Part 4 of a 6-part series

Their Monday night ballroom dancing lesson in full swing, Rick and Nancy Page lost the serious expressions that come in the first awkward moments of learning a new step.

“Quick, quick, sloooow. Quick, quick, sloooow” the instructor prompted the 20 or so retired couples shuffling around the dance floor inside the community center at Forest Lake Estates, one of about 150 senior communities in the palm tree-lined city of Zephyrhills 35 miles northeast of Tampa. On this late January night, temperatures outside still hovered in the 50s after a high of 70 degrees, a “cold snap,” according to several of the colder-blooded locals who donned sweatshirts and long pants on a day that would have had Mainers flocking to the beach.

Inside the community center, the dance instructor – who calls all the men “Buckaroo” and all the women “Sweet thing” – reviewed the rumba for the Pages and their classmates beneath giant cardboard snowflakes hanging over the dance floor – a stark contrast to the colorful pelican motif on the center’s light blue walls.

This is the third year the Pages, both retired Piscataquis County natives, have taken the class, which marks the end of the couple’s typically busy day.

“Down here you stay young,” said Nancy Page, 60, formerly an Old Town guidance counselor, before beginning her day with an aerobics class at the local YMCA. There she and Hampden native Joan Atwood, 61, stepped and lunged with about 30 other older ladies to K.C. and the Sunshine Band’s disco hit “That’s the Way (I Like It).”

The rumba and step aerobics aren’t the only new routines the Mainers have learned since moving to the Tampa area, the second-most popular out-of-state destination behind Boston for those leaving northern Maine. That information is based on a Bangor Daily News analysis of Internal Revenue Service data tracking county-to-county moves between 1995 and 2000.

The four counties that make up the Tampa metropolitan statistical area drew 476 people from Maine’s northern eight counties in the late ’90s. During that same period, less than half that number moved from the Tampa area to northern Maine.

Historical trends suggest many Mainers heading to the Tampa area, where one-third of the population is over 55, are retired and seeking respite from the snow and ice of their home state.

For Atwood, a retired office manager, it was eight days without power and one heart attack after the devastating 1998 ice storm that turned her attention to warmer climes.

“I used to say all the time that people who went to Florida were wimps,” she said during lunch at the Maine-ly New England Restaurant, a tiny eatery in Zephyrhills where framed pictures of rocky coasts and weathered lighthouses foreign to Florida adorn the rustic walls. “I don’t think that any more.”

Home away from home

The menu at Maine-ly New England, which includes such northern staples as clam chowder and bread pudding, isn’t the only thing in Zephyrhills specifically geared toward the wintering Down Easters.

Billboards boasting the best geriatric care line nearby Interstate 75 and area restaurants clamor to offer the best early bird specials.

“If you haven’t guessed, a lot of our conversations are about what we’ve eaten, where we’ve eaten, and when and where we’re going to eat,” quipped John Atwood, a 63-year-old retired Danforth social studies teacher and Joan’s husband.

After their wedding, the Atwoods sold their respective houses in Brewer and Hampden and made their three-bedroom, two-bath double-wide trailer on a 50-foot-by-80-foot lot in Timberlake Estates their year-round residence.

Timberlake Estates is a gated community with 450 tidy manufactured homes – most of which sell for between $40,000 and $50,000 – a community center, two heated pools, a whirlpool, shuffleboard courts, a fleet of golf carts and a host of rules, including one prohibiting dogs that weigh more than 20 pounds.

But it’s Florida’s rules governing taxes and retirement benefits that helped convince both the Atwoods and the Pages to make the Sunshine State their official residence.

Although Maine might be the fourth oldest state in the nation, with 24 percent of its population over 55 years old, Florida is the retirement king, with 27 percent of its population over 55.

Florida is one of just nine states that does not levy a broad-based personal income tax. And Florida’s property tax and automobile excise tax rates are less than in Maine, generally considered one of the highest taxed states in the nation, according to most measures.

“That was definitely a consideration for us,” said Rick Page, who retired from his job as a guidance counselor with the Brewer School Department in 1999.

Maine officials acknowledge that the state’s high tax burden has dissuaded many middle-income retirees such as the Pages from staying home.

At the same time, however, Maine’s low crime rate and expansive coastline has attracted its share of more affluent retirees, according to a recent examination of income tax records conducted by state officials.

“The guy from Pennsylvania who retired on Social Security isn’t moving here,” said Galen Rose, an analyst with the Maine State Planning Office, which has led the charge to attract more retiring baby boomers – and their assets – to the state. “In general, they’re people who have vacationed here many times, and they tend to be people of some means.”

Jobs and alligators

Sandy Michaud, a 36-year-old mother of three, isn’t considering retirement any time soon.

The Eagle Lake native and licensed practical nurse left northern Maine in 1997 amid a statewide push to phase out her level of certification in favor of registered nurses.

Michaud and her partner, 28-year-old Steven Plourde, also of Eagle Lake, landed just outside of Tampa in New Port Richey, a city of 16,000 people on Florida’s Gulf Coast.

It’s an area brimming with strip malls and, more importantly for the Maine couple, employment opportunities.

“I was here three days and I had a job,” Michaud said during an interview in the couple’s modest Mockingbird Lane home, which they rent from her father, who also lives in the area.

Now a case manager in one of the area’s many physical rehabilitation facilities, Michaud earns about $42,000 a year, a far cry from the $23,000 she earned as an LPN in Aroostook County, she said.

The differences between New Port Richey and Aroostook County don’t end with the salaries, said Michaud, who praised her new home for the convenience it offered compared to her hometown.

“I once had to drive 18 miles to use an ATM [when the local one was out of order],” Michaud said of a recent trip to Eagle Lake to visit family. “Down here, you don’t have to go far for much.”

Like Michaud, Plourde didn’t have to go far to land his job as a maintenance technician at the nearby Carleton Arms apartment complex, where his days consist of air conditioning and refrigeration repairs – and the occasional wrestling match with a trespassing alligator.

“I just cornered it and got on its back. Someone else grabbed its mouth,” Plourde said of his encounter with the 4-foot-long reptile.

He added nonchalantly that he once was asked to catch a water moccasin – the skin of which he tossed on the kitchen table during a recent interview.

But the alligators and poisonous snakes bother Plourde far less than the fact that Florida simply isn’t Maine, where his younger sister lives in Bradley with her husband and 16-month-old son – Plourde’s only nephew.

The distance between the siblings had Plourde seriously considering a move north in the near future to start his own refrigeration repair business.

“I think in Bangor, we could make it,” he said.

Family ties

While family eventually may lead Plourde and Michaud back to Maine, family keeps Brewer native Scott Thompson, 32, squarely on Florida’s Gulf Coast.

It’s been 13 years since Thompson moved to the Tampa area with a friend after both decided over a beer that their construction and maintenance jobs in Maine were going nowhere.

“We found ourselves wanting,” Thompson said while taking a break from rolling coral-colored paint onto the walls of his new St. Petersburg restaurant, the second he has owned in the past year. “We didn’t know what we wanted, but we were wanting.”

Among the things they wanted were the sandy beaches of Florida’s Gulf Coast, where the sunshine and the nightlife were more than enough to keep the young friends there.

On a recent day in January, however, Thompson – busy at work trying to open his small restaurant – was nowhere to be found as shoeless vacationers strolled down nearby St. Pete Beach, a vast, white stretch of sand lined with hotels, including the historic Don CeSar Beach Resort and Spa, a distinctive flamingo-pink, Mediterranean castle.

“Here’s a good place to be if you’re single or retired, but to work and raise a family here …” Thompson trailed off. “Would I want to spend the next 30 years here? Absolutely not.”

Now married, however, Thompson and his wife, a native to the area, have settled in Oldsmar, a city of about 12,000 people on the tip of Old Tampa Bay, where the couple is raising a 4-year-old boy and expecting a baby girl in April.

With his wife’s deep roots in the area and her parents still close by, Thompson said he didn’t foresee moving back to Maine anytime soon.

“I’m stuck,” he said.

But he acknowledged that being “stuck” in Tampa hasn’t been all bad, especially when the rabid sports fan is minutes – instead of hours – away from professional football, hockey and Major League Baseball.

Just one day after the hometown Tampa Bay Buccaneers won the Super Bowl, however, Thompson – whose email address “patsfan,” betrays his allegiance – passed on attending the victory festivities.

“Just because I live here, doesn’t mean I’m going to root for them,” he said. “Everything in my life revolves around the Red Sox or the Patriots.”

Best of both worlds

Keeping ties to home has been important for Rick and Nancy Page as well.

The couple still has a house on Sebec Lake near their hometown of Dover-Foxcroft, where they spend four months – “the nice ones” – of the year.

But with a daughter who was recruited from the University of New Hampshire to help manage a large Tampa hotel, and two young grandchildren nearby, the Pages nostalgia for home has waned.

“I love Maine, but I love it here too, and I don’t have to give up either end,” said a smiling Rick Page while sitting on the Atwood’s screened-in porch on a perfect 70-degree January day. “In some ways there are so many people from up there down here, it’s almost like we never left.”

Indeed, in Zephyrhills, friends from the north become visitors, visitors become snowbirds and snowbirds become homeowners.

Maine has traditionally had a strong presence in Zephyrhills, where 600 past and present residents attended Maine Day last year, an annual gathering held on the last Saturday in February.

While Maine officials have stepped up efforts to keep the likes of the Atwoods and the Pages at home, they concede that they can’t compete with the climate in the aptly named Sunshine State. Maine does see a slight net gain of just 340 retirement age people coming to the state annually, but it pales in comparison to Florida, which gains about 28,000 new retirees every year.

If tradition holds true, a number of northern Mainers – including some of the Atwood’s friends from home – will be among them.

“We’re just saving a spot for them,” Joan Atwood said.

Tomorrow: Historic ties