Whitey
Sounds like an excellent idea. Best of luck from the other side of pond.
Are You gonna Drive In Your Car forth and back?
(just to keep it car related)
I wish I could afford to do that. So I’m banking on selling my home and my two income properties and using the equity to buy/build a home and not have any mortgage. Smaller home and if built in the right place have over $200k left over.
Okay, I know we’re getting way off topic here, but a lot of people in your part of the country, just by owning one property, can afford two condos, one up north and one in the south.
Not just to keep this car related but because it’s true: My plan is to keep my house in Florida and live in a camper trailer in the summers. That way I can spend each summer in a different northern location if I want to.
Thanks!
A good friend from my high school days, just recently retired commercial pilot, lives just a short distance north in Clear Water. He’s lived here 32 years and he has assured me that feeling does not go away.
We’re getting together this week-end or early in the week and I’m sure we’ll reminisce about his 66 Mustang fastback 289 Hi-Po, 4-speed with solid lifters and “trumpet” exhaust pipes. I still have photos to give him and in one interior shot you can clearly see a Blind Faith 8-track tape in the tape player. We cruised many miles in that machine.
Like I said, I’m not sure I believed the supervisor
There have been times when I have discovered supervisors to be lying to me, for various reasons
I’ve found the best approach is to look people in the eyes, nod your head, say “Yes, sir” . . . and independently verify whether something is true or not
I always thought that was stupid… until I got “old” (age isn’t determined by the number of candles on one’s cake) and froze my toes (literally) last winter. Now I completely get it!
CSA
Mike, the good news is that it is quite affordable. We came down just to look at real estate to see what it would take to get a place when I start drawing Social Security late this year. We found a place and it was very affordable and had everything we wanted, turn-key furnished. We didn’t even have to wait. We wired down some money, paid cash, moved in, and now we have a base to come to every year and a much better way to look at other properties should we want to move, upgrade, or buy another and rent one.
I had no idea that it was that affordable to buy a nice little residence here (Mind you, it is a condo and you’re not buying the building, but rather a share of it. You own the space in one unit.). Monthly and annual expenses are few and low, too.
Relating it to cars, our building has condo units above and the entire ground floor is “under-building” parking spaces. Nice. Also, there are lots of really nice, cool cars here in really good shape.
CSA
With all the free time I have had recently I have traveled some and paid much closer attention to the weather. I left the 4-Corners one May after noon and found myself in a blizzard on a mountain side in Colorado wearing shorts and a T-shirt and that winter drove through ice and snow and record cold in St Louis then this past Summer St Louis had record heat. It’s no wonder so many people just fly over everything from the Ohio River to the Sierra Nevada and the California coast has people stacked like cord wood.
Just to keep on topic on my first trip driving to the Left coast I passed through Flagstaff late in the afternoon and when I got to Needles it was the middle of the night and I thought I left my heater on when I left the snow in the mountains. It was 100+* in the middle of the night and kids were outside playing. I was told it was too hot in the daytime for them to go outdoors. I will never spend a winter in Minot N Dakota or a summer in Needles California.
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The problem is for me to keep a place in the North - it won’t be in New England. Between cost of ownership and property taxes - it’ll cost too much. I could afford it if I had a place in upstate NY, but there are other issues with that (too close to inlaws for one). Even Condo’s here in NH are expensive. There’s some new Condo’s being built at the old Rockingham Park in Salem NH (Couple towns over from were I live). Two bedroom Condo’s starting at $479,000. Yes there are cheaper, but it’s still expensive. And then there’s the property taxes. MA is cheaper, but homes are more expensive. You have to go North of Concord NH or upper ME or upper VT to get something that we can afford and keep a place in the South.
Just sayin’, I appreciate those who are trying to keep a fair proportion of car discussion here. Thanks.
Like I said, I was washing my CAR when that BIG BLACK SNAKE crawled out from underneath it down there in sun country. I’m glad I wasn’t cleaning the tires and at least it wasn’t an alligator.
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If I had to wear a body camera it would go sailing to the trash bin the first time it gouged me or caught on something. Which would probably happen the first 2 hours of use.
It would be as bad as the dealer I worked for once who handed out baseball caps to us mechanics and which were said to “promote a feeling of loyalty and pride in our work”.
Of course these caps were snow white in color with a company logo and by the end of the day most were filthy and ditched on the workbenches or in the trash barrels.
The service manager out in the shop asked me why I wasn’t wearing my cap and I pointed to the blackened, greasy cap on the work bench and told him it made a bad impression on customers.
Of course the cap got that way by deliberately rubbing it all over a greasy transmission during an oil change.
The service manager and company owner liked the hell out of me for some reason so they figured if mine was trash then so be it with all of the others. That was the end of “loyalty and pride”. 
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LOL,
“hey, let’s promote loyalty and pride in the mechanics’ work, let’s give them white caps!”
Apparently they momentarily lapsed in their knowledge of what creates loyalty and pride. 
But I’ll give them points for effort.
If we started talking about management stupidity we would be going off-topic.
A local GM dealership was handing out ATTABOY cards to employees when their bosses thought they were going above and beyond in their work.The cards were denoted $5-$10&$20 but the employee had to scratch off dots and if the 3 dots matched the amount on the card face they actually got the money.After a few days the men in the shop quit accepting the cards because there were so few winners. Has anyone else seen such a tacky trick?
I used to hand out gift certificates from my own money at Christmas, but just quit doing it when I didn’t even get a thank you.
That’s not tacky . . . that’s known as teasing, to put it politely
If I was one of those guys, I would have accepted the card, walked back to my stall and promptly thrown it in the trash . . . probably without even doing the “scratch and sniff” part 
A couple of years ago the Chrysler/Dodge dealership here (who at the time had a newspaper story run about their older mechanics who had been there forever) ran an ad wanting to hire a bunch of mechanics.
The ad was the usual lying tripe. Clean shop, plenty of work, well stocked parts dept, great work environment, and a great benefit package.
The last line read like this. “Another of our great benefits for mechanics is a pop machine”. (Not free of course.) Who could turn that down…
That “Attaboy” card is embarassingly disgusting.
I dunno, the greenhouse (58 Chevy wagon and 61 Greenbriar, canyon copper) had a free pop machine but I didn’t like to use it unless I was offered. I would have rather put my own dime in instead of feeling like I was mooching. You have to understand if you have ever read or listened to “How to Speak Minnesotan”, that’s part of the culture. You have to be asked three times before you finally say yes to coffee, pop, cake, etc. even though you are dying for it.