It’s officially been eleven years now since i began my running streak. I was 57 years old and living in Austin, Texas. It was the year after we said goodbye to friends and co-workers in Decatur, Illinois that continue to come in and out of our lives. Today we reacquainted ourselves with a couple we haven’t seen since then and visited their new home in Watersounds Origins, along the Emerald Coast of Florida. We’re considering this area as a permanent retirement home, attracted by the beautiful beaches and upscale neighborhoods. Coincidentally we had set up an appointment with a realtor and toured a model home just down the street from where they live. The decision my wife and I need to make is how much we want to invest of our retirement savings in a home relative to traveling the world. We can buy a nice place and stay home the rest of our lives or make some compromises to fulfill our bucket lists. It’s the classic retirement decision between memories and material possessions. 

There was a cool mist in the air as I completed day #4,017 of “The Streak,” a 3.1 mile run along the sidewalks of West Destin, Florida. It’s a city that didn’t exist when my wife visited here 35 years ago and a totally unexplored area for me. I’ve been coming to Florida since I was a kid to visit my grandparent’s winter home, a mobile home in an Englewood bay-side park. It was a sharp contrast to the penthouse view of the Gulf that we experienced from our sixth-floor Sheraton Hotel room suite this morning. It poses the question of do we want a pricey view or simply more-affordable proximity to the beach? Do we want a condo, a family-friendly environment, or a 55+ plus community, where we could potentially alienate ourselves from younger friends?

This trip to the “Sunshine State” is strictly exploratory, weighing our options of where to move for possibly the last time in our lives. We’re sold on the beauty of the area and the fact that there are no state taxes, as we carefully start to spend our combined IRA. As a bonus, my son and his family live down here, but it also means putting distance between my wife and her two girls. We still have 14 months left on our Portland, Oregon apartment lease, so there’s still plenty of time to examine the possibilities. Our house sold much quicker than expected, a blessing considering our track record of poor luck in real estate transactions. Apartment life is teaching us the value of space, especially after cutting our square footage in half. A cross-country move will also be costly. but warmth is what we seek. Over the course of the next week, I will continue to run and my wife will contemplate the balance between home life and travel. I’ll be satisfied either way! In the last eleven years, we’ve moved five times, so it will be nice to finally settle down.