Our Backyard

It's been quite some time since I've posted and this is the reason why.  We're renting a home on the beach.  For a year!  The photo above is a view of our boardwalk backyard.  It's Port Monmouth, NJ and that's the New York Harbor bay.   Looking a bit to right, I can see the NY skyline.  The Gateway National Park is about 5 miles behind us as I took this photo.

Rita and I are looking at this as a "life list" dream come true.  We're selling our house in Central Jersey (although nowadays its never sold until the closing day), and we are going to rent a townhouse right on the beach.  It's something we could never afford to buy, even in this economy, but is very rentable because of the depression we are in.  We'll have 4 bedrooms, so there will be room for everyone! 

This will be part "A" of our retirement plan.  We do hope to end up farther south eventually. But for now, it's sunning on the beach, fishing on the shore, boating on the bay, sitting on the deck with a cold beverage watching the shore birds and ships passing by and maybe a little bicycling on Sandy Hook.  And there is a ferry about a half a mile away directly to Manhattan. Sounds like heaven to me!

Right now though we are still going through a grueling sales process. We were on the market for about 60 days and had a lot of lookers. Only two bidders though.  We ended up with a satisfactory sales price, and a short closing date in the middle of June.  The home inspection was scary, but we emerged from that OK as well.  There is still much to do (we've been packing boxes on weekends) but we have a pretty good jump on that as well.

I have a lot of stories about the home sales process, and not many are good for the seller. But a little pain will lead to a lot of gain!

My intention is to post daily once we move the shore. Obviously, there will be shorter postings but I think there may be lots to write about our experiences there.