We have owned the island place for nearly three years, and I’ve lived here full-time for nine months. I still wake every day feeling the magic of the place. I believe that it will always be so.
This is not really a tourist area or a vacation destination. It’s ranch and farm land and tourists up here are unusual. The nearby town has a bit of a tourist feel, but chances are good that, unless you live near here, you haven’t heard of it.
It feels like I’m on vacation every day, even though I’m having to put in quite a bit of work to get the compound set up and running the way I like. I’m well and truly retired, though, so the work feels much more like a hobby than a vacation.
I have had the rare fortune to actually live in resort properties three separate times in my life. I would have a lot of interactions with the tourist visitors and, inevitably, some would say “wow, you get to live here all the time; that must be amazing!”
It wasn’t.
For one thing, in those days I wasn’t retired so I was often too busy working to really enjoy what made the places resorts. More important, things that make a resort area an exciting or relaxing vacation getaway aren’t always the same as things that make one feel useful, challenged, or excited. Vacationing is about “getting away from it all,” and I wasn’t “away” from any of the things that make a regular life. I’m not saying it was horrible — the places were very nice — but what made the vacationers happy were not things I had access to or needed. Put another way: their “away from it all” was my daily life.
When I arrived here, by myself, with one suitcase and no intention of ever returning to the mainland, I was worried that I might have been just as deluded as the tourists at those resorts. I’m relieved to say that the things making me happy here aren’t the transient charms of vacationhood. The place really is a paradise.
—2p