Florida | Wishes And Pixie Dust

July 12, 2011
by wishesandpixiedust 4 Comments

To Dream Is To Believe

A common theme in our blog posts have referred to how brutal Wisconsin winters can be; we won’t revisit that topic, but reference it in the fact many Wisconsinites dream of moving to Florida, especially in the months November through March. To us Florida is an exotic location, with sunny skies and palm trees, while we sit with piles of snow and sub-zero temperatures. As we finalize our move, a recurrent comment we hear from people is: “I’m jealous”, mainly made in reference to not having to survive another winter.

It’s easy enough to observe us and feel like we have it made; to feel jealousy over the fact our winters in Florida will be spring weather in Wisconsin, and that we’ll never have to shovel again. The truth is, we consciously made the decision to make this our reality, and we have worked hard to make it happen. It has not been an easy road for any of us, but we feel the effort is well worth any sacrifices we have to make in the meantime.

One thousand, two hundred and eighty seven days ago we first dreamed the dream, of relocating to Florida close to Walt Disney World. We write out that number in words because it really seems surreal right now that we are only ten days away from realizing our dream. There were many moments of doubt that we experienced. The first twelve to twenty months it was merely a dream that we talked about; something that would occur in the future but we had no idea when, and we did nothing towards making it a reality. It seemed so far away in the future that it seemed pointless to expend energy at that point in time. The basement boxes and just the accumulation of possessions that we owned really overwhelmed us as where to start, so we did nothing. After our Disney trip in 2009, we were more enthusiastic than ever about moving to Florida and this is when we let the kids in on our dream, that someday we would move to Florida.

The dream first became real to us last summer, in June 2010, when we first set a date of September 2012 and started the blog. Even though we now had a date, it still seemed like it would never happen; and we didn’t really believe it would happen. How much difference a year makes! Since that time we backed the date to September 2013, and then in January of this year, we decided to take the plunge and move this summer. “Do you really think we can do it this summer?” is the question that propelled us forward.

We can’t say how many times we doubted ourselves, but it was a lot. Over the past six months since we made the final decision, we haven’t doubted our choice, but there have been moments of fear: fear of the unknown, fear that what we are doing is not in the best interests of our children, and fear that we will fail.

We are now ten days away from leaving Wisconsin. We can honestly say that this is the best decision we could have made for our family; our kids are uber-excited about moving to Florida, and while we won’t be traveling with as much money as we’d like (thanks to car repairs); we are very thankful we were able to take care of the repairs now and not have them happen along the way. We won’t be able to purchase as much furniture right away as we had previously planned, but we’ll make it work. An empty, unfurnished apartment in Florida is way better than our current home in Wisconsin, and because it is an apartment our expenses will be less than if we rented a house: we won’t need to do lawn care, maintain a pool, or spray for bugs; and we will have access to a business lanai (with wireless internet and printers) and fitness center, should be choose to utilize these amenities.

Thanks for following along~ we appreciate your comments and feedback!

July 6, 2011
by wishesandpixiedust 2 Comments

Go With The Flow

A part of any successful dream involves looking ahead and anticipating possible obstacles that may impede you from attaining your goal. If you’ve followed our personal accounts on Facebook today, you know that our car repairs will be $400; due in part to the age of our car, it requires a part that has to be ordered directly from the manufacturer. To say we’re a little frustrated is an understatement. However, we are extremely thankful this didn’t happen two weeks from now, or while en route to Florida. It could have been much worse.

Due to this happening, we thought back to the past twelve months and how our move has really unfolded. If you have told us last year at this time, that we would be moving to Florida in July 2011, we would have laughed at you. 2010 was not a good year for us, to say the least; we still had the dream with a date set for 2012, but due to circumstances occurring around us, we weren’t too hopeful we could achieve this move in two years. The thing is, the events that happened in 2010 needed to happen before we could make the move to Florida. If you are in a position now where you can’t possibly believe that you can ever achieve your dream, take heart. Go with the flow, keep dreaming the dream, and know that you can do it. We at Wishes And Pixie Dust believe in you, and we will cheer you on.

July 6, 2011
by wishesandpixiedust 3 Comments

Go The Distance

It seems wild to us to think we only have sixteen days left in Wisconsin. When we made our decision back in January to move , it certainly was an easy one to make, given the blowing snow and bitterly cold temperatures, and of course our love for Disney. In the past six months we have overcome obstacles; we share this bit of information because we want to let you know that it is impossible to plan a move across several states without hitting at least one or two roadblocks along the way. Things will not always go as you plan, you will have bad days and moments of “why did I ever decide to do this?” pop into your head. We’re here to let you know it’s okay, keep moving forward with your dream, and deal with the obstacles as they occur.

One such obstacle is our car. We brought it in to the shop in March for $700 worth of repairs, $900 in June, and yes, we are bringing it in again in July (tomorrow). As we mentioned earlier, the check engine light came on and while that didn’t necessarily alarm us too much, the large puddle of coolant on our garage floor that leaked after we drove around for a couple of hours did. We are hoping it’s nothing serious, and we would appreciate prayers on this issue, because we really don’t want to pour more money into repairs, as this is money that is not buying furniture for us when we move.

One of the things we are most looking forward to once we are in Clermont and inside our apartment, is to just enjoy the moment, knowing there are no boxes to pack, no rooms to clean, no furniture to unload, and nothing to do except realize that we did it. That is the moment that we hold on to now, that helps us to get us through these next two weeks, whatever they may bring.

July 3, 2011
by wishesandpixiedust 2 Comments

Saturday Doings :)

When we started our blog, it was mainly for our own purposes, to keep track of different aspects of our move. We feel honored that so many of our readers follow us regularly, and some readers aspire to follow in our footsteps and make their own journey to Florida to be closer to the Mouse. 🙂 In response to that, we attempt to post regularly, and to provide more informational blog posts that may help you with some of the major decision making that goes into a multi-state move. There are times that we share a blog post, and think “Really? No one is going to want to read that, it’s boring!”, and then we receive a few comments that encourage us that yes, you really want to hear about it! Today we wanted to share with you what our day looks like three weeks before our move, to give you a feel of perhaps what to expect when you experience your relocation.

Saturday is typically a very routine day in the Vitek household. We always begin with a trip to the library to return and check out different materials. We are very heavy users of the public library, it’s not very often we miss a visit, and we intend to keep up the routine once we make the move. We have two libraries in which to choose from in Clermont: Cooper Memorial and Cagan Crossings: we will most likely select Cooper Memorial as the library we most often frequent as it is closer to us than Cagan Crossings. Library cards must be applied for online, so we will do that the week of our move, so that they will be ready for us the following Saturday.

After the library we came home for lunch, and waited for a Craigslist exchange, twenty more dollars earned for our piggy! We then went to our oldest son’s apartment again, then off to Festival Foods to do some grocery shopping. We’ve been researching grocery stores in the Clermont area, and we do believe Publix will probably end up being our store of choice, although we’ve heard some good things about Sweetbay, so we may check that out as well. We pulled up the advertisement on the internet and the prices are quite comparable with what we are currently paying in Wisconsin.

We came home and unloaded our groceries, and went through the kitchen cabinets to see what else we could offer to Nick, and it ended up being quite a nice pile. He will get more once we are down to our last couple of days, but it felt good to be able to clean out items and not have to pack them! Saturday is also pizza night, and the big decision of where to order ensued. We want to make sure that we have our favorites one last time, and tonight we chose Rocky Rococo, a large sausage pizza with breadsticks. We waited to order until after 5:00, because we drive to pick it up, and we had another Craigslist transaction that netted an additional ten dollars. We always watch a movie with our pizza, and tonight’s selection was Cars. We still have yet to see Cars 2 in the theatre, but we plan to do that soon.

We did have a couple of minor *bad* things happen today. One, the check engine light came on in the car. We are hoping it’s just a glitch, as we just had the car undergo a 30 point inspection for the trip, including an oil change, and really can’t afford to put more money into the car at this point. The second thing involved an accident with a glass of soda and our external hard drive. At this point we’re not certain if any data is lost or if the device works. The cord did get severely bent, however. This is also another item that is not in the budget to replace.

Tomorrow we hope to finish up Ben’s room and make some progress in Catie’s. The kids are a little nervous that their belongings will not be packed in time, but we keep reassuring them, that yes they will. No toy gets left behind. LOL Nick is coming over on Monday to get some more of his things, and we plan to move the unwanted furniture into the garage, so we can Freecycle them. We have a lot of odds and ends in the garage, and are going to be letting people come and take what they want. Kind of like a free yard sale. 🙂

So that’s our day. We didn’t get a huge amount accomplished today in terms of packing, but some days are like that. We really like the fact that we’ve had plenty of time to sort through our belongings, so that we are not feeling hurried and rushed right now. Six months notice was perfect for us; it was far enough away to not feel pressured to do everything at once, but close enough that we weren’t discouraged that it was so far away We do better with short term goals, but that’s just us. You may find that a longer time period works best for you.

We wish all our American readers a very Happy Independence Day Weekend and please stay safe! We’re planning a new blog post for Monday which highlights our local haunts, so please watch for that. Mark is also working on a post that highlights a favorite Walt Disney World resort hotel, hoping to put that out later this week.

June 30, 2011
by wishesandpixiedust 3 Comments

Hold On Tight

The evening star is shinin’ bright. So make a wish and hold on tight. There’s magic in the air tonight, and anything can happen.

Tiana– Princess and The Frog

It has been 1, 276 days since we first dared to dream the dream of moving to the Walt Disney World area, and with only 21 days to go, we can honestly say that we have no regrets. We can only imagine how incredibly difficult it will be to leave our son behind; it’s a parent’s mission to protect and care for their children, and even though he is nineteen years old and a sophomore in college, it still seems wrong to not bring him with us. We are reassured that he does have a solid plan in place, and in fact he signed the lease papers today on his new apartment.

We have been busy scheduling our disconnects in Wisconsin, and arranging our utilities and cable hook-ups for Florida. The comment that we have been hearing a lot refers to the fact that we’re moving at the wrong time of the year. 🙂 Yes, granted, July is not an ideal time of year to be moving to hot and humid Florida, but we wanted the kids to finish out the year at their respective schools, and would rather not have them join a new school in Florida after the start date. The first day of school in Florida is August 22, which gives us less than a month of summer vacation left after we arrive in Clermont.

Wednesday we went down to the AAA office and ordered our Trip Tix and picked up a complimentary guidebook for Tennessee. Silly us, forgot to get the Florida book, but we will make sure to get that when we pick up the Trip Tix in a couple of weeks.

We are pleasantly surprised at how inexpensive the utilities and cable bill are projected to be compared to Wisconsin. We didn’t realize the extent to how much more we are paying here, and it definitely is one of the perks of moving to Florida. Our rent will be $286 more than we are currently paying, but our bills will probably go down by an equivalent amount, more or less. Of course, there is the monthly payment plan to Disney that we add on 😉

The Florida Department of Education released today its school grades based on the FCAT results, and we are very pleased to see that the middle school the kids will be attending received an A for the third year in a row. Click here to access the database.

We are still packing boxes and listing items on Craigslist, and we have lists all around of what we need to do yet. We titled this blog post “Hold On Tight”, because we feel like we are in a queue area, waiting to experience the attraction. It’s like packing and planning for the ultimate Disney trip, afraid we’re going to forget to plan for something, but uber-excited about the final destination. It is going to be so weird driving through Wisconsin for the final time, and knowing we won’t be returning.

Happy July 1st to all our readers~may all your dreams come true.