Home, Sweet Home: Joe and Heidi’s Excellent Adventure Comes to an End (with Plenty of Help from Penn Staters)

Joe and Heidi’s Excellent Wandering Adventure has finally come to an end.  We had our official closing Thursday on our new home in Bluffton, South Carolina. It was a beautiful sunny day, albeit a 90-degree day, but it was well worth the wait after moving from our Happy Valley home on June 30.

That’s 11 straight weeks of traveling as “America’s Guests” and staying with family and friends while most of our physical belongings sat in a storage unit in Bluffton. My last column was entitled “All’s Well That Ends Well” and it told the story of all the highs and lows of our “homeless” adventure.  We are indebted to so many for helping us to keep our sense of humor and sanity during what is said to be one of life’s most stressful activities: moving.

Cue the Blue Band and get the Nittany Lion because it’s time for a little Penn State love. The Penn State network was fully engaged and very instrumental in our decision to retire to The Lowcountry outside Hilton Head Island and in making it become reality. It started with Terry Pegula, who years ago invited us to stay at his beach property in Palmetto Dunes. We immediately fell in love with Hilton Head and discovered its charm, beauty and southern hospitality. It was also a favorite spot for Penn Staters as well as Yinzers evidenced by the number of bars and restaurants with Nittany Lion and Steelers, Penguin, and Pirates paraphernalia. 

One of my former Penn State Icer players, P.J. Amodeo, who lives in Savannah, Georgia, kept me in the loop about the exciting news of a new ice arena and a minor league hockey team coming to Savannah.  That turned out to be a huge factor in our final decision to make the move. Beach 30 minutes to the east, hockey 30 minutes to the west, and golf and tons of outdoor activities all around. 

Our realtor, from Weichert Real Estate, was Bob Dickson, a Pittsburgher and a Penn State alum who was our advisor, our eyes and ears during the construction and closing and, most importantly, has become a good friend. Penn Staters Dave and Deb Reese, Bob and Katie Jones and Brian and Nina Hand, have been friends for years but recently have really helped in our decision to move to the area and in helping with our transition here. 

Penn Staters Paula and Gene Schaefer, Deb and Andy Wllkosz, Marge Delozier, Matt Santangelo and Colonel Bloom have more recently been instrumental in assisting as well.  Chuck Swenson, former PSU men’s basketball assistant coach, even lives in our development. In fact, there is already a Big Ten Club, and those pesky Buckeyes already have their own club within Sun City. Well, you can bet that once I get settled in there will be a good chance there will be a formal Nittany Lion group represented!

So, it all went smoothly, right? Hold on, folks. Let’s just say we had a fumble, a false start, and we almost had a delay of the game call. You see, we had professional movers put our stuff in storage in Bluffton. But we still had a good number of items stored at friends Steve and Susan Sampsell’s in Stormstown and at Julie Bartolomea’s in Boalsburg. So, I had the bright idea of finishing the moving ourselves. We rented a 6’x12’ U-Haul trailer from Nick at Stoicheff’s on North Atherton. It was going to be $1,300 to rent it one way and only $29.95 a day if I returned it. Well, I had to be back in State College anyway on business so why not DIY? Chris and Eve Bahr bequeathed us their moving dolly. Harry Duckworth lent us his furniture blankets. I mean we got this, right?

The plan started off well. The drive down was uneventful, we flew my 6-foot-4, 210-pound CrossFit-competitor son Jonathon down for a couple hundred bucks, we hired a few local guys and we’d get’er done! 

Well, it turns out the first guys we thought we had couldn’t do it. Next, we investigated a local moving company, and they couldn’t do it the day we wanted to move in, and we would have had to rent their truck even though we already paid for the U-Haul trailer we had.

Enter the power of the PSU network. I put the word out to some of our new neighbors and boom! Andy and Deb Wllkocz and Marge DeLozier’s son-in-law Matt Santangelo, another PSU alum, answered the bell. Along with my son Jon (PSU class of 2016) we knocked it out in no time. A little sore, for sure, but Mother Nature smiled upon us, and we had two days of low humidity, no rain and temps in the low 70s. Finally, our luck had changed.

We are now settling into a routine which includes twice a day, five-minute golf cart rides from our house to the Sun City North Dog Park. Barkley, by the way, loves going to the park in our new electric golf cart! He sits next to me strapped into the front seat with a cool breeze blowing in his face. The new neighbors and dogs seem to love Barkley and he’s adjusting nicely. Once we got the kitchen table put back together, Barkley laid down underneath it across my feet, just like he always has.

We took Sunday afternoon off and went to Coco’s on the Beach on Hilton Head Island. There we ran into Penn State alums Rita Murphy and Curt and Maggie Harler.  The bottom line is that WE ARE…Everywhere!

No Battista story can ever be without a little drama. As if the past 10 weeks of living out of suitcases wasn’t enough, and you can’t make this up, along comes Hurricane Ian. That’s right, our stuff isn’t even all unpacked and already we have to deal with a potential hurricane? C’mon man! 

When I asked a group of locals at coffee Monday morning what they recommend we do to prepare for Ian they just chuckled at us. “Y’all must be from up north. Those weather people like to get everyone all riled up so they can sell more ads.”  Well, sorry I just can’t be that cavalier and will do the prudent thing and go over the hurricane prep list. We went to the local Walmart, and it appeared we weren’t the only ones stocking up, as the shelves were bare and the check-out lines long.

John is a Penn State grad I met at our dog park the first day. On Monday, as our dogs played in the park, I asked him if he does anything special when the hurricane warnings are first announced. He said he does the commonsense things like stocking up on bottled water, making sure flashlights work, having a few days of non-perishable food on hand. He said he boarded up his windows the first time, which took a long time and a lot of effort. Hasn’t done it since.

An old friend asked if I was afraid of the hurricane. “Why would you move from Central Pennsylvania where there are so few naturally occurring weather threats to go to a place where you are rolling the dice every hurricane season?” he asked.  

That’s a very fair question especially since we love the four seasons, especially my wife, Heidi. For me it was mostly about mental and physical well-being, my body having sustained many of the scars of a life spent playing football, baseball, softball, tennis and, of course, hockey. I simply hurt all over and I feel every ache and pain that much more in cold, damp weather. My doctor told me I needed the warm sunshine and to give up playing adult hockey. One was a tough sacrifice. The other music to my ears. 

So how did I respond to my friend who questioned my reason for heading south? I did one of those things my parents and almost every coach I ever played for always taught me not to do: I said something I might live to regret. I know, shocking, the “feather-ruffler” himself saying something that could come back to haunt him. In an overconfident and even cocky way, I tempted the fates by responding, “Statistically speaking, there is a rather small chance a hurricane will descend directly upon our area. We may get some nasty storms and a lot of rain and even sustained winds of over 75 miles per hour. Maybe, but not likely.”

I further tempted the fates by adding, “What I do know is there is a 100% chance that I will not shovel snow this year, walk my dog in sub-zero temperatures or wake up to cloudy, gray skies at least 50% of the time.”

Only time will tell if I jinxed my new town and we incur Ian’s wrath. Ironically, when this article gets published, I will be in State College to announce a very special event coming to Happy Valley. Yup, that Penn State Network exists everywhere!