In August of 2023, I went to the post office to get a money order for a thousand dollars to put a contract on a house, but when I came out of the building my vehicle wouldn’t start. The nearest mechanic with an available tow service was a place called Jack and Don’s. A guy named Mike with squirrelly eyes and a five o’clock shadow arrived in a tow truck and hooked me up.
Conversation on the ride to the shop was sparse; a long way from home and my northwest-Florida accent wasn’t doing me any favors with being understood. It was as if Mike was mystified by my presence. What was I doing all the way in northern Minnesota? Most likely he just couldn’t understand what I was saying.
They loaned me their shop vehicle to use while they analyzed my vehicle.
Thanks to modern technology, my wife is already privy by now to the details of the situation when I arrive back at my father-in-law’s house. After only forty-five minutes, I’m delighted to receive a phone call, but they only need me to bring the loaner car back; they had left another client’s keys in the door panel.
Back and forth I go.
A few hours go by before someone at Jack and Don’s finally calls to inform me that the flywheel is shot, and it’ll be at least a week before their shop can get to it. In a small town, my options were limited, and the other few shops I subsequently called were also at least a week out and saying the work might take a week to complete.
I return the loaner car, my father-in-law picks me up, and it’s about to start raining as I’m transferring all our pertinent belongings in anticipation of being without a vehicle for a while.
Today is Friday and I have to be in the corporate office by Monday for a company-wide meeting that I absolutely cannot miss. There are no rental car companies within hours of this small town I’m in, however, there are three car dealerships. I realize that I’m going to have to buy a car. We were already on the market to buy a new car within the next year, so we had no trouble finding motivation to make this upgrade.
The next morning, I borrow my father-in-law’s vehicle and make quick work of going back to Jack and Don’s to inform them I will be having Triple A tow the vehicle to a friend’s house. Mike seemed surprised I wanted to keep it and offered to scrap it for me for $500. Now, I’m a curious person, I like to know how things work, but I have very little knowledge of how automobiles work. As we wait for the tow truck, I start picking Mike’s brain about what happened with my vehicle.
Mike is disheveled, he goes between looking intently at me and then off into the distance as he speaks, almost as if his words trail off right before he snaps back into attention-mode and then looks at me wilily.
I’m asking basic things.
“So, the flywheel is connected to the crankshaft and,” I motion with my hands, “this is the part that got worn out and caused it to start slipping?”
I am just trying to obtain a basic understanding. As I unveil my plans, Mike realized I’m actually going to have someone repair this. I’m pretty much talking out loud to myself at this point when Mike gets up from behind the desk, goes into the shop without saying a word, and comes back out holding a catalytic converter; presumably mine. I said I didn’t know a lot about cars and I don’t, but I could recognize the part because of how much they’re in the news from getting stolen for their resale value.
“Oh yeah!” Mike feigned remembrance. “This is yours.”
My face went blush red. I had no idea you had to remove the catalytic converter to access the flywheel. But I played it off and thanked him.
“Where do you want it?” he asked.
“You can put it in the backseat.”
The tow truck showed up and dragged my partially disassembled vehicle to my wife’s friend’s house. She’s from this area, which is why we wanted to move here.
Sunday morning, I take half the normal coffee ration and hit the road toward the three dealerships within my vicinity. I have my shortlist of requirements, but I am a painfully deliberative individual to a fault, so it wasn’t until six hours later that I invited my wife for a final test drive. To my defense, it’s a huge purchase under pressure that I can’t return, and we have two little kids riding on this decision.
We got it done. Jordan was fantastic, I was his very first sale, and it showed, his greenness, but it was great to have such a tenacious salesperson in my time of need.
Monday morning, we are driving off to the big city so daddy can make his meeting. We never went under contract with those sellers. We still hadn’t found a buyer yet, so they came back asking for five times the original earnest money, non-refundable, and said we had five days to get an inspection.
We were only an hour out when I got a phone call from Jordan. Something or another, this and that, blah blah I don’t know but they couldn’t sell me a car on Sunday in the state of Minnesota for some reason. They had to rerun the sale on a Monday, but I was absconding with this vehicle one way or another.
We arrived at the hotel where I could prep for my meetings that week, and the dealership overnighted me new paperwork to sign. I picked it up from the hotel’s front desk the next day after returning from an all-day corporate meeting. Friday morning, I dropped it off at a FedEx site somewhere in Wisconsin while on our way back to Florida, but not without first taking in the reality of my impossible situation — I “bought” a car, drove it of the lot, and could have technically taken it back a week later at no cost. I joked with the dealer’s finance guy on the phone, who coincidentally is also named Mike.
“I never would do this, Mike, but technically, I could bring this car back to you like I never bought it, right?”
“Ahem, uh, yes sir.” Mike respectfully informed me.
Back home in Florida, twenty days after driving off the lot with my new car, I still had not received any notice of a new auto loan. Surprisingly, nothing had been processed yet, I was able to contact Mike once again and change the lienholder to be my bank — the bank I would have chosen if I had not been forced to use their lender when emergency-buying car on a Sunday.
It would take me several more weeks to obtain a Florida license plate. Since the car was purchased in Minnesota, I had to arrange an appointment with a local sheriff’s deputy to come to my home and confirm the VIN before Florida would register a title in order to get a permanent tag. This delay I attribute to my own laziness. Over the span of this whole ordeal, I called Mike back three times to request a new temporary tag, which I learned, by the way, does not even change except for the month. So, anybody could Photoshop the month and keep printing one indefinitely I suppose.
We really don’t want to be in Florida, so we proceed accordingly and put our house on the market. We find a home in Minnesota that we think is perfect, it checks all our boxes and we are ecstatic. But I have to put eyes on it before I’ll commit to a contract. So, we hop in our new car and head back to Minnesota to look at this house. It’s a bullet trip, straight there and back.
The grueling back-and-forth wouldn’t have been so bad, but we got there and found the house did not pass inspection. It was devastating news and we felt foolish for wasting the two-thousand-mile trip (but we did love our new vehicle). We had so much angst about the situation that we drove back to Florida and took our house off the market. Moving to Minnesota in the winter would not make sense for us anyway, and this wasn’t working out; everything felt forced.
We spent the next two years drowning our sorrows with about twenty trips to Disney — it’s very cheap when you’re a Florida resident. That’s how Florida sucks you in. I definitely was relegating myself to just staying in Florida, the kids could grow up with a Disney lifestyle, living near the beach. But they still would never have that strong, familial network we were craving. That would only be found in Minnesota — six generations’ worth.
With the old vehicle stuck in Minnesota, I figured it would make sense to ask the dealer to repair it for me since we’ve already established a fruitful business relationship. They indeed discovered it was the flywheel and quoted me a couple thousand dollars to repair, which sounded accurate after asking around. By now it was November and they were going to start charging me rent to leave the vehicle on their lot much longer. When the repairs were finished, they sent me a bill for twice what they quoted, claiming their mechanic underestimated how long the job was going to take. I proceeded to inform them that I was not in the business of paying their mechanics to learn on the job, and after some extensive back and forth and pulling up of old email threads to confirm who said what, they ate most of their mistake, and I sold that vehicle to a friend of a friend to recoup just about the same amount I spent on the repair.
It was only six months later, however, that we made our final failed attempt at moving to Minnesota. I had had strong apprehensions with living in such a small town. Even though I work remotely, I want a contingency plan, and small towns don’t have an industry for my skill set.
My apprehensions of living in a remote location were mostly fueled by a company merger, wherewith we were told a year in advance that not all of us would make it through; some eight percent would be let go — gracefully (and it was graceful for those who didn’t make it).
We looked at another small town, but to ease my worry we looked at one that was only an hour from the Twin Cities. This would allow us the best of both worlds, where we could visit family but if push came to shove, I could feasibly commute daily into a market where I’m employable.
Our Florida house went back on the market for the second time and as soon as we had it under contact, we headed up to Minnesota yet again and found another home. This go-around was marked by our potential seller’s realtor, who, unbeknownst to us, contacted our buyer’s realtor asking to see their pre-qualification to buy our home. It almost spooked them away at that point, but our realtor smoothed it over. We never came to an agreement with that seller anyhow due to timing, so that phone call from their realtor was even more counterproductive and useless than you could imagine.
So here we are in the middle of 2024 with our house under contract, and we need to find something suitable where we can raise our children. We find one more home in this same area and decide to make another journey to Minnesota to properly vet this house. We get all the way there and the first time we see this place is with the inspector. It doesn’t fail like the first one, but there are enough things wrong with it that I’m starting to catch the sweats; I’m feeling so much pressure.
I came out of that house and my wife said she could see the sickly, pale look on my face. I would have been so miserable in that house, coming from a newly built home where we were the first to live.
Discouraged but determined, and while we were still physically present in Minnesota, I decided to speak with some builders about a newly built home that I knew I would be happy with. The builders we met with were so nice. We picked out all the features, limiting the customizations as much as we could to keep it within what we could afford. We really would have loved that home.
Our home sale in Florida was going great. The buyers sent professionals to measure the windows for custom curtains. They had us remove our two-story outdoor playhouse and swing set from the backyard (a twelve-hundred-dollar piece of play equipment which we ended up just giving away). I had to remove the heavy-duty shelving units that I installed in the garage because they wanted to have their own installed.
We did all these things for them because the home passed inspection with flying colors, and the appraisal came back for more than we were asking for. Yet, still, with exactly just ten days before we were set to close, the buyers backed out, stating that it, “just didn’t feel right.”
We . . . were sick.
Yes, we got to keep their earnest money deposit, which didn’t make us feel any better, and thankfully, those nice builders were so understanding and gave us our deposit back when I promptly notified them. They gave us an opportunity to find another buyer, they were building the home anyhow, but after about three more weeks I called it quits again. We took the house off the market this time because I was just so flabbergasted and overwhelmed with the buyers backing out; showing a house with young kids is hard. I was so nervous that I would be let go through the company merger, and that I would be stuck in some awful situation rendering my family homeless, kicking myself for selling a home we were settled into.
In hindsight, though, we would have been miserable in that location, because even though we would have be a couple of hours from family and friends, the reality of why we wanted to move to Minnesota would have never been met. You’re just not going to pop over to someone’s house for a thirty-minute visit unless you’re close by.
For the next solid year, we just did Disney and we did it hard. At times we talked about a life in Florida, taking the kids to Disney as much as we could. It’s a great place where you can create your own experiences; we almost never did rides and there are so many educational opportunities.
I wasn’t eager to move only because we were settled. On paper and in everything logical that I knew to be true in life, I knew Minnesota was the better place to raise a family. And with my wife being from the state, I knew this endeavor was not over.
After that final year in the Florida house, the Disney annual passes were expiring and the company merger looked more and more like it was not going to expel me. We were breathing easier, we had literally packed and unpacked all our belongings no less than three time by this point, so we were lean. And the kids were two years older now, which opened the possibility that one of us could drive the kids alone while the other drives a moving truck. This would save us thousands of dollars.
We felt the squeeze in the Florida housing market, it was real. Houses in our neighborhood were sitting for months, only to finally sell for way less than what they were listed for. Builders were selling new homes, offering tens of thousands of dollars in credits and points. We were anxious, but we listed the house again.
This time we moved a third of our belongings into storage to more effectively stage the house. This was the third home we’d sold together, and now this was the third time we were trying to sell this third home; we knew how to show this house by now — for sure.
As soon as we landed a contract with another serious buyer, we wasted no time zeroing in on some of the homes we’d been watching on Zillow. We brilliantly executed our strategy to find the perfect realtor and location close to family and friends. All in all, it took about five weeks from the moment we found our new home until the day we closed on it. In that span of time, I loaded all our belongings into the biggest moving truck I could find and drove it to Minnesota. Twenty-one of those days we spent on the road in hotels, constantly hoping that nothing else goes wrong, which it did — our four-year-old broke his leg just five days into our three-week-long transition to Minnesota.
It was extremely unlike me to buy this home sight unseen — just ask my wife, she remembers the nervous looks I had walking out of those failed inspections; my desperate contemplation to make this dream work for us. But that’s how we bought this one.
We were in Florida on the phone after the walkthrough with the inspector when he told us that out of all the six hundred homes he’s inspected, this one was the cleanest one he’d ever seen. My heart sang with relief and tears of joy filled my eyes. Mainly because I knew at this point, I was not going to let my buyer get away; I was practically either stuck without a home indefinitely or stuck in this one miserably. I was just hoping for resell value.
But the inspector went on and on about how well-maintained this home was. I had hoped it would be, because when I found it on Zillow it stuck out to me because it had only been on the market for twelve days — with only one owner ever. Yeah, we got so lucky.
Right now, six months ago, I literally said to my wife that we may have to stay in the Florida house for one more Christmas. We never would have dreamed that we could be spending our first white Christmas in our new home this soon, especially after the turmoil we experienced trying to escape Florida.
Everybody is so nice here in Minnesota, I joke that it takes thirty minutes to get through a four-way stop. Learning to live with the winter is such a wonderful experience. I love dealing with the snow still, and I’m sure that won’t last. But right now, I enjoy learning how to live with the cold. One of these most noticeable qualities of living up north is a sense of community that I think comes with having to live with the cold; you have to depend on each other for survival. It’s important to care about others.
Living in a quaint, little town is like sipping nostalgia every day, this wonderful house was built in an era that I’m familiar with, so it feels so cozy. It’s absolutely a splendid home to raise our family in. The community is superb.
In a poignantly remarkable bookend to this journey, we did not spend another Christmas in Florida. In fact, I was the one to deliver all our Christmas cards to the post office, handwritten by my wife. It’s the first time I’ve been back to this post office since I came here two years earlier for that money order. I exited the building and the quiet air of the cold suspended the sound of my boots crunching the snow before I got back into the car that I purchased right up the road just two years earlier. I kicked my feet together to knock off the snow from the boots before sliding all the way into the seat and shutting the door. I pushed the ignition and turned my head as I reached over my shoulder to grab my seatbelt. On the other side of the street is that black tow truck with “Jack and Don’s” written on the side, and inside is Mike with his wiry little mustache and five o’clock shadow. I don’t think he saw me, but I saw him and those squirrelly little eyes peering over his shoulder as he looked back for traffic before pulling into the road. I chuckled out loud to the universe and at that moment knew I had officially moved to Minnesota.