[This week we are visiting two university towns to get an idea whether either might be a potential place to live. We are intrigued by the idea of living in a university town because of the diversity, activities, and free educational opportunities for seniors.]
Sunday, June 12, 2005: We arrived in
We met Les and Olga Miller for dinner. Les is the uncle of our friend, Charlotte Dearborn. Turns out Les used to run the local welcome center, since closed. But he is well connected to the Gainesville Visitors Bureau office, where he suggested we visit and mention his name.
The B&B has hi-speed wireless, and Rick was thrilled to be able to review his fantasy baseball team’s progress and update our website.
We are scheduled for a tour
of the
Monday, June 13: After a fine breakfast and a
nice chat with Joe about the
We were quite impressed
with the University and all it has to offer—not just for undergraduates, but
for “seniors” as well. The tuition for
undergraduate, instate students is $3K per year. Made Rick want to consider starting all over again….. The tour ended at “The Swamp”—the football
stadium. There appeared to be a
recruiting effort going on with prospective quarterbacks. We wandered back to the Reitz Union, decided
to pass up the food court, almost bought a t-shirt in the bookstore, collected
our car and headed for the Butterfly Rainforest (a part of the U of FL Museum
of Natural History)—there are more activities on this campus than you can
count. We spent 90 minutes at the
Rainforest—until it started to (what else?) rain. So we headed back to The Magnolia, stopping by at the Visitors
Bureau (where the mention of Les’ name brought smiles to people’s faces, but no
special perks for us) and then at the Chamber of Commerce, where we collected
information about housing options.
Back at the Magnolia, we
got better acquainted with Maggie (the duck), who was Joe’s birthday present 6
years ago and thinks she is his kid.
Maggie has her own “compound” and private pool. It took a bit to convince her that she
wanted to go swimming and even more to coax her out again and back to her
pen. Joe gave us a mini-tour of one of
the cottages and we chatted about the circumstances that led him and Cindy to
become innkeepers. We went back inside
to enjoy the wine and foccacia provided by our hosts and to look over the
housing publications. Tomorrow we will
spend checking out the available housing opportunities.
Tuesday, June 14: Spent the day exploring the
area. We met with a realtor from
Coldwell Banker who gave us an orientation to the
Wednesday, June 15: Arrived in
Thursday, June 16: We had a very busy day
today. First stop was the Columbia
Chamber of Commerce to pick up local maps and information about the city. Since we had been so successful with
Coldwell Banker in
We had our tour of the
University. USC is a lot smaller than U
of FL, but very “old south” feeling.
After viewing an “orientation” video, we toured “the Horseshoe” (the
central park-like area of the campus), the student building, the library, a
typical dorm room (ugh!) and a classroom.
Donna, Rory and Rick had
dinner tonight at Donna’s Dad’s house.
Rick has known Donna for about 15 years, but had never met her
parents. Her Mom was out of town, and
it turns out Rick HAD met her Dad. They
went to see the baseball consolation game and finals at the 1996 Atlanta
Olympics along with Donna’s former husband and father-in-law. (Senior moment for Rick…..). Donna’s daughter, Ashley and her boyfriend,
Mo, were also there. Ashley had printed
several listings she thought might be of interest to us-- seems like everyone
is trying to help us move to
Friday, June 17: We got a late start this
morning—catching up on our sleep…..
Donna took the day off from work, and we went to track down all the
houses we’d identified from the various listings and real estate
magazines. We started in
We stopped for lunch at
Yesterday’s, a nice little spot in the Five Points area of town, near where we
had dinner on Wednesday night. Then we
headed on to the rest of the houses in our pile of listings. We saw one or two that we might like to see
and made notes of the addresses and realtors.
By 5:00 we were tired, so we went to The Vista area of town to do some
window-shopping and have a drink. There
is a large antique market there, but we had only 15 minutes to browse. Rick was lucky and found a used copy of “The
Thornbirds” that he had been looking for.
After a drink at “Rust”, we returned to Donna’s and then out to dinner
at a Thai restaurant—very good!!!! We
are looking forward to seeing the inside of some of the properties tomorrow
with Judy.
Saturday, June 18: Rory was awake around 2:15am
and swears she heard 5 gunshots and the squealing of tires……hmmmm. Judy called at 8:00 and we agreed she’d pick
us up at Donna’s at 10:00. We set off
to keep two appointments she’d made—we didn’t care for either house. On the way we saw a FSBO. We called and the owners agreed to show
it. It was larger than the one we were
in yesterday and we liked it, but again, it had limited closet space and the
rooms were a bit small. Judy was
beginning to get a better idea what was important to us from the comments we
made as we walked around.
Rick and Donna disagreed
about whether or not we had seen a house yesterday. The princely sum of $1 was bet, with Rick insisting they hadn’t
seen it. We went by it twice—but the
bet was never resolved as both Rick and Donna stuck to their opinions. Judy wanted to just pay one of us the
dollar, but we wouldn’t hear of it!! We
saw several more homes, tried to corral a stray dog (unsuccessfully) and headed
back to
We let Donna’s dog Isabel
out in the backyard and she found a baby bird in the grass. Unfortunately she was a bit rough and broke
the poor bird’s neck before Donna could get her to put it down. We buried the bird in the back yard and
before we knew it, Isabel had another one.
This time she dropped it without hurting it. We decided that the two baby birds had fallen out of their nest. We called the Carolina Wildlife Rescue for
instructions on what to do with the little guy (?). We drove over there with the little bird in a small cardboard box
in which we had put a towel. He was
pretty traumatized at first, but as we drove, he seemed to perk up. The volunteers at the Wildlife Rescue
assured us that it was in good health and would be fine. Apparently it was a starling whose Mom had
deposited her egg in a robin’s nest.
The momma robin was hatching both the starling and the robin (the one we
had to bury). We felt really good about
being able to save at least one of them.
We plan to leave early
tomorrow afternoon so that we don’t have to drive all the way home in one
day.
Sunday, June 19: Donna, Rory and Rick kept the
appointment at the house we’d seen on Thursday. We arrived a bit early, but were welcomed by the owners and
invited to just wander around the house and grounds. It was a very spacious 1800 sq. ft. probably because of the
finished upstairs (with bath). While we
were inside, Rick noticed a Westie and a Scottie being walked outside and
realized it was Judy. Her husband, Ron
was also there and we got to meet him—a very neat guy. Rick reminded him that we were counting on
him to find a nice guy for Donna. After
chatting for a while, we headed to Five Points for a late breakfast. We ate at the Gourmet Shop, another example
of the variety of quaint little places to eat in
We drove about halfway home
(320 miles) and stopped at a Ramada Limited Inn at exit 318 off I-95. I mention this only because the rooms were
filthy and smelled pretty badly. We
tried two rooms, the second was worse than the first. “Limited” seemed to be
the operable word, so we said, “No, thanks” and checked into the Best Western
next door. For a couple of bucks more,
we got a clean, comfortable room with a king-size bed!!!! By this time it was after 7:30 and we were
hungry. Except for some yogurt at a gas
stop, we hadn’t eaten anything since our late breakfast. Other than a Ruby Tuesday’s, a Taco Bell and
a KFC, there wasn’t much nearby. We saw
a sign for The Conch Inn—we hadn’t had any seafood on this trip and it sounded
OK. We drove toward the ocean for a
while, but never found it. What we
found was “Marty’s” (steak, seafood, chicken—according to his sign). We figured we had nothing to lose, and it
turned out we were more than right.
They had two for one drinks, and when Rick hesitated about what to order,
the waiter pointed out that the fried grouper dinner was free for father’s day. The food was just fine, plenty of it! When Rory asked for seconds on the wine, the
waiter brought Rick another beer (which he had to decline—driving, you know).
Monday, June 20: Home without
incident. Stopped in Arcadia, FL on the
way home to browse antique stores as a break from driving. We accomplished
exactly what we’d hoped from this trip.
We got a good feel for both towns and their universities. We saw representative housing and hooked up
with helpful realtors. We’ll see what
happens….