SHOUT OUT!

It’s been awhile since our last blog post, and for that, I do apologize. Everything is happening so fast, we’re busy, and it’s just seemed non-stop. We try to make time for ourselves also, but that isn’t helping the poor little neglected blog here either.

With that said, and with Karie’s prior plans of a well deserved massage and shopping trip, I was determined to get something up here this evening. Of course, I just drew a blank on what to write about as I typically like to plan these things out. Recent renovations? The new alignment system? Projects of late? All the various repairs we’ve done? The awesome customers we have? All very, very cool – but they just didn’t seem like the appropriate topic this evening as I hadn’t had time to put a lot of thought into it. So, I looked at the common denominator for all, and kept coming back to one thing – this is all only possible because of where we’ve landed, Punta Gorda.

Now, I could write a book on the things I’ve grown to love so much about this beautiful little city – I won’t bore you with that, you need to experience it yourself one day. This “shout out” post is for some very dear friends of ours, Dirk and Angela. You see, we met them back in 2010 while living in North Carolina. Dirk was into Volkswagens, as I was, and we hit it off pretty quickly. Soon after, we both got into boating, and we all spent many a weekend and vacation together on the water. But, Dirk and I also share a common trait of over-researching everything to the point of insanity, whether that be a blessing (like the $1200 smoker I just bought), or a curse (like the weeks of research spent ensuring I got the absolute best I could for what I could feasibly budget spending).

Carrying on then. Once into boating, every winter was spent grumbling about winter and wishing for year round boating. Probably sometime in 2014 or so, we both started talking about realistically moving to south Florida one day. I was convinced I’d be there first, but never put any hard, serious thought into it. I’m not sure Dirk did either, for awhile – but that definitely did change. He began researching incessantly, and we often chatted about the different places he’d found, pros and cons, cost of living, amenities, etc…  Long story short – in 2017 he scored a job transfer down, and after years of research, he settled on Punta Gorda.

Now. I’d like to think that had I been doing all the typical research and googling that I do, I would’ve ended up in the same spot. There’s a good chance I would. But, there again, I had never in my life even heard of Punta Gorda. Before the realtor.com article last month, I’m not sure PG was ever really known for anything. It was like SWFL’s best kept secret. Would I have found it? We’ll never know. But Dirk did, and we visited often, and we fell in love. Now that we’ve lived here for 3 months, we feel at home already. Every time we walk downtown, or visit one of the many events happening every weekend, or we sit down at the Celtic Ray. Every time we watch a sunset at the Tiki Bar, or bicycle the Harborwalk, or just ride our jet-skis out to Cayo Costa. We’re reminded every single day of how much we love this city, and of how we found it. For that, we can probably never thank our friends Dirk and Angela enough for taking a leap of faith and landing here and making it home, which ultimately led us to do the same.

And with all that said, I’ve had a corned beef brisket on my new smoker for quite a long time now, and I’m gonna go home and take care of that. I’d invite my dear friends over to share, but Dirk is probably researching the next best thing, and I certainly don’t want to interrupt that!   😛