Pros and Cons

As always when moving to a new place, there are things to get used to!

Here's our list of Pros and Cons so far:

Pro:

We have cable included with our rent, so we get to watch t.v.

Con:

We have cable included with our rent, so we watch too much t.v.

Pro:

Kylee is loving her new school, and her teacher sent home a report saying she is up to speed in everything and is progressing well. Plus, our neighborhood has a million kids and she's already made some friends.

Con:

With the amount of documentation they require to register kids in school, we might as well have been applying to work for the FBI. And volunteering at the school? Forget it. Fingerprints, background checks, district training, photographs, references, your first-born child...oh wait, maybe not. Seriously though, I want to do it, but I missed the last district training for this year, so it'll have to be next year.

Pro:

They sell milk here. Our family likes milk.

Con:

It costs an arm and a leg, Costco doesn't sell two packs (or 1% milk), and it comes in jugs that look like this (see photo), which we have discovered it is IMPOSSIBLE to pour without spilling, no matter how careful you are. We pay more to buy our milk from the local supermarket now, simply because it can be poured without spilling.

**As a side note, Costco here also does not sell fruit leather! If anyone feels the urge to send/bring us a gift at any time, we will accept boxes of fruit leather from Costco. Thanks.

Pro:

We have a gym in our subdivision that is included with our rent, so we have easy access to exercise.

Con:

I feel obligated to exercise now, because the gym is right next to Kylee's bus stop.

Pro:

Everything here is incredibly green. It's really beautiful.

Con:

All the grass is crab grass! You know that stuff we try so hard to keep OUT of our lawns in Utah? That's all they plant here! On purpose! I'm not sure why. It's not very conducive to playing on, because it is really pokey.

Pro:

Our church branch is amazing. The people are really friendly and they do lots of activities.

Con:

Our branch building is a school in the middle of nowhere. You literally leave town, drive out on all these skinny roads into the middle of a swamp on the edge of the Everglades, and then out of nowhere there's this school...and that's where we go to church. Also, not only is there no piano, there is not even a full keyboard. We have these little 1/2 keyboards, so there are no musical numbers or choir or anything because you can't play a lot of songs on 1/2 a keyboard.

Pro:

It rains pretty much every afternoon, and it's like monsoon-style rain. Crazy downpours. And it's totally warm. Ally loves to go out and stomp around in puddles and play in the waterfalls of rain coming down off our roof. When it's done, the sun comes back out and everything is blue and sunny again.

Con:

With the rain comes extreme humidity. Skyler and Ally walk around outside for 5 minutes and they both look like they just got out of the shower. Their hair is soaked, and sweat runs in streams down their faces. It's insane!

Pro:

We live within 15 minutes of several different beaches, and since we are residents here we get a free parking pass so we don't have to pay! Plus, the water is warm.

Con:

Sand. Everywhere. It takes longer to clean up after the beach than it does to prepare to go, drive there, play there, and drive home. Okay, not quite, but seriously, it's soooo much sand!

Pro:

Gas is cheaper here. When we left Utah it was averaging somewhere around $2.79/gallon, and here it's between about $2.19 and $2.25. 

Con:

Meat is freakishly expensive. I think the cheapest ground beef we've found was $4.89/lb, and that was for like 70/30. I never even knew there was such a thing. We bought the 90/10 and we almost had to take out a personal loan! Luckily, other things aren't too bad. Groceries in generally are more expensive here, but they're not as outrageous as I thought they might be.

Con:

There is no Costa Vida (or Cafe Rio). We're going through withdrawals.

Pro:

Today we found a place called Moe's southwestern grill and tried it for lunch. It wasn't as good as Costa Vida/Cafe Rio, but it's definitely a good alternative.

Pro:

It's not too crowded here. It's still the off-season, so the population is pretty low and there's not much traffic.

Con:

Naples is a huge destination for retired peeps. Some are really nice. Others not so much. Skyler and Ally and I already got kicked out of the DMV because after waiting for 100 years for our turn to get a Driver's License, only to finally be told that I actually cannot get one because they want a DNA sample (okay, just an un-expired passport to go along with my birth certificate, marriage certificate, SS card, 2 forms of address, AND Utah license - seriously, do I look like I'm sneaking in from Cuba or something?), we were sitting in the waiting area waiting for Andy to finish getting his license (he doesn't need an unexpired passport or marriage certificate because he is not "changing his name"), and since by then it had been about 200 years, Skyler was done. He threw a tantrum about having his shoes on, so I told him he could take them off, and then he stopped crying. He was screaming for approximately 20 seconds total. After he stopped, the security guard walked over and invited us to leave because "it's impossible for us to do business with your children making noise." Well, maybe if you didn't make us wait 300 years to get helped with anything (there was literally 10 people in the entire building, I swear), he wouldn't be tired and hungry and bored out his mind! Anyway, in the end I decided that my Utah Driver's License, which does not expire until April 2018 will be just fine. If  they really want me to get a Florida one (which they claim is required within 30 days of moving here), they can make it easier to do so. I'm not buying a new passport just so they can charge me $58 for a FL DL. (And I don't have 400 years to wait in line again.)

This is just a random photo of Skyler's hair. Andy cut it yesterday, and he looks so much better! I never realize quite how shaggy he has gotten until we cut it.

Overall, it's nice here, and we're liking it so far. Last Sunday we sat out on our patio and watched what we are 98% sure were a couple of alligators swimming around in the lake behind our house. There's also one in the lake by our neighborhood pool, and when Kylee was trying to scare him out from under the dock she found a turtle instead. He was pretty big, and she fed him grass.

Life in Florida

As I mentioned before, it was a LOOONG drive to get here. Interestingly, last week one of Andy's friends from Provo was here for a couple of days to visit us (okay, he was really here to interview to start the CRNA program in February, but he stayed with us, so that counts as visiting, right?), and he has that app on his iPhone where it tells you how far away your spouse's cell phone is (or something). His wife was in Utah and her phone was only like 1491 miles away from his. So...if you were able to drive in a straight line from Utah to here, you could save yourself like 1000 miles. Wouldn't that be nice!

Our entire downstairs is tile (this seems to be the case everywhere here), so the first thing we did is go out and purchase a couple of area rugs for our living area.

Ally thinks she is special because all the toys are in her room. She and Skyler actually play together really well most of the time.

Our back patio is HUGE and it's all screened in so there are no bugs. There are little geckos everywhere, and they run around on the outside of the screen a lot. Skyler likes to try to scare them away by walking really close and...looking at them. Yep. He's soooo scary!

One day we went to Best Buy to look at laptops, and when we got out of the car Skyler saw the Florida MotorSports store. (He really just saw the checkered flag on their sign and said "I want to go see the race car store!") So we went in, and he made us walk up and down every single aisle to look at every motorcycle, dune buggy, water ski, four wheeler, etc. We would still be there this time next year if we didn't force him to leave.

This is our living room, taken from the patio doors, facing to the left. That's a full bathroom over there on the side.

Another shot of the patio.

This is from the patio doors facing to the right. A more formal living space, I guess, plus office. Through that window arch is the front door on the right. Through the other arch behind it is the dining room. To the left is the kitchen (through the square opening).

From the front door.

Kitchen. The door on the right is the garage door. The one straight ahead is the pantry/laundry room/under the stair storage.

Dining room. This is really supposed to be more of  a breakfast nook, but our table fits fine.

All of the bedrooms are upstairs. I'll take pictures of them sometime as well, but kids were napping, etc. when I took these, so it didn't happen.

And for those who were just dying to know the fate of our goldfish (because I know you were all waiting with bated breath)...Pumpkin is alive and well. I dumped 1/2 the water out of his tank, put him on the floor of the front seat of my car, and drove him 2536 miles across the country. Before we would stop for lunch I'd make sure to turn the AC on passenger feet to make him nice and cold so he'd survive an hour of baking in the sunshine while we were gone, and when we got to our hotels at night we brought him inside. I thought he might get shaken-fish-syndrome from all the bumps and car vibrations, but he is a tough little guy, and is enjoying his new home. (For those who don't know, this is the goldfish we won at Kylee's school Halloween carnival last year. We actually had two, but when we told them we were moving to Florida in a couple of weeks, Goldfishy promptly had a stroke and died. Apparently it just sounded too daunting for him.)

Moving to Florida

 

We closed on our house in Utah on Sept. 3, spent the weekend in Park City for Andy's bike race (which I didn't bring a memory card for, so my camera was useless), and then on Labor Day (Sept. 7), we got our moving truck. A bunch of our friends, neighbors and family came to help us load it up, and it went surprisingly fast.

 

I'm going to miss this house so much! It looks so big and empty!

 

I followed Andy all the way across the country as he drove the moving truck. The trip was looooooooong. I don't think I put enough o's in that word. Google Maps told us it would take 38 hours, give or take a few based on rush hour, construction, etc. What they didn't take into account was the fact that the moving truck couldn't go over 70mph EVER, and we spent the entire drive over the mountains going a max of 38. We've often commented on our way over the Rockies about how bad we feel for those semis in the right hand lane with their flashers on. "That must take forever!" we've said. Yeah. We were the cars in the right lane with our flashers on...AND we couldn't even catch up to the semis who were also in the right lane with their flashers on. Holy. Cow.

 

Anyway, I decided to take pictures of the moving truck passing all the state signs as we went. I'm not going to lie, I totally took these while I was driving. However, that's why they're not great photos. I didn't really look at all. I used my GPS to figure out approximately when we might be crossing state lines, and then I had my camera out and turned on, and when I saw the signs coming I just held it up and did the "continuous shutter" until I was pretty sure I got something. Didn't even look until we got to our hotels for the night. P.S. A HUGE thank you to my sister Connie for finding us great deals on great hotels with free breakfast as we drove.

 

COLORADO:

 

The first day we just went to Connie's house in Castle Rock, Colorado. It's supposed to be a 7 1/2 - 8 hour trip. With the slow mountain driving, it took us 10.5. Not horrible, but not a great start!

 

The second day we were driving across Kansas to Liberty, Missouri. I'm pretty sure there is NOTHING but corn in Kansas. I've joked about that a lot before. Now, having driven 400 miles across that state, I'm not joking anymore. Totally serious. I think people must be trying to trick you when they say they live in Kansas. I don't think anyone actually does live there.

 

KANSAS:

 

MISSOURI:

 

In Missouri we purposely stopped in Liberty so that we could go to Liberty Jail that night when we arrived. As you can see, it was definitely "night" when we arrived, but that didn't deter us! I'd been there before, but Andy never had, so we still went. They were open until 9 and I think we got there at 8. We didn't even stop for dinner first. We fed the kids sandwiches at the hotel later!

 

The third day, the plan was to go from Liberty, Missouri to Chattanooga, Tennessee. According to Google, it was about 600 miles and should take us about 10 hours. We figured with stopping, etc., it would take 11.5-12 hours. Long day, but doable.

 

ILLINOIS:

Okay, you're probably thinking "where is the Illinois sign?". Well...I missed it! We were in the middle of this bridge, and suddenly we passed a little tiny green sign that said "Illnois state line". I was like, "What!? We're in Illinois? Where's the real sign?" So I kept my camera out, sure there must be a real sign somewhere close. It wasn't close. About 5 minutes later it was suddenly overhead on this big bar thing, and by the time I saw it and grabbed my camera and woke it up and pointed it skyward...I was too late! But...just know, this bridge is the line between Missouri and Illinois.

 

KENTUCKY:

 

TENNESSEE:

 

So, Tennessee was BY FAR the worst. First we got stuck in rush hour traffic in Nashville for at least a month (okay, maybe just an hour), and then we realized that we were going to change over to the Eastern time zone and lose an hour RIGHT before our stop for the night. Still, we decided that we would still push through to Chattanooga. Yikes. About 40 miles outside of Chattanooga we got stuck in construction. And when I say stuck, I mean we literally didn't touch our gas pedals for over an hour. We alternated between brakes and idling forward at a minimal speed FOREVER. We finally ended up pulling into Chattanooga around 11pm local time (we had left Liberty at 7am). It took us 15 hours to get there, and then we lost an hour.

 

At that point we decided there was no way we were going to make it to Naples on the 4th day. It was slated to be about 685 miles and take around 11 hours. We figured at the rate we'd been going, we'd be pulling into our new home super late in the evening, and you're not allowed to park trucks, etc. here overnight. We decided we'd just make it as far as we could, and just have 2-4 hours left to go on Saturday.

 

GEORGIA:

 

FLORIDA:

 

On the 4th day we ended up making it to Ocala, Florida. It was only 3.5 hours away from Naples, and we got there around 4pm, so we had plenty of time to go eat dinner at a sit down place, and then take the kids swimming, and then relax. After about 46 hours of total travel time so far, lots of late nights, lots of PB&J, and lots of McDonalds, it was so great to NOT be pushing for Naples that evening! We timed our departure the next day in order to miss morning rush hour in Tampa, and ended up arriving in Naples around 11am. A bunch of people from our branch came to help us unload, and someone even brought us a home-cooked dinner to eat that night, and someone else brought us some bags of groceries that included necessities like milk, cheese, eggs, juice and cereal so that we wouldn't have to run out to the grocery store yet. We had branch-brunch for lunch on Sunday, and someone else brought dinner Sunday night. It was so great to not have to worry about all that, we felt really welcomed here!

 

More photos of our home, neighborhood, etc. soon. :)

Crazy Kids go on a Train

 

Kylee started school at Mt. Loafer on Aug. 19. We knew she'd only be there for a couple of weeks (our house was already sold, we were just waiting for it to close), but we thought it was worth it for her to get to see her friends for a couple days before we left for Florida.

 

One day Skyler didn't finish his yogurt for breakfast, and Ally decided to do yogurt finger paint, apparently. She was super proud of herself.

 

The week before we were moving we decided to post Andy's truck so that we'd have about 10 days to get it sold, just in case we needed that long. It ended up selling about 45 seconds after we posted it, which was CRAZY. People were even offering us up to $1000 more than we were even asking.

 

Since Skyler loved the Heber Creeper so much when we went last year, I decided we should go once more before we left Utah. We got a family pass for the Monday night train (they're a LOT cheaper if you go on Monday night!) and invited Todd, Tiff and Evalina to go with us. The kids loved it just as much this time as they did before.

Rocky Mountain National Park

I'm just going to warn you now...this is a total photo overload! I couldn't decide what to include and what not to, and picked too many.

 

In August (about 2 days after we got home from Trek) we went to Rocky Mountain National Park with my sister Connie and her family. My mom and Bruce were originally supposed to come as well, but then my mom couldn't get work off. Since we were caravanning to Colorado with Connie, we convinced Bruce that he should still come. He could fit with Connie and her kids on the way there, and then ride with us on the way back (we were dropping off some stuff that Connie is storing in her basement while we're in Florida, so we had more room on the way home!). The trip got off to a bit of a rough start - we left about 45 minutes behind Connie and Bruce and we ended up getting stuck in Spanish Fork canyon behind a mudslide that closed the road for several hours. Connie and Bruce made it through, so we literally got there RIGHT after it happened. We finally ended up taking a detour that took us about 50 miles out of our way, and we didn't get to Connie's house until close to midnight, but at least we got there!

 

The next morning we all got up and headed up to the National Park. The first day we got there in the afternoon, and after we set up camp we decided to go on a little hike that started right by our campsite. Most everyone was happy to be out walking.

 

 

Skyler wasn't sure if he was happy to be out walking.

 

Our campground was a really pretty place and had a shuttle stop to take us to trailheads and stuff.

The second day we decided to go on a longer hike that passes by three different lakes and some small waterfalls. It was a little too long for Pax and Skyler, so they got carried for part of the way. Mostly they did really good though.

 



 

It was a little chilly at first, so Skyler ended up wearing my sweater, which was like a dress on him. I'm sure people thought he looked kind of silly!

 

We passed this guy on the trail. He just stood there looking at us while we took pictures of him!

 

I realized that I don't always have very many picture of me, and with Ally in the backpack she doesn't get very good pictures either, so I took a few selfies, which are Andy's favorite photos of all time.

 

If this doesn't look like a redneck baby, I don't know what does.

 

I don't know why Skyler is making this face, but I love that Pax is lounging on a log watching him make it!

 

When we were waiting for the shuttle to pick us up at the end of the hike, we saw this guy come strolling down the trail.

 

I LOVE this one. I feel like they both look so happy and no weird/fake smiles!

 

Another selfie. This is going to be Andy's favorite blog post of all time.

 

Our campsite was up the hill from the Sugiyama's and Bruce's sites, and it was kind of fun to be in our own little secluded meadow. (Plus if our children cried it was less likely that others might hear them!)

 

Lest everyone thinks I'm the worst mom ever, she actually dropped the bottle and burst into tears AFTER I was already trying to take a picture of her walking up the trail. It was an unfortunate coincidence that I ended up with a picture of my kid bawling cuz her bottle got dropped in the dirt! This kid can burst into LOUD tears in a split second (or less). She is super dramatic, and her life is REALLY hard, apparently.

 

This guy was hopping around by our campsites.

 

On the last day, we decided to drive up this old dirt road they have that is one-way only and takes you way up to the top of the mountains (like to the point where there was still snow, in August). It was a really beautiful drive, but I'm super glad Andy was driving. That road was pretty narrow, with some pretty hairy switch-backs, and there were no guard rails whatsoever. We stopped and walked down to this waterfall along the way.

 

We saw a HUGE herd of elk in a meadow across the valley. There were probably somewhere around 200 of them lounging on the side of this mountain.

 

Then later we pulled off to the side of the road so I could find Ally's binki really quick, and suddenly there were these guys waiting to cross the road. They were like 10 feet (or less) away from us. It was pretty fun! Overall, the weather was a little cooler than we might have preferred, but the trip was great, and we all had fun.