Lingering winter leaves snowbirds leery of coming home to roost
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Lingering winter leaves snowbirds leery of coming home to roost
JOAN BENSON-CACCHIONE
joan.ca...@timesnews.com
Shivers from an early April snow here rippled south, deep into sunny
Florida. Erie's icy breeze ruffled feathers among its flock of snowbirds
wintering there.
"I just got off the phone with a client of mine in Naples who's scheduled to
come back in a few weeks," said Eric Dahlstrand, manager of Miller Travel
Services.
"So," the conversation went on a day when forecasters in Erie called for
wind, snow, sleet and a high of 37. "Do you think another few weeks is
enough?"
The man was only half-joking.
A dilemma now floats before him in the dreamy Southern surf, as well as for
others who ducked winter by winging south last fall: When to come home? What
if winter still roams these parts?
Sure it's nice today, but Erie's Florida corps knows that winterlike blasts
can hit here at any time in spring, up until just after the Memorial Day
picnic.
Erie's snowbirds - an estimated 3,400 to 4,000, based on temporary
change-of-address requests filed with the U.S. Postal Service - have seen
some of their flock head north by now. Others, though, won't even risk it
until sometime in May.
Even that long is no guarantee of warmth and sunshine.
"May is sometimes a terrible month, and we've wished we would have stayed
(in the South)," said Sue Ann Pier with a sigh. She's just spent several
snow-free months in Lakeland, Fla., with her husband, Jim.
According to the Piers and others, our whacked-out winter weather this year
is the talk of the Florida Panhandle and points south. Phone chats and
e-mail continue to zip back and forth from balmy Southern shores to the
still half-frozen lake.
"From everything the family told us, it was a miserable winter" in Erie,
said an all-too-chipper Jim Pier. "We had an e-mail last week from a friend
of ours (up north). She said she really hoped that it was warmer here than
it was there. That it was snowing up there."
It was. When wasn't it?
"I spoke with my daughter Monday (April 7)," said Myra Spangenberg, who
later e-mailed a picture of friends in shorts snapped weeks ago on the lanai
outside her North Fort Myers, Fla., home. "She said you were expecting, I
don't know, 5 to 7 inches or something like that?" she said, with not nearly
enough empathy.
She said that with snow alerts like that drifting south, some snowbirds -
those whose rental leases are up now - "are just dreading going back."
"The dreaded snowflake," travel-agency manager Dahlstrand intoned in a grave
voice that quickly dissolved into a chuckle. Seriously, "there are people
who can't stand the thought of one," he said.
Let alone 143 inches of them, and counting, into the first week of April.
Newspapers and Web sites continue to spit out the graphic details to
winter's escape artists down South. Stories about cocooning and inch counts,
and about rock-salt sales hitting all-time highs this year.
Ooh, they'll pass.
"We love that part," said Sue Ann Pier about the oodles of nasty storms
they've missed. "That's the main reason we're here."
Winter in Lakeland and other parts of Florida was a tad cooler this year.
But on this brilliant April day, Sue Ann Pier said her husband was outside
painting, under a cloudless sky.
"We had a high of 88 here yesterday," she offered brightly.
The thermometer in Erie that day never struggled much past 35.
If you were ever going to winter in Florida, this was the year, Dahlstrand
said.
"It was everything combined" that made it so hard to take, he said. "The
bitter cold and the continued snow - even today," he said last week. "And
there was not really ever a break. ... I'm a huge winter fan, and I'm sick
of it."
Yet once they are safely down there, busy with rounds of golf, tennis
matches, meals with friends and ocean cruises, most find a moment here and
there to dash in out of the unforgiving endless-summer sun to check in on
Erie's weather.
And laugh?
"How did you know?" blurted out Jim Pier with mock innocence. Then he
laughed.
Lately, the Piers and others are keeping an even closer eye on the weather
up north. As much as they might miss the family, they're prepared to tinker
with their Florida departure date, if need be, for the jaunt home.
That goes for Spangenberg, too.
"I'll tell you," she said she told her daughter last week. "I'll be home
when I see five sunshiny symbols in a row" in Erie's forecast.
Sun? Wasn't that sun glinting off the pretty snowflakes in May 2002? The
flurry of midmonth flakes that made it the second snowiest May on record?
Note to the family: Look for Mom around, say, the first of July.
JOAN BENSON-CACCHIONE can be reached at 870-1737 or by e-mail.
Last changed: April 15. 2003 5:25AM