chilly
Well-known member
- May 13, 2006
- 3,117
- 1,003
I have been an Alaskan for over 30 years but Alaskans love to go to Hawaii in mid to late winter just for a break, and about 14 years ago my wife decided her retirement was coming up and she wanted more than 2-3 trips a year so she bought a condo and remodeled it. She retired and started going over after Christmas and staying until there wasn't any snow on the ground in Alaska. I was still working so I would go over with her and spend a few weeks and come back and go over in March and spend a few weeks and then go over a couple of weeks before she was ready to come home and then we would both come back. I retired December 31, 2015 and started going over with her for the winter and then coming back to Alaska for the rest of the year. That lasted until the toddlers of some people 2 floors up flushed a couple of diapers, kept flushing the toilet, filling up their tub, and then the tub overflowed and our condo was drenched with sewer water. Because of several factors it took us a year and a half to get the 3 insurance companies involved to get off their collective a$$es and then it took the contractor 9 months to redo the condo. In the meantime we decided we weren't going to go through that again so we bought a beautiful house in July of 2018 and started living there. My wife decided we would to a 50/50 but keep Alaska as our home. That lasted about 6 months and she decided it was stupid paying 2 mortgages and insurance etc so we sold the house in Alaska with the plan of someday buying something smaller. Then Covid hit and she had several health issues and there was almost no medical care on the island (we lived on the island of Molokai, only 7,000 permanent residents and very little infrastructure). We came back to Alaska for our daughter's wedding for a month and ended up having to stay for 11 months due to travel restrictions and other factors. When we got back in 2021 things had changed and the attitude of the locals was decidedly hostile towards anyone not originally from the island. That got worse and worse until finally we decided in the early spring of 2022 that we had had enough so we contacted a builder, flew back to Alaska, bought a lot and contracted for a house, got that started, flew back to Molokai, put our house on the market, sold it 5 hours after it listed for a quarter million more than we paid in 2018, packed up what little we wanted to take home to Alaska, and left in mid July. We rented a B&B from August until our home was completed in April of 2023 and that was the end of the Hawaii saga.
LOTS of people ask us the same thing, and the quickest and easiest way to explain it is that VISITING Hawaii and LIVING in Hawaii are two completely different things.
I am sure we will eventually go back to visit Hawaii but we both realize we don't have to own a piece of it to enjoy it
