One year ago today: April 23, 2015, batbike alternator anniversary.
Five years ago today: April 23, 2011, ghetto Rolls-Royce.
Nine years ago today: April 23, 2007, the contest nobody won.
Random years ago today: April 23, 2008, Immokalee fixer-upper.
MORNING
We got out of Dodge for the day. Here’s a candid photo of JZ and I enjoying the normal Florida roadside scenery. Once again, I’ll tell you what happened and you can stew up your own estimations of the day. I’ll even nudge you in the right direction a few times. We may not be getting better at finding which properties to investigate, but we are far more sophisticated in our methods. I mean we now waste far less time on the fake-outs and bad areas. I didn’t say we were immune, just less susceptible.
The ride is now standardized, north on 95 (I-95) to exit 87, then left through Indiantown and Okeechobee before breakfast. Not before coffee, we stopped for coffee in Dania Beach. Next stop is the Interlake, the family café in Lake Placid. Earlier I reported them closed on Sunday, but in a routine very familiar for my Florida luck, it was the one Sunday this year they closed because the cook was ill. Here are the properties we toured along with a quip about why each of these made the goof list. (The derogatory refers to the ad, not the property for sale.)
Bowling Green – house has been “on sale” for over 12-1/2 years (4680 days).
Bartow – the stripped to the studs place on the “wrong” side of town.
Lakeland – so far in the bush I had to trace a satellite composite on paper to find it.
Highland City – a green area surrounded by orange on Trulia.
Mulberry – seriously, the Google map was upside down.
Each of these places had some reason it could not be investigated without “boots on the ground”. Since the above list is the order these were visited, I’ll tell you the tale of how it went and why every one held some surprises for us.
JZ could not recall any of the numerous times we’ve been through Bowling Green, a curiously named hamlet on the secondary highway. According to the neighbors it has been abandoned a while, so we looked in the windows and inspected the wooden siding. It has been reshingled but nobody knew the reason it has never sold, other than that it has been repossessed by the bank and maybe they have been hard-nosed on the price. Which is twice what it should be because we now know what budget houses are worth by looking at them.
In Bartow, the [advertisement] description was accurate, but a close-up interior inspection showed it needed triple the amount of work implied by the ad. They said electrical and drywall. No sir, somebody had been trying to double up the sagging studs and rafters. While it could be fixed up to snuff, the amount of physical labor was beyond what we could envisage for ourselves.
This next place, Highland City, is not much more than an area on the map in an area with many roads bearing confusingly similar shapes and names. By some margin, it is the best of what we visited not just this trip but so far; big yard, lots of trees. But talk about aroma. Doggie smell, I would not be surprised if the place had been raided as an illegal kennel operation. The carpet would have to go the first day. This needs a second look.
Mulberry – somebody on the mapping system is asleep at the switch. We wasted the final hour before sunset not realizing the map names were wrong. Quite a nice area but when you can’t find anything wrong, it usually means bad neighborhood. Large yard, two work sheds, and a quiet location. But an annoying notice on the door said HUD property, yet the area isn’t HUD-like.
Um, Whistler’s Mother’s son.
NOON
Now some travel news. It was a great trip, the high point was driving past some football team holding cheerleader practice. We have not seen that may blonde babes in one location in years. There are no large numbers or groups of blonde women in south Florida. With light traffic, we made it to Lake Placid by 10:30AM to the family restaurant named above. What a pity even these small town women are often plastered with tattoos. I’ve found they usually did it to please an old boyfriend.
That place with only interior studs in Bartow was the primary reason for this trip and that was pretty much rejected after an hour. It was accurately described but just too much work. The interior could have been made into anything you wanted and it was probably zoned commercial as the back yard faced a fairly major roadway.
By now, JZ is convinced these small towns are brim full of gorgeous young women. He’ll learn, the good ones are picked off by the time they are fifteen. This was the topic of hours of lively conversation, I suspect if he relocates to Lakeland, some gal will make him into a husband in a month. My original plan stands, that is, he should not make any definite plans to leave the city as long as he has the option to crash at my place. He continues to mistake initial politeness toward strangers as small-town acceptance. Very wrong, but I’m done pointing that out.
My limit is walking distance to town, and the one place we found by satellite was over twelve miles out there. I should say me, not we, since JZ remains computer-illiterate. He’s still got the sense to be amazed how I always find these places by intuition. I’m amazed that I still don’t trust the GPS to keep a driver in safe areas of town.
Even with a map in lap, the twisty roads of Florida will get you turned around in an instant. I’ve mentioned the hellacious road-naming system, so you can’t use that either. My rule of thumb is that there is always something wrong with a place that you cannot find anything wrong with.
And this particular place had nothing obvious. We combed over the property unable to explain the low price. It is not, repeat not, illegal to go through lengths to conceal structural housing defects in Florida. This one was a stumper until I noticed the foundation (it was a mobile home on an acreage) was about a handspan higher than it needed to be (see accompanying photo). See JZ standing on the veranda that is five feet off the ground. Ah, got it. The land floods in the summertime. That would also explain why the lower steps on the patio and entrances were somewhat newer wood. See, we’ve learned.
[Author’s note: it remains a wonder how many people who know we have been looking will offer us “advice” on how to go about that. These are totally people who know zilch about real house-hunting. Their concept of buying a house seems to heavily involve signing a $400,000 mortgage and taking everybody’s word that the place is good. They have no boots-on-the-ground experience. But such persons still think they know more about what we are doing than we do. That’s after a year of expensive, directed, time-consuming learning on our part. Pretty amazing.]
But the doggie-aroma place is intriguing. This is the smell of shedding, not poo. The yard is fully treed and lots of parking. I like this one. Attribute the musty smell to something you don’t often see in this part of the world: wall-to-wall carpeting. JZ assures if that carpet is dumpsterized and the place swabbed with chlorox, it would be a charmer. I’ll get back to you on this one.
And the last place, the HUD-spot as we took to calling it, was just too good to be true. It seemed out of place in such a relatively nice neighborhood. Other than tons of noisy kids in the area and people burning leaves leaving a pall of smoke, it was structurally the nicest. But then, why the HUD sticker? One government regulation is too many for me when it comes to housing.
I insisted on a coffee stop to review the day, whence JZ insisted it be McDonald’s. So, dusk found us in the Mulberry franchise with two busloads of noisy teenagers returning from soccer practice. That's too much commotion to go over the places in the depth I felt necessary. Conclusion? Of what we saw, the doggie place has the most potential.
EVENING
While I was prepared to stay for a few days and scout the entire vicinity, JZ forgot to tell me he had to help his brother move furniture. So it was a dash back to Miami and you know what I think of high-speed travel after dark. Here was the comic relief. Outside said McDonald’s above, there was a machine vending a locally produced sort of news-sheet for 50 cents. Ha, if you want a laugh at the local’s expense, pick up a copy.
Read on, bearing in mind this world is full of people who think because they are as good as you at one thing, they are as good as you at everything. This is rarely more true than with guitar players. Consequently, they spend inordinate amounts of time channelizing the conversation.
For those who disagree, I have good news. You can subscribe to the above newspaper for only $35 per annum. Anywhere in the US.
Mostly concerned with some reunion of former phosphate mine employees, I have for you a paraphrased list of the most sidesplitting errors. Remember, we don’t know these people and owe them nothing, so we are making slapstick comparisons to what we are used to. Here goes, enjoy:
“Members did a lot of physical work.” (As opposed to?)
“Robert got up Saturday morning and drove over 100 miles both ways.” (Way to go, Bob.)
“Enjoy the nice mild weather things work out.”
“The Press will soon publish a well researched and documented article. (Y'don't say?)
“If you send Richard photos, he will scan them and give the originals right back.” (Toot sweet.)
“Back in the day, many things got photographed very rarely, if at all. (said Yoda.)
“He was lived by his family and many friends.”
“Some folks came ambled in. Some walked in quickly."
“His worst injury was a broken femur.”
“A relatively small area with a lot of things going on, sometimes all at once.”
“A refresher course aimed at keeping the mayor out of trouble with state law.”
“I remember you, your brother was Ed.”
“Marie, age 101, she will be 102.”
“A religious professor got five years’ probation for voyeurism.” (Make that former professor?)
“City Commissioners got a tongue lashing from a parade of residents.”
“The company was merged out of existence.”
Finally, a newspaper that doesn’t need funny pages. All the unaligned columns, crooked pictures, mixed fonts, and punctuation errors are true to form. Here are my favorite spelling mistakes this issue: socities, embarrasing, verbabge, accolates, artisian, spectulation, destabalized, nonsene, competitition, protocals, poragraphic.
Also adored was multiple instances of the word “thier”, beloved by sixth-graders everywhere. From one writer to a group of others, I hope they understand my poking fun. Then again, they may be writing for the benefit of those of us who need fairly constant reinforcement that small-towners and their mentalities are so utterly charming you can’t hardly stand it.
Don’t you dare punch me in the arm.
Last Laugh
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