As a little background, Mary (my wife of twenty years) and I moved to Sparta, New Jersey from Dallas, Texas three and a half years ago with the company that I worked for at the time. I was excited about helping to open a new division of the company and about being a part of a cutting edge technology product that would be a first in the aviation industry. Looking back, that part all went pretty well.
Fast forward to June 2009, I was laid off in the second major downsizing for the company. Man, this was huge. New Jersey is a very expensive place to live and we had to do something. I have tried desperately to get a job here in the north east, but there are many other unemployed aviators and aviation managers up here in the area. I will say that New Jersey has an outstanding unemployment support system.
The unemployment payments (euphemistically called "unemployment insurance") are among the highest in the nation and there is a group called Professional Services Group (PSG) that has exceptional volunteers and the reeducation value is fantastic. More on that later.
We have two sons. The youngest is more involved in the matters of the house and he is more aware of the discussions Mary and I have about our options. Our oldest works and has a serious girlfriend to whom he is very dedicated. I thought that I would tell my oldest about the likelihood of out move south, to make sure he had the information because he has also expressed an interest in going back to college. It caught him a little off guard. We will come back to this later as well.
A couple of months ago, I caught wind of a possible flying job in Pensacola, Florida on a Marine Corps job site. The listing described an ideal opportunity that seemed perfect. Having gone to Navy flight school in Pensacola as a Marine 2nd Lt. forty years ago, the thought of moving back to 'P'cola', as we often refer to it, was very appealing.
The only problem was that the job offer was really just a rumor that some one had posted very prematurely and on an unauthorized basis. The job was not to materialize for another year or so and the job posting was the result of a casual conversation and not an official notice.
Meanwhile my brain began to spin about how great it would be to live in Pensacola again. Mary and I have become boating enthusiasts, having owned four or five boats of various sizes. As mentioned earlier, we can only boat six months of the year and then we have to spend money to store the boat for the rest of the year while staring at a frozen lake.
Now that my head is spinning about the beautiful white sands of Pensacola beach, the non-job realization of the flying job could not shake the desire to move there. So now I am thinking that I just need a job in Pensacola, any job, so that we can go ahead and move there, and be ready for the flying job when it eventually does open up. It seems to me that it would be easier getting a job in Pensacola living there than in Sparta, New Jersey.
Mary, ever the travel agent, never saw a trip for us that she could not plan. So within a couple of days of the discussion of the necessary "road-trip" she had the itinerary all planned out and had me publishing it to all of our friends that we will need to stay with in order to save a little money. It is not easy living on unemployment and Social Security. (Did I say that I began collection Social Security two months after I got laid off...very handy). I have already talked to most everybody about the possible trip anyway, but now we have a plan.
Tomorrow, I will go into the plans for the trip and the plans for getting the house ready to sell.
