks and cupcakes. It was exactly what we needed, especially the
air conditioning. We did not walk that
far but in the humidity it was pretty tough. A chocolate mousse cupcake ruined lunch as well as anything could.
We went back to the house to wait for Jim, but 1 PM came and
went. We called, and they said he was still busy. I said we would wait until 3, and after that
forget about it, and he didn’t show, so we didn’t get to see much of the Lakes
of Mount Dora except from the outside. If they don't want to do business with me, I don't want to do business with them.
The next morning we drove to Orlando, found the airport, and
found the incredible ripoff gas station that we found the last time we were in
Orlando, 1998 or so. I needed only a few
gallons so I paid for it. On our trip
home, we were upgraded to first class, but did not get to sit together. Still, first class on a Boeing 757 is better than
coach, and we appreciated it.
So our Florida adventure concluded with no decisions being
made, but it seemed that if we moved to Florida we would probably want to go
somewhere else during the summer. We
could do that here just as well.
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