The biggest move is selling the family home:

Groundhog Day!
No, it’s not actually Groundhog Day—but that’s exactly how it felt one morning as Angel and I sat at our breakfast table.
We’re in our mid-50s, the kid’s a senior in college, and life was starting to feel like a loop. Same coffee mugs. Same conversations. Same everything.
Our home had always been the house. You know the one—the hangout spot. The place where kids crashed after parties, showed up after dates, or threw their first ones. Selling this house was no small thing.
We’d tried once before, when the girls (we still say “girls” even though we only have one kid—our house was always full of them) first went off to college. We listed the house, told Victoria, and instantly had full-metal-jacket meltdowns from all the kids.
Okay, maybe that was too soon. In their minds, they still thought they’d be coming home after college. Now that most of them have graduated or are on their way, they’ve realized they’re off to live their own lives. And for us, that shift made all the difference.
Emotional timing matters when you’re selling the family home.
Yes, there’s still a touch of sadness—but now, it finally feels like our house again.

The Stirring
We needed adventure back in our lives. And truthfully, we also wanted to cash out some of the equity we’d built over twelve years. We didn’t owe much, and we weren’t interested in refinancing or taking loans. We just wanted to realize the gain, plain and simple.
For years, we’d tossed around ideas:

• Maybe a condo?

• A smaller home in Fort Lauderdale?

• A townhouse in a different neighborhood?

But reality kicked in fast.
Three dogs—including two senior ones—meant condo life was a hard pass. The thought of endless elevator rides just to take them out for walks? No thank you.
Downsizing in the same city didn’t sound exciting either. And moving too far from our close circle of Fort Lauderdale friends—our chosen family—didn’t feel right.
So we just kept talking, circling the same ideas. Until last October.

The Detour That Changed Everything
We were driving home from a wedding in Ponte Vedra Beach, Florida, when it happened. Somewhere near Palm Beach, I started Googling golf communities.
I’ve got two besties who recently moved north to Palm Beach, so the idea of being near them was appealing. I’d always had my eye on Jupiter—but let’s be real, Jupiter prices have gotten wild.
So I started digging. Gated golf communities. Marinas. Clubhouses. We looked at four or five options and researched them all:

What were the initiation fees and dues?

How good was the course? (Because my husband plays golf 5–6 days a week and practices just as often—nonnegotiable.)

What about the clubhouse?

If it looked dated—old furniture, old décor—it was out. We didn’t need “brand new,” but we weren’t going back to 1998 either.
I wanted tennis courts (I was still playing then), nice clay surfaces, pickleball, and restaurants nearby. We scrolled through Google and Facebook photos like detectives.
And we kept coming back to one place: Tesoro Club.
“Maybe we should just stop by on our way home,” I said.
Famous. Last. Words.
If you’ve ever car-shopped or house-shopped with us, you already know how that story goes.

If you want to know more about Tesoro Club click here.

The Ride Home
After visiting Tesoro, we spent the rest of the 75-minute drive home exchanging silent looks—the kind that say, Are we really doing this? Could we actually do this?
We’ve lived and worked in Fort Lauderdale for twenty years. Our roots run deep. But this next step wasn’t about roots—it was about us.
When we first got married, everything was about us. Then, as Tori hit her middle and high school years, life became all about her. Angel dove deeper into golf. I poured myself into parenting and work.
Now, here we were again, staring down a new chapter.
“What about us?”
The closest we’ve come to rediscovering that feeling has always been when we travel—just the two of us. No house to manage, no dogs to walk, no routines pulling at us. That’s when we reconnect and remember who us was.
Now, it’s time to find that again.

To be continued…