Well Wyatt....it's time to get out of Dodge!

As the cowboys used to say in the spaghetti westerns I grew up watching….”Boys, it’s time to get out of Dodge”. Dodge, of course, originally referred only to Dodge City, Kansas…but as time went on the expression has come to mean getting out of any place (or situation) that has gotten too dangerous, or too uncomfortable for many reasons. i don’t know if Wyatt Earp (the sheriff of Dodge City back in the 1870’s) ever used this expression when escorting the bad hombres out of town (the ones he hadn’t shot yet), but I like to think that maybe he did.

And now, I’m going to borrow it.

It snowed here last night! In Arizona. What???? We thought Arizona was a Winter haven for the rich and famous. This is where you come to warm up from the harsh conditions that hit much of the US this time of year. Play golf in shorts… lounge by the pool. Well sports fans, this might just be the new normal. This has been one of the coldest and wettest Winters to hit Arizona in over 100 years. Last night it went down to 32 in our part of the county. No big deal in the rest of the country, but here in the desert regions near Scottsdale, that’s earth shaking. A lot of homes here don’t even have heat. True. Not long ago, we looked online at a really cool house not far from here that had no air conditioning and no heat, other than a very inefficient fire place or two. That’s the way they used to build the adobe style homes here in Arizona. The thick concrete walls insulated the home against both heat and cold. That was then….this is now. Good luck with having no A/C or heat.

I walked Tuck last night around the fountain in the only warm clothes I own….a hoodie, a rain parka, two tee shirts, a knit North Face beanie and tennis shoes (they stayed dry for about 10 seconds). Yep, I froze, but Tuck loved the snow. Since the walks are all for Tuck anyway, I suck it up. In town, a huge annual art show is being set up. Vendors come from all over the country to sell their crafts and….enjoy the sun. It is going to warm up later in the week, but not in time to help the poor vendors. We’re going anyway….they always have great kettle corn booths.

It’s time to get out of Dodge!

Cheers!

Wayne, Claudia & Tuck

Hooking up the wagon train and heading East...back to Florida. Yikes!

Well…it’s official. We’re headed back to Florida. I said we would never move back to Florida in one of my posts…but it appears I spoke incorrectly (perhaps I should go into politics). As the old expression goes….”never say never”.

We did a couple months of research on the Charleston/Savannah areas and found them both to be lacking. Too crowded, too expensive and really lousy real estate markets. Taken individually, not too bad….but when added together…they were deal-breakers.

So, we did what we always do….made our lists of the things that are important to us in an area….got out the mighty AAA road atlas and started looking. While taking Tuck for a walk one day around the lake in Fountain Hills (they have the world’s tallest fountain), I met a cool lady, also walking her doggie, who had recently moved from the Saint Augustine area and we got to talking about the area. Since we wanted to explore an area entirely new to us, it sounded promising. Another month of research followed and we liked what we saw…..great beaches, fun towns, dog-friendly, affordable real estate, close to a large town, close to an international airport, great climate and last but not least,…close to major medical facilities (Mayo has a large hospital in Jacksonville). The rest, as they say, is history.

We got into action and located a climate-controlled storage unit, a short -term rental to use while we check out the area, made a call to the now familiar Penske folks and lined up a truck and a car carrier, called local and long-distance movers, started packing up the house and began plotting our route. While it might sound like the easiest part of the process, planning the route is tough. Any stops have to be dog friendly, have adequate parking for me to pull in without turning around (the truck and the car carrier are as long as a semi-truck), have to be no longer than 500 miles at a stretch and have to be comfortable and clean….vital at the end of a long day. Claudia is a Jedi master at route planning.

I’ll update the posts and of course add some pictures along the way. That’s it for now….back to work packing up artwork. Damn….we’re getting good at this.

Cheers!

Wayne, Claudia & Tuck

Moving East....advice not needed....and lyrics that sum it all up

Since we’ve announced that we’re heading East to get back to the ocean….friends, family and total strangers have (for some reason not yet clear to us) decided to give us their opinion on where we should live. Claudia and I both find this very odd, since where you decide to live is a deeply personal decision. I mean, really people, we have literally just devoted two full years on this quest, driven over 50,000 miles and spent a lot of money searching the country for a location that will work for us. Trust me when I say this one last time….if there was a perfect location, we would have already found it and moved there. But alas…there wasn’t. Henry David Thoreau was fortunate to have found Walden Pond, but even he only stayed there two years (HA…that makes me feel better already). At the end of the day, you simply have to find a spot that checks off most of the boxes and go for it. Will that spot be perfect? Nope. Will it be good enough? Absolutely.

Joni Mitchell wrote many beautiful songs and one in particular is “Amelia” ( a tribute to Amelia Earhart) that sums up my feelings on this subject:

“People will tell you where they've gone

They'll tell you where to go

But till you get there yourself you'll never really know

Where some have found their paradise

Other's just come to harm

Oh Amelia it was just a false alarm”

Thanks Joni….you nailed it.

Cheers!

Wayne, Claudia & Tuck

Happy New Year....it snowed here today....and heading East!

Greetings to family, friends and new readers. This will be a quick post just to close out the year…and what a year it has been.

I now have a bunch of titanium rods and screws in my back…and I’m an inch taller (which is to say, I’m not as short as I was prior to June 29th). I love the old Terminator movies, where Arnold plays the cyber-robot from the future. If you’ve watched any of them, you know the scenes where his metal skeleton is exposed. I can relate to that now, after seeing the images of my back post-surgery! Yikes! No more strolling casually through the airport security booths for me. I’ll set off every alarm they have. But…it’s healing (slowly) and I hope by this time next year, I’ll be able to report a full recovery.

The move from California to Arizona was another tough one, but very necessary for a number of reasons, first and foremost being near to the Mayo Clinic here in Scottsdale. But, there’s no doubt about it, the move took a lot out of me physically. Loading and unloading lots of boxes and tools took its toll on my poor back. Well sports fans, those days are over. I can now cheerfully tell any movers we hire what to pick up and where to load it and not feel guilty about not doing my part. Yippee! For the next year, I can’t lift anything heavier than 10 pounds. Which is, basically, nothing heavier than a pair of hiking boots. Which brings me to my favorite subject….moving!

I’ll write more about this next year (tomorrow), but for now I’ll just say that we’ve decided to head back East. Bottom line….we miss the sea…and living near the Pacific is just way too expensive. As much as we tried to love the desert, we just couldn’t. And, there’s also the heat. We’re no strangers to heat, after living in Florida for 15 years, but we hated living through 125 days where the temperature was over 100….with many days over 110. If you’ve ever wondered if you can REALLY fry an egg on the hood of your car in Arizona. Yep, no problem. Exposed metal reaches temperatures well over 200 degrees. They’ve actually cooked pizzas inside cars in Phoenix. That’s ridiculous (but it was a great YouTube video to watch).

And on the subject of weather…it snowed in Cave Creek, about 10 miles from here today. We only got sleet….but wait…isn’t this Arizona…where people from all around the world come to avoid the cold? Yep…maybe this is the new normal? Watch the movie “The Day After Tomorrow” and get back to me. Great movie by the way. Scary stuff.

So, the wagon train heads East sometime in April. We won’t announce where we’re heading just yet, but it’s not back to Florida. Been there, done that.

In the meantime, Claudia and I hope you and your family have a safe, healthy and happy New Year! Let’s all make it a great one. Now, if only we can get Trump out of the white house……

Cheers,

Wayne, Claudia and Tuck

Georgetown, TX....the tech boom and traffic, traffic, traffic!

So here we are in Georgetown, TX….a quaint town of about 70,000 and about 30 miles North of Austin. We had heard great things about Georgetown….close to Austin, affordable, lots of amenities, an old historic town square voted “the best in Texas”, etc. So, after reading lots of great articles about Austin….and getting recommendations to visit there from friends and family…we decided to do what we always do…get in the truck and find out for ourselves. Not wanting to look at neighborhoods directly in downtown Austin, we settled on Georgetown as a good suburb to visit. We found it to be pretty much as described. The town square is great…all the buildings have been restored and are now restaurants and shops of all types. Less than 10 minutes from town square, you can find all the national chain stores. The neighborhoods are another story. Surrounding the town, there are perhaps 10 different communities with prices ranging from $250,000 to over $1 million. Unfortunately, the builders of these communities decided to cram in WAY too many homes. Not only did we find that the homes are too close together, on each side, but they also backed up to one another. Many of the homes shared a common back yard fence. That might be OK for apartment homes, but in upscale neighborhoods where you might be spending $500,000….that’s a deal breaker for us.

And then there’s the traffic if you decide to leave Georgetown and head into downtown Austin. I’ll be really direct about the traffic in and around Austin. It’s terrible. We entered the Austin area from the West side on a Sunday afternoon….hoping that we would avoid the dreaded traffic we had heard so much about. Nope. Not even close. Every road, every interchange, every side road was bumper to bumper going into and out of Austin…and this on a random Sunday afternoon at 5:00. Wow. We finally got through town and headed North to Georgetown. It took us almost an hour to go a mere 30 miles. This was not looking good. If it’s this bad on a Sunday afternoon, what must it be like during the week? We found out…it’s grid lock.

Yesterday and today, we checked out towns around Georgetown, thinking perhaps some of them might fare better in the traffic department. We visited Sun City, Leander, Fredericksburg, Round Rock, Cedar Park, Liberty Hill, Andice, Florence and a few more I’ve already forgotten. The traffic was so bad in most areas that we quit early and took Tuck for a nice walk in a local park to decompress. And we haven’t even started to check out the areas on the South side of Austin.

What has happened to the Austin “area”? There’s an easy answer….the tech boom. Austin has become the Texas equivalent of Silicon Valley in California. All of the major players in the tech industry now have offices and manufacturing facilities in and around Austin. Many thousands of new jobs have been created. And these companies pay their employees really well. So well that in most neighborhoods around Austin, the home prices start at $750,000 and top out well above $2 million. Want to buy a restored home in the very hip 2nd Street District downtown? Try $700,000 for a 1,000 sq. ft. home built in 1920, that has no garage and only on-street parking. Due to the huge demand, prices are soaring everywhere. It’s San Francisco all over again. And to top it off, Apple just announced that they’re going to build a new headquarters in Austin starting in 2019 that will about 7,500 new jobs. Yikes! Good news for Austin, but bad news for commuters. This will continue until the tech boom either slows down or blows up, which it inevitably will at some point. Claudia and I have read this book before and we know how it ends. Real estate doesn’t appreciate 15% annually for very long. At that rate, your home would double in value every 5 years.

Clearly….this area is not going to work for us for many reasons. The last thing we want in a retirement area is traffic gridlock, a real estate boom waiting to blow up and a population of newly-minted tech millionaires as neighbors. Might be perfect for some…but not us.

And so, tomorrow we head back to Arizona, where we will begin the search anew. The bad news is that this was yet another dead end. The good news is that after each trip, we learn more about what we want in a town…and what we don’t want. As with many pursuits in life, clarity only comes after a lot of work and experimentation.

Cheers and thanks for reading!

Wayne, Claudia and Tuck

On the road again....exploring Austin, Texas

Are you kidding me? Here we are back on the road, only two weeks after a grueling road trip through Mexico. The night we got home from Mexico…I looked at Claudia and said…”I’m beat. Absolutely dead tired. My back hurts. My head hurts. My butt hurts. Even my eyes hurt. No more trips for a while”. A month driving 3,500 miles through the interior of Mexico will do that to you.

And then…we unpacked, took stock of our trip and realized that….yep….as hard as it was to head back out after just getting home, we had to get back in the saddle and continue our search for a great (not just a good, or an “OK”) place to live. And the clock is ticking. Summer…and the unbearable Arizona heat it brings…will be here before we know it. Get the damn suitcases back out. Poor Tuck…he just looks at the suitcases and wags his tail as if to say…”I’m ready Mom and Dad”. What an amazing dog. We love him so much.

Anyway, back to the story. Since we have already explored (and more or less scratched off the list) Florida, Georgia, California, Oregon, Washington, Nevada, Utah, Wyoming…and most recently Mexico, one of our last potential areas to consider is Texas, specifically the Austin area. Why Austin? Here’s a start….a moderate climate, great culture, great food, an amazing music scene, affordable housing costs, access to great health care, an international airport nearby, a great mix of residents both working and retired, access to great shopping if we need it, within a days drive of other major cities to explore and last, but not least, enough “stuff” to do to have a fun and productive retirement. It’s no wonder Austin makes the list every year of great places to live or retire.

So here we are in Georgetown, TX, a rapidly growing and very popular suburb of Austin. Georgetown is located on the North side of Austin. We just arrived late this afternoon after a 9-hour drive from Van Horn, TX, so we haven’t had much time to explore yet. But what we have seen so far is really promising. The town has a beautiful restored town square, recently voted the most beautiful town square in Texas. We got Tuck and took a half-hour walk around the square. Even on a Sunday night, there wasn’t a parking space to be had around the square. People were out eating, drinking, walking, enjoying the Christmas lights, etc. Nice! A good sign. The sidewalks don’t roll up at 7:00 here. Even on a Sunday night, a lot of the restaurants were open until 10:00. That isn’t typical, even in Scottsdale.

Tomorrow we’re going to check out the town and a lot of neighborhoods within a reasonable driving distance of downtown. More info and pictures tomorrow night.

Thanks for “watching”.

Cheers,

Wayne, Claudia and Tuck

Home Again!

We made it home yesterday afternoon about 5:00, after a 600+ mile drive from Van Horn, TX. We stopped in Tucson and thanks to Claudia’s quick thinking, snagged some groceries for our Thanksgiving dinner before the stores closed at 4:00. Except for the rotisserie chicken and the rolls, everything else was frozen and it tasted amazing. Hint….if you’ve never tried Bob Evans mashed potatoes in the vegetable isle, you owe it to yourself to try some. You may never make mashed potatoes from scratch again. Yes, I’m serious (my Mom was an amazing cook and she turned Claudia on to these years ago). As we ate and polished off a bottle of wine, we had to laugh at the amount of work we’ve put into preparing Turkey Day feasts in the past. Days of grocery shopping, trying to cook “the perfect turkey”, a full day of cooking all the side dishes….then after all that work….eat for maybe 30 minutes….and clean up for 2 hours. Man, we are so over that! I guess “back in the day”, we ate a lot more. But now….one helping of everything and we’re done.

We drove 3,500 miles over the course of our 25-day journey. That’s a lot of miles on any interstate system….but I’m here to tell you….it’s a massive amount of miles when driving through Mexico. You’ll have to trust me on this one, until you do it on your own.

We learned a lot on the trip….things that could only have been answered by actually going and seeing it for ourselves. Forget the blogs. Forget the International Living articles. Forget the websites. Forget the Facebook posts. Forget the YouTube travel videos. None of them….were even close to being accurate. Mostly, they showed only the good side of Mexico and very little of the bad. In the case of International LIving….that’s how they sell magazines and keep readers waiting for the next magazine to arrive in the mail. Ditto for the YouTube bloggers….that’s how they increase subscribers, which in turn increases the money they get paid from YouTube.

We found Ajijic to be nearly overrun with tourists from the USA, Canada and the UK….a victim of too many “this place is perfect” videos, newspaper articles, magazine articles, etc. This quaint little village is now a parking lot…with bumper to bumper traffic from 8:00am to 9:00pm. Want to park somewhere other than the local WalMart? Forget about it. And…once again, as we have found so often in our travels, too many Californians with too much money (mostly from the sale of their homes in the Bay area) coming to an area and driving up rents and home prices. The phenomenon is now referred to as “Californication”. A year ago, a beautiful home in Ajijic could be rented for $750-$1,000/month. Now, the rate is $1,500 - $2,000….about what you will pay in many beautiful communities around Scottsdale, including the golf course community we currently live in. We saw this pattern in Northern California, Oregon, Colorado and now….sadly, in Mexico. Paradise found…..paradise lost. When a city, or an area, makes it to a magazine cover….it’s all over.

In Puerto Vallarta and the nearby community of Bucerias, we experienced a different problem. Of course, it’s super touristy (cruise ships, etc.) and with that comes lots of traffic. We were prepared for that part. What we weren’t prepared for was the fact that both of these areas have become super popular weekend party spots for the residents of Guadalajara and Mexico City. And when these folks come to party, they start around midnight and they go all night long. We found out the hard way. Noise abatement rules….nope…they don’t exist in Mexico.

The bottom line….Mexico has much to offer and thousands are moving there every year from countries around the globe. For some….it may be worth the sacrifice to live there. And make no mistake about it….it is a huge sacrifice. But after spending a month to experience it up close and personal and running the financial numbers…we’ve decided it isn’t for us. Southern France or Italy maybe…but definitely not Mexico.

So, that’s it for now. Stay tuned for the next edition of Tuck’s Travels, which will come fairly soon, as we’re going to check out the Austin, TX area in early December. Yep….back on the road!

Thanks for joining us on this amazing journey. Get out there and travel!

Wayne, Claudia & Tuck

The border crossing....waiters in starched white uniforms....and back in the USA!

Well, I’ll start this post off by saying that I’m writing this from a LaQuinta Inn in Laredo, Texas. If you haven’t been to Laredo, don’t put it on your bucket list. BTW…if you travel with pets, LaQuinta’s rock. All of them, coast to coast, accept pets…dogs, cats, birds, you name it, they take it. And cheerfully….you don’t even have to sneak in the side door after checking in….not that we’ve ever done such a thing.

Yesterday, we drove from Ajijic to the little town of Matehuala. All in all, it was a pretty good drive. Most of the roads were good. Late in the afternoon, we were dragging as we pulled in to the little town of Matehuala. As we drove into town, things didn’t look good. After nearly a month here, we’ve gotten pretty good at sizing up towns quickly. So picture driving through any poor town in the US and looking for your motel sign. Please Lord, I hope it isn’t that one with the hand-lettered sign out front. And then, as if by a miracle, a huge sign appears on the horizon…..Las Palmas Midway Inn. Yippee!

We pulled into a spotless 1960’s era motel, complete with a miniature golf course, shuffle board courts, a beautiful pool, rooms you drive up to and park beside your door (a luxury I can’t even describe) a huge lobby and a restaurant with an outside patio where you can eat with your pets. Are you kidding me? And this is interior Mexico.

We check in, unload the car, take Tuck for a quick walk and head to the restaurant…starving after a long day with no lunch. Who greets us at the restaurant door but a waiter in a perfectly pressed and starched bright blue jacket, white shirt with a bow tie and black linen slacks. Wait….is this New York? Nope. To say we were speechless is a massive understatement. We were seated outside by the pool and no less than three waiters came over to our table. One seated us, one took our drink order (amazing marguerita’s) and one took our dinner order. Every now and then, the stars align and last night, they did. We had a wonderful meal and were treated like royalty. We don’t know who owns this inn, but whoever does is a rock star. We headed back to the room and took Tuck for a walk around the 5+acre grounds. This morning for breakfast, we had the same wait staff, but all dressed in different colored uniforms. Amazing.

Then, we headed out for the border. We knew it would be a tough day, as between Matahuala and the border at Laredo, there is….basically….nothing. No towns, no gas stations, nowhere to pull off the road….nothing but little villages that cropped up every hour or so. If you have a peanut bladder, you better not travel in Mexico.

As we approached the border crossing, we had a lot of apprehension, as we had heard a hundred stories on what to expect and all were different. Some people said all cars are searched, your papers are scrutinized, your pet needed papers from your USA vet, you needed prescription records from your USA doctor for all non over-the-counter drugs, your visa and passports were examined, your suitcases were searched…the list went on and on. We got everything out and organized before we pulled up to the crossing. Instead of a large building with great signage, we see a very small sign on our left that reads “entrega tus papeles de auto aqui”….aka…surrender your auto papers here. When you enter Mexico, you have to register your car and when you leave you have to turn all the papers back in…or you can never bring another car into Mexico. Sounds like fun, huh? Well, it turned out to be a non-event. We pulled up to the little building and a super nice guy came out and in perfect English said, “ are you surrendering your car permit”? Startled, I said yes we were. He took some pictures of the car and the license plate, scanned the windshield sticker we had been given at our entry and said…”have a nice day”. Boom. Done.

We drove about a quarter mile to the US border crossing and a very serious US army guy inspects our passports, takes some pictures of our car, asks us where we’ve been in Mexico and waves us through with a nice “have a nice day”. And just like that, we’re back in the USA. So…if you hear horror stories of border crossings, don’t believe them. We were treated with total respect and the whole crossing took less than 15 minutes.

Tomorrow we head out for Van Horn, Texas. It’ll be another long day, but the end is in sight.

Peace,

Wayne, Claudia & Tuck (the wonder dog….he never made a peep for 8 hours today)

Back from the beach....and heading home!

Hola everyone,

This will be a very short post, as (once again), Claudia and I are bone-tired. This traveling stuff is hard…particularly in a foreign country.

We rolled out of Bucerias early this morning and drove back to Ajijic to begin packing for our early morning departure. As anyone who has traveled knows all too well, packing to return home is never as fun as packing to leave, but it goes a lot quicker because you basically don’t care how you look and the clothes are all a mess anyway. However, in this case, we’re ready to return. The last week has been hard on us all. There’s WAY too much to tell and it would fill many, many pages. Perhaps another day and another time…or possibly Barnes & Noble will want the book rights? I’ll work on a title. It’ll have to have “Old Gringo’s” in the title somewhere.

Right now, we’re laying out the gear to keep with us in the car and sorting out all the other stuff to put up in the rooftop carrier.

The first stop tomorrow night is Matehuala. The lady at the hotel told Claudia in broken English (aka Spanglish) that a tour bus is scheduled to arrive there in the afternoon, so we’re going to haul ass to get there and unload before it arrives. The next night is Laredo, TX, where we cross back into the good ‘ole USA. The last night on the road we arrive in Van Horn, TX….a memorable stop for us on our drive to California from Florida. The last time we were in Van Horn, it was sleeting when we unloaded.

From Van Horn we have a long haul back to Scottsdale, but armed with some Red Bull mixed with diet coke (trust me, it works) and the motivation to get home to our own bed, we’ll make it sometime that night.

This may be the final post until we get home. I’m not sure what the internet service will be, or how much energy I will have to log on and ramble a bit. So, until then….thanks for reading! It’s been an amazing journey.

Cheers,

Wayne, Claudia & Tuck

We pass the refugees on the road to Bucerias

On the road to the coast, we began to see dump trucks escorted by the Mexican police. That’s a sight you don’t normally see. Hmmm…..what’s up? Hauling radioactive waste? Then, we noticed people standing up and sitting inside the trucks….apparently on top of the gravel, or whatever it was the trucks were hauling. Then it hit us…the truck drivers were giving rides to the refugees crossing Mexico and headed to the US border. Bless their hearts, these poor people were hanging on for dear life riding in an open truck going 50 MPH down bumpy, winding roads. No money, no posessions…only a desire for a better life. Claudia was able to get a quick photo with her cell phone and I’ll post it later today.

The life lesson here is…when you think you’ve had a bad day, or you’re just dissatisfied with your life in general…jump in a filthy dump truck with your children and ride across Mexico. That’ll put things in perspective, won’t it?

Adios,

Wayne, Claudia, Katie & Tuck