By Robert Nelson - March 17, 2022
It all started for Dawn Fleming on the 405 freeway in L.A. in 2003. After years of living the SoCal lifestyle in Orange County, she and her husband Tom were in culture shock. They looked at each other and said, “This is our life? What are we doing here?” That conversation started them on a journey that took 13 years before finding the end of their rainbow in Isla Mujeres, Mexico.
Dawn Fleming, 60, graduated from the University of Minnesota, close by her hometown of Bloomington, a suburb of Minneapolis. She took a degree in anthropology and got married while in school. Following graduation, her first husband went on to medical school and then the couple moved to Irvine, California in 1989 where he was a resident at the University of California, Irvine.
The couple split not long after moving to California, so Fleming enrolled at Western State University, Fullerton to complete a law degree and get on with her life, establishing her own business called Themis, named for the goddess of justice. She married her second husband Tom, who is now 70, in 2003.
Destin, Florida was the couple’s original destination back in 2003, but things got complicated and life interfered with their plans to escape L.A. immediately. Although the housing market was crashing, they were able to purchase a 48-foot center cockpit ketch called the Santorini. Before long, they headed south to sail in the Baja Ha-Ha race from San Diego to Cabo San Lucas. But they did not stop there. They pushed on to Mexico’s Caribbean coast and Isla Mujeres, floating in turquoise water just 18-minutes by passenger ferry from Cancún, and a place Dawn Fleming had been visiting regularly since 1992.
“When we stopped at Isla Mujeres in 2010, it really felt like home,” Dawn Fleming told us. “But we were not yet ready to call Mexico home. We had shipped all of our belongs from California to Panama City on Florida’s panhandle. We lived there for two years, but it was still too cold for us. Punta Gorda, located on Florida’s southwest coast, seemed to be a good fit for us. But again, it wasn’t the end of the rainbow. We had been following the real estate market for more than a decade, so I did some research and found a need for three- and four-bedroom homes. There were a lot of condos and hotels, but not many villas.”
In 2016, they found a large home right on the water for US$475,000, but financing was expensive, topping 16 percent at the time. But with a little work, the owner was willing to self-finance at 4 percent, making the deal possible.
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