We have had many requests for information that is more specific to areas that people can move to; quite a few of recent as many out there look to follow their dreams to move to FL. Now, Jen and I have been looking to do this for a while but we had a challenge. Do we just drive through cities and towns and report back what we see? We felt this would leave you short on actual info as you’d ‘see’ the area but not ‘experience’ it. So, we’ve reached out to many of our local friends and asked if they’d like to provide a short piece for us based on their personal experiences. How is the shopping? How are the schools? How is the traffic? How are the people and local conveniences? We know this is what we’d like to have had and now we’re looking to bring it to you. Watch for these pieces to be posted over the coming weeks and if you have a personal story you’d like to share, please let us know.
Today the Florida Department of Education released their School Grades for 2012. You can follow the link below to view all of their listings and historical information for all Florida schools.
As we approach the one-month milestone in our long journey, it seems wild that we will no longer be residents of Wisconsin; it’s almost too much too take in at times. In the early planning stages, we decided to make this our future reality, but we always knew that if things didn’t work out, we could always postpone the move. Even as we moved forward with our dream in January, our “escape route” of delaying the move was always a possibility. We have reached the point now, however, that backing out is not an option 🙂 It’s kind of scary to go out there without a safety net. The quotation by Robert Burns “The best laid plans of mice and men often go awry” really applies. It doesn’t matter how much you organize or how hard you plan, there will always be something that changes. It may be a good thing, it may not be so good, but you need to go with the flow and accept it for what it is.
As we approach our 30 days countdown, we thought it would be fun to make a list of 30 things that haven’t gone according to plan:
Our first moving date was going to be September 15, 2012
Our second moving date was going to be in 2013.
Our third (and final) moving date is July 22nd, 2011.
We considered renting a U-Haul truck at one point.
We thought about renting Pods.
We considered driving both cars down.
We considered letting Mayflower do part of the packing for us.
We considered renting a house.
We decided against the first city we picked.
We paid much less in a security deposit than we anticipated.
We didn’t get the apartment we wanted.
We got a better apartment!
We didn’t meet our packing goals.
Car repairs cost way more than we thought it would ($1564) Some might question the wisdom of this given the age of our car, but we expect to get at least two more years from it, it purrs like a dream now, and it also means no car payments, which totally rocks.
We didn’t sell nearly as much stuff on Craigslist as we would have liked.
We considered having a rummage sale but decided the grunt work wasn’t worth it.
Disney raised ticket prices so the cost of an annual pass will be higher than anticipated.
We’ve gone through 33 end rolls of paper that we use to pack boxes. We received 5 free, so that totals $56. We didn’t expect to use so many, and we’re not done yet.
All our boxes have been free so far, from either Mayflower or the seafood restaurant, and we currently have 138 boxes packed. $138 x $2 (average) = $276 savings. We expected to have to pay for boxes (although we’re not done yet!)
We don’t even want to total the cost of packing tape 🙂
Our bank decided to drop the Disney Rewards program for our bank cards. This was a disappointment, however, we currently have $172.44 saved in Disney Reward Dollars, will probably accrue a few more dollars before it ends, which we will be able to use at Disney World. Good news.
We didn’t realize just how much stuff we had. Let’s put it this way: we should have our own wing in the Goodwill store!
We didn’t think we had so much paper/documents/art projects stored in the house, and it took weeks to go through it all.
We didn’t realize how hard it will be to move away from businesses we’ve frequented for years.
We weren’t able to sell our oak desk, but we were able to dispose of it a lot easier than we anticipated. It will not be missed!
We acquired a lot more medical bills than we would have liked.
We didn’t expect that our son Nick would be able to get one month’s free rent at his new apartment, which saves us on needing to rent him a hotel room for a week, and a storage unit for his furniture.
We were hoping to take a visit down to Wisconsin Dells to ride the Ducks, but given the cost of the car repairs, we are unable to do that before we leave.
We were also hoping to possibly visit Chicago for a day trip, as our son Ben absolutely loves the city of Chicago, and Mark was born and raised in Chicago.
We are fine with putting off the day trips, because it gives us an excuse to come back. 🙂 Not that we need one with Nick here, of course!
We don’t know what the following weeks have in store for us……just around the river bend….. but we are excited to see how things will unfold and begin our new life as Floridians. Walt Disney said it best: “Many of the things that seem impossible now will become realities tomorrow.” Since we first imagined our dream, it has been 1,266 days in the making. Wow. Hold on to what you believe in, and keep persevering. If you believe in it, you will do it.
We hope all our readers have a magical Disney-filled week! 31 days and counting! What are you doing now to pursue your dreams?
It’s hard to believe looking back, now that we’re at 32 days, but we began this journey with a decision way back on January 1st, 2008 after our Christmas season visit to WDW. Then came our next decision, where to live.
We started by deciding that we wanted to be no further away than a 20-30 minute drive. Then by reading through the blogs of people we knew online who lived in various areas of Central FL we had many ideas as to which areas we’d like to make our new home. We then made a list of all of the cities we had found from that reading as well as those we knew of from past visits. Then using Google Maps we scouted other cities within that 20-30 minute ‘zone’. That gave us our original search areas of NW Osceola County, NE Polk County, S Orange County and S Lake County.
With the areas “narrowed down”, our plan was then to visit as many of these areas as we could on our 2009 Disney trip (our first time driving down); with our primary focus being the areas just south of WDW. We were able to drive through several places and stop in a few stores (to gauge prices, etc.) and made some notes to take back home with us. The drive-through was cut short by a FL rainstorm, but we did come away with a new perspective.
At this point I want to say that where you choose to live will depend a lot on your personal feelings, choices and lifestyle. And keep in mind that when choosing a new home in the WDW area you will need to make some trade-offs. From many months of research online and from having mailings sent from many different commerce groups, I did learn several things. As an example, the closer you live to WDW property, the higher the prices tend to be in the local grocery stores; but further away you’ll have a longer drive to WDW but the grocery prices are lower. This is especially true in the “tourist corridor” to the immediate south of Disney property where many stores raise their prices to catch the tourist dollars from those staying in Vacation Homes and/or Suite Resorts. So you’ll want to keep things like this in mind when you start your adventure, and everyone’s choice is theirs, there is no “right or wrong’ choice…just the choice that is best for you.
Once we narrowed our choices to Clermont, Windermere, Winter Garden, Reunion, Groveland and Minneola we started “visiting” these cities virtually using Google Maps, Google Images, YouTube videos, blogs and also through the help of local friends who live in these areas or who would visit for us. This helped us to ‘see’ what areas looked like and to learn what shops, restaurants, etc. were in each area. We also learned at this point that apartment and home rental costs were very similar. Sites such as www.rent.com, www.rentalhouses.com, www.apartments.com, www.forrent.com, www.trulia.com and www.realtor.com are excellent resources for viewing apartments and rental homes. The last two are great if home-buying. We also read the online versions of all the local newspapers.
By this time Clermont had risen to the top of our list and we do have friends living there who were able to give us great info on the city in general. Then it was a house-search. We decided mid-way along that we wanted to rent an apartment to start so that we could personally learn about the communities and neighborhoods. Using the apartment search sites above we narrowed our search to 3 apartment complexes. Our preference was to have a first floor apartment and we needed 3 bedrooms, so this narrowed the search to 2. At this time an ‘outside contender’ popped up unexpectedly. There was a house for rent in the city which had topped our list early on. The house seemed great; a pool and yard (lawn care and pool maintenance included), a nice sized house and the price was right. But the owners couldn’t get licensed to rent and so we dropped this house from the list and we had our final contenders: Village at East Lake and The Gardens at Citrus Tower.
We spoke and emailed with leasing reps at both apartments and Carrie at The Gardens just really sold us on them. She took the time to answer all our questions and we came away from our calls knowing everything about The Gardens and only half as much about Village at East Lake. The rest is history.
This blog will follow our family as we prepare to move from Wisconsin to Florida, and we’re excited that you’ve chosen to join us! We decided to name our website Wishes and Pixie Dust, (and included the Disney song above), because it is our love of Disney that has precipitated this move, and with a little luck and pixie dust, our dreams will come true.
Our dream first began in 2006, after our first family trip to Walt Disney World. It grew to a distant wish, to a real possibility by 2008, after our December 2007 visit, and confirmed after our August 2009 visit to the World. We live in a state where the weather is totally unpredictable six months out of the year, and instead of asking ourselves, “Why do we live here?” we’ve made the leap to do something about it.
We have set a move date of September 15, 2010. We are a family of five, but only four of us will be moving to Florida. Our oldest son will be a junior in college, and will relocate to Madison. Our daughter will be a freshman in high school, and our youngest son will be in eighth grade. We will be moving after school starts, but feel it’s important not to leave before we get our oldest son settled.
Like Carl and Ellie of The Relocated Tourist, we will be selling all our possessions except those that have sentimental value or are not practical to replace, and plan on having professional movers do the bulk of the work. We drove down to Disney last August, really enjoyed the drive, and look forward to being able to do it again. We just don’t want the stress of U-Haul for this move. We plan to host a huge yard sale this summer, not so much to earn money but to pare down our possessions.
We welcome all comments and suggestions! Right now we are very much still in the planning stages, but have decided on Clermont as the city we’d like to relocate to. We will update our blog and hope you’ll follow us along on our journey!
Wishes And Pixie Dust 