For me, growing up in California, everything was at my fingertips. The mountains were an hour in one direction and the beach an hour in the other direction. And no matter where I moved, Virginia or Washington, the ocean was always minutes to mere hours away. That is until I moved to Colorado. The farthest I ever lived from an ocean, was six hours and that was for the two years I lived on the east side of Washington state. I wasn’t there long enough for it to bother me.
My 15 years in Colorado are another story. I didn’t particularly want to move to Colorado, I loved Washington state and had lived there for seven years and never planned on leaving, but life had other plans for me. From day one, moving back to WA was a tickling whisper in my ear. I kicked and screamed my entire time in Colorado, but I found ways to occupy my mind.
EDUCATION IS IN MY BLOOD
I am a lifelong learner, it is my meaning in life. It really doesn’t matter what I am learning, I love learning for the sake of learning. I have been a certified nurse assistant (CNA), obtained my EMT license, and was a medic in the Navy Reserves. I have a diploma from the UK in Marine Biology and am currently enrolled in a conservation course and a meteorology course with the same school. I have a Bachelor of Science in Web Design and Multimedia and a Bachelor of Arts in History with a licensure in Secondary Social Studies Education, and a minor in Human Nutrition.
I have recently completed all three of the required courses, Freshwater Systems, Upland Systems, and Coastal Systems, to be certified as a Florida Master Naturalist. I have no intention of ceasing to learn and the best way for me to learn has always and will always be, to educate others.
MY LOVE FOR WATER
At 17 I started exploring the idea of working with marine life. I believe this came about while I was working at Magic Mountain (Six Flags) when they had a dolphin show and I really wanted to work with them (my view has changed since the 80s). I either wanted to be a marine biologist or an oceanographer, but life had different plans, so I tried to join the Navy and become a diver…at that time, it wasn’t open to women, soooo again, life had different plans. Instead, I moved to Virginia for four years and married into the Navy, learning as much about my then-husband’s job.
After our divorce, I moved to Washington state and joined the Army, where I injured my hips and was barely able to walk by the time I was discharged. This led to a lot of self-trust issues and I really wanted to get out and walk, hike, and just be out in nature again, but I couldn’t because of my fear of not being able to move and needing to get back to my car. My solution was kayaking. I took a class on Kayaking on base and hit the lake. It was perfect and just what I needed.
SO, living in Colorado with my husband created some issues for me. First, I was 1,000 to 1,800 miles from any beach. The water that was closest to us were reservoirs, manmade and stinky. The Platte river? Stinky. Sure I kayaked or rented a paddleboard to play on the reservoir near us, but the energy was just different. The vegetation was different. It felt…fake. So, when we decided to finally move from Colorado, my number one requirement was that we needed to be near an ocean and natural water sources.
MY NEED TO BE OUTDOORS
Growing up, I always joked that I was born on a horse. From day one, I was riding. Mainly tied to my mother, but still on a horse. I started off riding doubles, graduated to ponies, and then to adult horses by the time I was about nine. I became a pro at falling off horses. Graceful has been used.
I was a true tomboy. Dirt bikes, tree climbing, ATVs, and boys as my best friends. Sure I had girlfriends, but boys… I could rough it with. My best girlfriends though were also tomboys. I rode mountain bikes, learned to shoot, ride a skateboard, hike the Los Angels hills, shoot bows, rope a bail of hay, ride motorcycles and dirt bikes, and break horses. There wasn’t anything I wouldn’t try if it kept me outside.
When I got older and married to a guy I went to high school with, our big thing was camping in the Sierra Nevada and that was when I got my first taste of hiking. My first hiking trip was up Mt. Whitney. We had just broken the tree line when my then-husband started suffering from altitude sickness and we had to return to camp. I keep hoping one day to return, but I’m a lot older than I was in ’95, but camping there, was the best. Creek fishing and the high desert night air. Some of my favorite things.
When I moved to Colorado in 2006, I was admittedly miserable. I have no idea why I thought Denver was in the mountains, but when I saw that it wasn’t, I felt deflated. From 2006 to 2014, I was miserable and focused on my education. In 2014 however, we bought a wrangler and joined a jeep club, and headed to the mountains. That was exactly what I needed. We would go as often as possible over the next six or so years, but it took an hour just to get to the foothills and then another hour or two to get to the trails. In 2016 though, I had enough of sharing the trail and obstacles with my husband and bought my own jeep. This way, we could both take on the obstacles and have a little more fun. Having two jeeps for camping helped give us a place to hang our hammocks too.
We also had the absolute best time taking our jeeps to Moab for some intense rock crawling. We went twice with one jeep and then I got Toothless (my now jeep). Again, we both wanted to drive the obstacles, and sharing made it rough. I loved the challenges and facing my fears. Nothing like a verticle climb in one direction, knowing you have to go down something just as steep on the other side.
My husband is a Colorado native and he spent a lot of his childhood on Lake Powell during the summer and fishing with his dad, but he will tell you that he is not a mountain person, he always felt better near the ocean, so it didn’t take much to convince him that when we move, an ocean was required.
Now, the ocean wasn’t the only requirement, we needed nature as well. Though I can be happy on the water every day, I also need trees. My husband is fine just being on the water, but I’m starting to think that the vegetation here is growing on him.
AMONG THE LIST OF PLACES
In August of 2017, we took a trip to Washington to have a look. My parents still live in the Vancouver area, but Portland just isn’t the same now and I really wanted to get back up to the area I lived before so I can see Mt. Rainier every day again. Unfortunately, nothing felt right anymore. It felt old and used up. The scenery was great, the housing and shopping centers, not so much. This concerned us. Did we become snobby?
In December of 2018, we took a trip to Temecula, California. I had a high school friend that lived there and my husband had a childhood friend that lived there as well. It was first on our list. We drove out and spent a week and loved it. It was an hour to the beach and an hour to the hills for camping and offroading. It felt like home. My family was only two hours north of us and it just felt good…until we lost my husband’s friend and then it made it difficult for us to consider it anymore.
In October of 2019, our kids (my step-kids) convinced us to look at Florida. Honestly, it never crossed my mind. All I knew about Florida was that my mother hated it when she lived here as a kid and the bugs were big and a lot of snowbirds lived here. My husband had been once but he doesn’t remember much. Our kids wanted us to check out Clearwater because they had friends there that they stayed with a couple of times and loved it. So, we gave it a go. I was instantly sick from the humidity for about 3 days and then it settled. Going from a dry high altitude climate to sea level and 100% humidity, didn’t bode well for me. We were there for about 10 days and other than the sand, we found nothing redeeming. One day, we were driving toward Sarasota and Bradenton to look, but we were so tired of looking, that we gave up and went back to our condo and treated the rest of our stay as a vacation.
In March of 2020, we planned to spend five weeks in Colombia, but after two weeks the pandemic hit and we made it out of the country on the second to last flight. Talk about a life upheaval. Once returned, we revisited the ideas again, to move. We owned our home and wanted out before the market turned south on us. I wasn’t working and now, neither was my husband. The kids were grown and recently married, our blind diabetic dog had passed, I graduated, and now, there was nothing holding us back. We started to look more in the Sarasota area, the area we skipped the last time. In pictures on Instagram, it looked more like what we wanted, and decided to plan for another trip the following March (2021).
This time, we decided to drive and leave the snobby view at home. We realized that we had grown so used to our shopping centers and home styles that everything else looked poor. It was silly and we knew it and decided to visit with fresh eyes. Within a week of being here, we wanted to find a way to stay and sell the house from here. Of course, we couldn’t, we had so much work to still do, but we started planning.
OH IT’S ON!
Once we got back, I started to build my knowledge database. I started networking and planning our life there. I transferred my teaching license and started looking at homes.
First, we were going to buy but decided that it would be wiser to rent our first year until we figure out exactly where we want to live and it also depended on where I got a teaching job. Honestly, I am glad we did rent. We love our landlords and they want us here another year, which is great because I am not teaching yet because of issues that need to be sorted out before I can apply, but I am still hopeful.
I met some wonderful people on social media that helped me learn about the area, network, and meet other like-minded individuals. This isn’t something I would normally do. I am pretty much the person who just goes and figures things out on her own, but this time, this time I really wanted to make the most of this move. I just turned 50 and I swore that this half of my life was going to be filled with activities and people that make my heart happy and I am going to do whatever it takes to take care of my soul. So far, it’s a success story.
WHO DIDN’T MAKE THE CUT
CA, WA, and FL were not the only states on our list. In fact, Arizona and Texas were on the list. Yes, I know, Arizona does not have oceanfront property, but the housing is great and I love the desert as well. For that one simple reason, it was marked off quickly. Texas was on the list twice, but closer to the gulf. Housing again is great, but as a teacher, the horror stories for social studies left a bad taste in my mouth. I wanted to like it, one of my aunts live there and one of our daughters moved there, but my husband and I are more tropical in nature.
WHY DID FLORIDA WIN?
Oh, the reasons are plentiful.
FIVE, physical issues are going away. In Colorado, our skin was constantly dry. I had allergies I never had before. My husband’s joints hurt him more. We had sinus headaches from the altitude daily. My hips hurt more, but that was also because I weighed more so I can’t put it all on, Colorado. Here, my skin is happier. My husband’s hands feel better, not 100%, but better. My allergies aren’t gone, but not nearly as bad or as noticeable as before. I used to sneeze daily and repetitively.
FOUR, it’s flat. Yes, this is a plus and a negative, but I have bad hips and the big downer at our home in CO was that we lived in the Seven Hills community and it was nothing but hills. Going for walks was difficult for me. We tried “Ride Your Bike To Work Day”, once. We died. Now, I can walk, ride my bike, skateboard, and just you know, be happy. I’m a little stiff, but only because I am doing so much. I’m not complaining.
THREE, the warmth. After 15 years of living in the cold for nine months out of the year, we are due some happy sunny weather. Yes, we were concerned about the humidity, but my husband lived in Oklahoma and I lived in Virginia, so we aren’t strangers to living in it, it’s just been a while. Temperature-wise, I lived in the typical 100-115 dry heat of California, without A/C. I’m good.
TWO, the rain. I miss the rain in Washington. I miss the green too. This place has way more rain. As a matter of fact, we are in the middle of a downpour with thunder and lightning as I type. Stopping every once in a while when we think of something that needs to be moved or brought in. I loved the storms in Virginia too. It’s my understanding that hurricane season is a month away.
Just got a text from my husband from his office “I think it’s safe to say we are getting the rain we longed for.”
ONE, nature. It is everywhere and I mean everywhere. Much like it is in Washington where I lived. Not so city feeling. Though I do love Seattle, I wouldn’t live in the city, just more in the rural areas, but close enough for a nice visit. Here, there aren’t really any cities other than Tampa and that isn’t much in comparison to what we are used to. Now, nature has many parts here, we have the uplands for hiking and camping and the freshwater areas for kayaking and hiking as well, but wait, there’s more. We have the sound, the bays, the gulf. It’s amazing.
ARE WE HAPPY YET?
I really can’t say enough about any of these particular areas or this state in general and that is why I created this blog. I haven’t had so many new experiences in the last decade or so and it is just sensory overload at times and I needed an outlet. We had started building a community site for exploring nature around the world and had been a year or two in the making when we decided to put the breaks on it and move. In March of 2020, while here in Sarasota, I purchased Salty Seananigans domain and we agreed to repurpose our idea and focus on writing about living in Florida. Not the touristy things, but the living life things. Sure the line can be blurred, but I teach social sciences, which means I look at things a little differently. Within social sciences, there is history, archaeology, economics, geography, psychology, and anthropology, which can be broken down into the various areas of culture. In college, I took an archaeology course and St. Augustine’s archaeology site was our focus, so I know there is much for me to dig my academic teeth into.
My husband just went to Colorado to see his parents and work on a project for them for six weeks. It was cold, windy, snowy, rainy (and not the good kind), and all his physical issues were manifesting again. He missed it here already and is constantly telling me how happy he is now that he is back.
So, to ask “Are we happy yet”, is an understatement. We are to the moon!!!
Stay Salty and Stay Connected,
Kelley
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