While we have been luckier and better off than most, 2020 was by far the worst year of 4 dreadful years. Our plan had been that when our youngest goes off to college in 2023, we'll spend a year getting the house in NJ ready to go on the market, sell it (and most of the stuff in it) move to somewhere in the Palm Beach area and rent a house or an apartment, and come back for a few days every month, while living the rest of the time in our Abaco home.JaxTeller wrote: Sun May 09, 2021 10:06 pm Updating this thread since it has been a while. (Well over a year - but what a year it has been!)
COVID got to us - well not physically, but mentally I am in the pits. Things have been rough at work and it is time to move on. My father-in-law passed away in December and that brought about some change at a sudden pace. Mom-in-law decided to move away from the area and has relocated to be closer to her grandchild. That leaves us with no family in the immediate area.....
We've honed in on Gainesville and Tampa thanks to the input in this thread. Hoping to start the moving process in the next 2 months and we'll go from there... I know I said 3 years in my first post. But really have no reason to see another sub-zero MN winter....
But two things have changed.
Abaco has never been the same since Dorion (Sept 1, 2019), probably the strongest hurricane on record. If there was a Class 6 hurricane, this would be it. And then Covid. Crime has been up, even building materials stolen from the house going up across the street from us--and we're 16-17 miles from town. The government's ineptitude (and corruption) following Dorian was positively Trumpian--even police were stealing relief supplies openly to ship to relatives in Nassau. The Covid response has been better--the Prime Minister is himself a physician--but only because it couldn't be as bad as his handling of the 'cane. All of a sudden our retirement paradise isn't so much a paradise. We are actually toying with the idea of selling our dream, broken-hearted.
Then there's the new National Socialist Volksrepublik of Florida, where peaceful protest will now be deemed felony rioting, and voting against the new NSDAP is verboten. I expect the death penalty to be expanded far beyond aggravated 1st Degree murder. There is now NO WAY we want to move THERE either. I'd rather deal with snow.