I guess some of you were probably born and raised here, but like myself, I suspect many others moved here by choice.
My parents would take us kids (I had two younger brothers) on vacations to various places in Florida maybe once or twice a year. Mostly on fishing trips that my dad and brothers were really into. I didn't care for it much, mostly because fishermen are insane and likely to get you killed. I remember up in Maryland going out fishing with them and after hours of not even getting a nibble, and I had long ago turned blue from the cold, these people were refusing to give up. I finally whined enough to get them to take me back to shore where I could at least sit in the car while they went back on out.
Another time, after a long stint of time refusing to have anything at all to do with their insanity, it was on one of the Florida trips down to the St. Johns River area (I don't have a clue what town it was near) I decided that the river looked so nice and peaceful, and they were egging me on to come on out for the boat ride. Well why not? What's the worst that could happen. About an hour into the trip, there was an odd mist above the water that we were heading into. Well, that "mist" turned out to be some sort of bugs that bit the hell out of all of us. Every bit of exposed skin had little red welts wherever that pestilence had landed and bit. Needless to say, I was not amused.......
One of the trips down to the Keys for another fishing adventure was rather disappointing to me, in that I loved nothing more then running around catching lizards and frogs and what not, so the Keys was a whole new universe to me. Well we no sooner got the stuff unloaded from the car when I hightailed it to the back of the motel with the intention of diving into the wooded area to look for critters. Whoa! Never in all my life have I seen so many spider webs in one place! Seriously! Every two trees or bushes had these monstrous cobwebs between them with either this HUGE hairy kneed spider sitting in the middle of it, or else these little weird black and white ones with red tips on some spikes around the body. No WAY I was going in to that mess. So I mostly sat around the motel that trip. And of course they were trying to get me to go out fishing with them. Man I was tempted, because the blue green waters of the Florida Keys is pure beauty to behold. But, no, that St. Johns River trip was still pretty fresh in my mind...
And probably a good thing I didn't. One evening they my dad and brothers came back from their fishing jaunt and my brother Ronnie was as white as a sheet. My dad said they had been out fishing nearly all day and were getting ready to head on back. Ronnie had a lot of bait gunk all over his hands, so he leaned over the boat edge to wash his hands off in the water. He no sooner had pulled his hands out of the water when a rather LARGE barracuda broke the water right where his hands had been an instant before. Yeah, right. I'm going fishing with THESE guys....... And then they mentioned the shark that were seen underneath the boat that were at LEAST the length of the boat....... I'll take the spiders ANY day!
Well anyway, even thought the fishing trips I could do without, I have always been extremely attracted to this state. So back in the mid 80s or so, the wife and I talked about buying some land down there to just keep for retirement purposes and build a house on sometime way in the future. So I started getting a publication called the
Rural Property Bulletin delivered to the house and scanned the ads looking for something interesting. There was a real estate agent working out of Ft. White who seemed to have a bunch of listings, so I wrote him a letter telling him I was looking for the following:
- A LARGE chunk of land
- Mostly wooded with a stream or pond on it.
- On a dirt road
- Close to the national forest area below Tallahassee
- Price under $50,000
Yeah, pretty funny these days, but it didn't seem TOO unreasonable to me then. But the guy found a few pieces to look at, so on one of our vacation trips, the wife (Connie) and I first stopped in at Ft. White, and had this guy drive us up to the Tallahassee/Crawfordville area and looked them over. Of them all, the first piece of land, which was around 50 acres had everything on the list except the price. Asking price was around $1500 per acre. So we thanked the agent for his time, and then continued on down to Englewood.
Laying on the beach, we talked it over, and figured the first piece of land was the one we wanted to shoot for. We figured what we would do was to tell the agent to offer them $800 per acre for the whole thing and from there we could go through the counter offer stages and meanwhile figure out if this was what we REALLY wanted to do.
Well, they sure caught us flat footed when the offer was ACCEPTED as is! Gulp! Wasn't expecting THAT to happen...... But heck, it seemed like a pretty good deal, so we just said OK, and the rest is history.
Now the property just set vacant for around 5 years and Connie and I would take out vacations there by camping out on the property and putting around on the land. Digging up those danged sand spurs that had somehow gotten in control took us most of our time and efforts, but except for the straggler that sometimes still turns up, we got rid of that crap. And it was a great time for us. Spending the time in a tent on your own land is quite an experience.
Anyway at this time I was working for an outfit called Quotron up between Baltimore and Washington DC working with computers. It was an OK job so I didn't have any real pressing desire to go anywhere else for the near future. But something happened that changed that completely.
A friend of mine at Quotron was telling me about a tightness in his chest he was having a few days before I was leaving on vacation. He said he usually gets that way right before coming down with a cold. Yeah, another trip to camp out on our land. We were gone a week or so and when I got back I found that my friend was out sick. I commented to one of the managers that yeah, John has said he was probably coming down with a cold, and the manager just looked at me and said nothing, but "well it's not that....". Well long story short is that the reason John had this tightness was because he had a collapsed lung. The reason the lung collapsed is because of a tumor the size of a plumb inside of it. The doctors told him to get his affairs in order. So we had a few long talks before he quit and went to live his final days out in Texas. One thing he said that had a huge impact on me was "You know Rich, I always dreamed about all the things I was going to do when I got older. But you know what? I'm never going to do them because I just won't live long enough. A lot of them, I could have done already, but I didn't because I thought I had plenty of time. You just never know, do you?"
Sheesh..... I was a changed man after that. I talked to Connie about it, and I told her that I didn't want to run the risk of never having lived in Florida by something like that hitting me. Yeah, the job market was tough, and the housing market was tougher at that time, so just dropping everything and moving was about as dumb as can be. Quitting a good job with nothing on the line, and trying to sell a house when the market was soft as mud. Just not smart at all..... But I talked with the manager at Quotron, I think to try to get him to talk sense into my head, but he just told me he was envious of my taking a step such as this. He told me "You know, you can always come up with a reason to NOT do whatever it is you really want to do."
Well we just decided to just DO it and see what happens. The animals were a complication as I had to move them all down here. But first I had to get a building built to put them into when I got them down here.
Wow, this is really running on a LOT longer then I thought it would. And it's getting late.... I may have to do a
Part 2 for this later. I'm running out of steam...
Did anyone really READ this far anyway? You MUST be bored....
Economically and "climaticly" depressed! 50 days a year of sunshine. 
Just kidding Buddy
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