Florida 1

June 3, 2012: Let's go to Florida!

We pack our bags at a leisurely pace in the morning and video-call the grandparents (Happy Mother's Day, moms!).
The plane takes off at 2:30 p.m.; we leave the apartment at 11:30.
Traffic jam on the JFK tarmac — we take off an hour late.
Alice, Mag and Henri nap on the plane. We land in Fort Myers at 6:30 p.m.
We pick up our rental car, a lovely white Jeep that swallows all our luggage — and even the bit of grocery shopping we do at Walmart before arriving at THE VILLA!

Cape Coral: the crisis came through here…

Show off your house,
Show off your car,
Show off your boat,
Welcome to Cape Coral!

This is the American paradox, life-size. On one hand, 250 Fortune 500 CEOs own a home here. On the other, Cape Coral is the US city with the second-highest rate of personal foreclosures (number one being… Las Vegas!)
Riding a wave of unchecked tourism and real-estate development since the 1960s (funny how those two always seem to go together), Cape Coral was hit extremely hard by the subprime crisis from 2006 on.

Within a few months, home prices crashed by… 69%! You can find 3-bedroom, 2-bath houses here for $80,000 — about €65,000.

The only problem: they don't sell, and for good reason. Building materials were in desperately short supply during the 1990s housing boom, so American builders imported Chinese drywall containing carcinogenic materials.
So here's your chance to buy a gorgeous vacation home for your golden years — which might turn out to be rather short…

Joking aside, the five of us discover a town split in two.
First, the inland part, where the boomtown has turned into a ghost town (and according to the locals, it was apparently much worse back in 2006).
Then the waterfront, where the "high-end" homes all come with a private dock and one (or several) boat(s).

If you can look past this split personality (come on, make an effort!), Cape Coral has direct access to the Gulf of Mexico, and with your own boat (often included in the house rental), you can reach white-sand beaches in under half an hour, in 84°F water all year round.
Every day, dolphins and manatees swim right next to the boat. Pretty sweet for the 9 days we decided to spend here before getting back to our RV!

Juliette: up at 7:00, in the pool at 7:30, breakfast at 8:00, in the pool at 8:15, shower at 9:00, in the pool at 9:15, out of the water at noon for lunch.
12:30, pool?
Nope — a man came to put chemicals in, so we have to wait until 1:30 (phew). 1:35: "Is it OK now, Mom? Has it been an hour?"
1:36: pool….. and so on until 8 p.m. That's Juliette for you!
Alice is seriously starting to keep the same schedule as her sister.
Alex, more laid-back, hoses the salt off the boat's hull with his dad, plays paddleball with his dad, and tries wakeboarding off the beaches of Sanibel (though he lands on his butt a lot!).

OK, tomorrow for sure: spelling drills, book reports, and multiplication tables...