It would be great if we could fly back and forth from Florida to Michigan and everything would be in place when we arrived at our condo (or Michigan home). No days of packing and unpacking. No loading and unloading. We wouldn’t miss the fourteen hundred miles of traffic and congestion. The first year maybe we’d need to UPS some of our stuff, but we’d like to aim for the eventual possibility of just having everything in place.

I have a lengthy list of stuff we drag back and forth. Many of the items could be left either in Michigan or Florida and we’d get by. We would need to buy duplicates of a few things, but I’ve started outfitting both places with the same essentials.

Our musical instruments present some problems. John could leave his Webster dulcimer here and I could leave my Orthey autoharp. John could play one of our other two Websters which are currently in Michigan and I could play my Oscar Schmidt autoharp when up there. But his Bacon and Day Silver Bell banjo is a bit of a problem. Although he has another banjo in Michigan, it’s not the quality of the one that he drags back and forth. He also has only one ukulele. He could ship the banjo, but eventually we want to get it down to a point where we have all items located one place or the other and they’d stay there.

But in the near future, the bigger blockade to our plans is Charlie, our bird. What do we do with Charlie? We’ve kidded that we could let him fly on his own, but obviously that’s not possible. He’s old. He may not be around many more years, but he seems to be doing fine. We certainly expect that he’ll make the round trip with us home in May and back here in October so we’re stuck driving.

At least in May, 2014, and then again in October, 2014, provided Charlie is still with us, we plan to drive to Michigan and back to Florida. That may mean John will want to buy another vehicle for our “road trips.” He would like to replace our Michigan Chevy Malibu with a late model SUV which gets decent mileage. He’d drive that to Florida instead of our 2003 GMC diesel truck.

Of course even if we bought an SUV, we’d need to keep our truck in Michigan until we decide to replace our 5th wheel with a trailer. (It’s the vehicle we use to tow the 28′ 5th wheel.) If we get an SUV, upgrading our RV to a nice but smaller trailer would be our next purchase.

Once we have a road-worthy SUV and we drive it to Florida, the next thing John would like to do is to sell our Florida Jaguar (although I love that car more than any of our vehicles). It stays down here all of the time (in our Florida garage when we’re in Michigan). But we could get rid of it, if we have a more conveniently sized vehicle we can use when in Florida. Our big GMC diesel crew cab truck, which we drive down, doesn’t work for any car trips around here at all so we move it to the “RV Storage area” and there it stays (covered with a canvas cover we bought for it) all the time we’re in Florida. (The RV truck storage rental slot costs us $155 annually.)

John’s a numbers guy. As he sees it, we’d save $155 annually for truck storage, plus almost $560 which we spend annually for the Jaguar license and insurance. And if we get rid of the Malibu, that would save over $530 in license and insurance. Of course he isn’t considering the more than $30,000 that it would cost to purchase the new SUV which would also need license and insurance and for an SUV would probably be higher than either the $560 or $530 we pay on our current vehicles annually.

I’d rather wait another year. Maybe by then we’ll lose Charlie. If that happens, we can keep the truck to haul our 5th wheel in Michigan, keep our 5th wheel, keep our Jaguar, and just fly back and forth from Michigan to Florida. No expenditures would be necessary except for the flights back and forth which sound like a bargain. And if we do that, we won’t have our truck here in Florida, so we’ll save the $155 for the rental of the storage space in the RV storage area.

The way I look at it, the vehicle is only part of the equation. We aren’t getting any younger so driving back and forth, even in the snazziest SUV won’t eliminate the strain of driving the 1,300 miles each way. If we don’t have Charlie (our bird) in the equation, we’d be wiser to fly which is safer. We would then want a vehicle down here so we could fly in and have a car to drive. The Jaguar is perfect.

Eventually we may still replace our Malibu with a more versatile SUV and eventually upgrade our 5th wheel and get rid of the truck, but it wouldn’t be because we needed it to drive to Florida. We can figure it out at that time.

Of course at that point you’ve gotten into big bucks: A SUV and a new trailer are BIG expenses. We have an 2003 GMC truck, a 2004 Chevy Malibu, a 2005 Jaguar and an old 5th wheel to trade up or sell for these new up-grades but you’re talking about well over $50,000-$60,000 in new purchases, and probably less than 20,000 for the vehicles we’d sell or trade in. That’s a huge difference and for what reason?

Oh, well.. we’ll figure it all out.