One way to cut time from your trip south
If you plan to take advantage of one of those low price golf community discovery visits I've written about, but you don't look forward to driving round trip, check out AutoDriveaway.com. The firm arranges for personal cars to be relocated from one city in America to another and finds people to drive them, without any rental charges (in some cases, the driver pays for a few tanks of gas). The drivers, who apply to AutoDriveaway and must meet some basic criteria, can go online to see what locations are available (they change day to day). Currently, for example, a 2008 Ford Explorer in Atlanta is available to be driven to Malden, MA, just north of Boston. In this case, the owner pays for all gas.
The Mexican retirement cartel
American tourists in Mexico are being targeted -- no, not by drug cartels or corrupt Mexican police or smugglers looking for mules. They are instead in the sights of real estate developers, according to a recent story in the Dallas Morning News.
Mexico is a beautiful country with an impressive topography, especially along the slim Baja California, surrounded by water, the Pacific on one side and the Sea of Cortez on the other. Many Americans, some of my friends included, have beautiful homes in golf communities like Cabo San Lucas and other American friendly towns up and down the coast. Jack Nicklaus and his fellow leading designers have used the local terrain as landscapes for their seaside courses. Late last year, Tiger Woods announced he would design his third course on a peninsula near Ensenada, a Mexican resort town 65 miles south of San Diego.
Call me an American chauvinist, but with all the great golf communities here in the U.S., at deeply discounted prices from just a few years ago, I wonder about the attraction of Mexico, with its drug cartel murders and odd ownership rights (you own your home for only 50 years if it lies within 30 miles of a coastline). If you really want to purchase property on a Tiger Woods golf course, what's wrong with his layout at The Cliffs Communities, not far from Asheville, which is slated to be ready in 2010 or early 2011.
The Dallas Morning news article is available on many newspapers' web sites. I've chosen the Cleveland Plain Dealer (click here); it includes a map of Mexico that indicates the numbers of drug cartel murders by region.
