The Owners’ Story
-by Ian and Maté, hosts, Firefly Resort Cottages
“Who does that?” everybody asked. “Sells their house, gives up good jobs and just leaves without a next place to go?” They’d answer themselves, “Crazy people, that’s who!” Not impossible, there were lots of ways to go crazy in Seattle and we had sampled several of them over the years. This time it was different, we were truly losing it. We’d had enough. It was time to go.
It wasn’t always that way and for our 17 years in Seattle Maté had a blast for a while at the Starbuck’s mother ship but he decided that corporate cubicles just weren’t a good fit. He set out to do something totally different, became a carpenter and spent years as a general contractor restoring and remodeling exclusively pre-WWII homes. Ian, meanwhile, “found his tribe” as he attended graduate school at the University of Washington and got a Masters of Public Health; he was inspired by and working in the areas of rural community health and program evaluation.
We talked about having kids, but never did; instead, we spent their inheritance on the restoration of our house and then a vintage Airstream we named “The Breeze”. We loved that house, our home, and our friends, but grew weary of the long, gray winters. Perhaps, Maté had been asked one too many times to remove his shoes before being allowed inside somewhere and Ian had definitely been ordered to “check his white male privilege” for the last time. Maybe it was just the weather.
It was clear it was time to go, but we didn’t have a destination. “Not Seattle” is not a real place. We knew people who moved to and from because of a job, family, a parent, or a spouse. We needed a different approach if we were ever going to find our place. As crazy as it seems, we took the “Let’s just go, look around and we’ll know it when we see it” approach.
We cut the bonds that tied us to Seattle. In June 2017 we sold the house, quit our jobs and put most of our life in storage. We bought an enormous truck, packed up the dog, a giant bag of weed and what we could fit into 190 square feet, and set out in search of the perfect new home in the Breeze. We traveled through Washington and Oregon, skirted the wildfires ablaze in California by traveling down the east side of the Sierra Nevada into Nevada and across southern Arizona. We dipped up into northern New Mexico, looped Colorado and dropped back through New Mexico and into Texas. Always, we were looking. We really thought our new home was somewhere in the southwest and although we loved the desert vistas and the daytime warmth, the elevations and mountains were too cold and the plains too dry. We were wrong; we were cold, and so we headed south.
We arrived on the Gulf near Corpus Christi on Martin Luther King Junior’s birthday. We had a dream, that was for sure, but our dream was not looking good at that point. We hadn’t found anything that felt right and living on the road was not nearly as cheap or freeing as we had imagined. There was still a bucket list with “New Orleans” on it and old friends to visit in Clearwater so we knew which direction we were headed but were unsure about prospects as we had never imagined living on the Gulf. Only crazy people live down there, right?
Winter hit hard that month even on the Gulf and so we hunkered down and re-evaluated. We still believed we’d know it when we saw it, but we weren’t so sure we would ever see it. It’s a big country. You could spend a whole life of the road and never see it all. Along the journey, we told people we met what we were up to, and made it a point to ask about special places they knew about. We’d investigated positive leads, but upon seeing and experiencing them, none had been remotely appealing. We were having doubts.
The Airstream seemed smaller now. We refined the search process: continue looking at places we thought we’d like to live, if we found one, look for a house we wanted to live in. If we found a house, then we would know what income we needed to live and could see what job opportunities we could find. This process was what was supposed to guide us to a more perfect life. But it also kept looking a lot like the life we had just left behind: big mortgages, stressful jobs, slow commutes.
For the next four months, from Corpus Christi to the Florida Panhandle, always within spitting distance of the Gulf of Mexico, we worked the process. The first mention of Cedar Key was while we were in New Orleans from a couple that had traveled from southern Florida along the Gulf Coast. We came back to the RV park to find an envelope taped to the Breeze with note and a list of places along our route we might want to see, and blurb about each one. “Breakfast at Emsy’s (if you like basic)” at Eastpoint, FL. “Airstream food trucks and watercolors” at Grayton Beach State Park. Venice, FL was “odd, excellent weird.” Next to Cedar Key she’d written: “Everything!!” The note was unsigned with no contact information. In the morning, they were gone; we would not see them again even though, unknown to us, they had just changed our lives forever.
After Easter 2018, we left Mexico Beach for a three-night stay at Low Key Hideaway. Cedar Key moved us from the start. We had not seen anything like it anywhere on our travels and we knew, even though it seemed unlikely, that we really, really, really wanted to live here. This was one of the most beautiful places we had ever seen and couldn’t believe that someone or some company hadn’t come along and ruined it. We were stoked, we were desperate, we were in love. We began our little process again for the last time in Cedar Key. We decided to stick around a while. We explored and looked at houses and found one on Highway 24 but more importantly the listing mentioned a cottage property next door, Mermaid’s Landing. Things were looking up. Could it really be?
On its surface, this place had everything: collapsing foundations, rotten floors, broken tiles and windows, leaning walls, derelict gardens, sagging eaves, leaky rooves, peeling paint, unintelligible plumbing…it was perfect! It was perfect because we could fix all of that and we’d get to live here, too! What Cedar Key offered was everything that we hadn’t yet found, everything the journey had taught us to value: home.
Finding Cedar Key was about finding home. For us, home was our partnership––being on the ride of a lifetime together—not commuting to distant jobs and seeing each other for dinner and the weekend. Having our own business was the only way we’d be able to have that; when home was work and work was home we would have the balance that eluded us in the city. It also turned out to be people—kind and generous people who are bonded to and take care of one another even when they don’t agree on everything. It was water, both the working water that supports us and the water that, in exceptional beauty, gives life to CK. Home had trees; they stand for time when circumstances allow, and land that can’t support a tree might not support us. Finally, finding Cedar Key was about finding a special warmth: not only the warmth that comes with the Florida sunshine, but a warm spirit of openness and friendliness towards strangers and kin, locals and visitors alike that we found in Cedar Key.
We appreciate how rare this is, an appreciation born of our own trial and error. In finding Cedar Key, we are now ready to instill these same elements of our home into Firefly Resort Cottages: togetherness, being close with each other and the town; keeping focus on the waters around us for food and recreation; honoring the trees that provide shelter from the sun and remind us to preserve the past; and providing a warm vacation experience along the waters of the Gulf. We are so astonished we ever found Cedar Key, let alone these cottages, and invite you to be our guest, and come and experience it for yourself.
Come see us! Visit this link for reservations, or call 352-477-5070. (Please, be patient if you call and leave us a message: our business demands the office phone go unattended for periods throughout the day, but if you leave a message, we will call you back.)
Ian Maki and Maté Newell
Opening Day of Firefly Resort Cottages
October 19, 2018