We Are Buying a House in Puerto Rico!

Part 1: Why!

Last week we made an offer on a house in Cabo Rojo. Here’s the story of why, after 3 ½ years of a traveling retirement, we are (sort of) settling down.

I prefer to call it anchoring. The traveling will continue.

When we drove our Tacoma out of Colorado and embarked on our adventure in fall 2018, the world was in a different place. We were all healthy, traveling was safe, and we envisioned at least a decade of footloose exploration of the globe, until we got tired of traveling or couldn’t physically do it anymore. Our son Gavin took a gap year from high school before starting college, and we all took off on the road trip of life!

Leaving Colorado, Sept. 2018

We started in Tlaquepaque, Mexico, where we took an immersive Spanish class.

Then Guanajuato. Mexico City. A visit to Puerto Vallarta. Acapulco.

We experienced butterflies, beaches, tacos, mercados, museums, Mayan ruins, mountains, canyons, cities, villages. It was fascinating! Invigorating!

With Gavin starting at Champlain College in Burlington, VT, in August 2019, we headed to our lake house in Vermont for the summer. We hadn’t been able to enjoy this home while living in Colorado, and had forgotten how lovely it was to float on our lake in a kayak, hike in the Green Mountains, ride 30 miles on challenging country roads. We decided we would travel nine months of the year and return to Vermont every summer.

The plan was set.

Then life intervened. The day we dropped Gavin off at college, Bob’s mom called to say she had been diagnosed with terminal colon cancer. When she went into hospice care, we moved into her condo and cared for her through the end of her life. It was a gift.

After she passed, we flew down to Mexico City to resume our traveling life.

Five weeks into our three-month stay, Covid arrived, and everything changed. When the world locked down in March 2020, the whole family headed to Grandma’s condo. On his way there from college, Gavin caught the coronavirus. He was sick for a month, quarantined in his bedroom, and never really recovered. It turned into long-haul Covid.

Gavin in bed, thermometer in mouth

Two years later, Gavin has been diagnosed with a chronic illness called POTS, similar to chronic fatigue, and forges a daily battle to improve while slowly finishing college. This struggle will last into his adulthood. We no longer want to go off and live in Asia or Africa for months and months at a time. We want to be a much shorter plane ride away, if needed.

The constant evolution of Covid makes travel complicated and not as safe as it was when we started.

And now the war in Europe threatens the stability of the whole planet.

In the midst of all this disruption, I find I crave stability. An anchor.

We have also discovered that a life of just travel and exploration is not a full life. Part of the reason we maintain this blog and YouTube channel is to give us purpose, and a connection with those we love and the world. But we also need in-person connection. Friends. Volunteer work. Community. We have started making these in Vermont, and we cherish our friends there.

Up Next … Why Cabo Rojo?

We are Back in the States!

We are back in the United States for a month and have settled into a beautiful apartment in the Penn Quarter of Washington, DC.

Saying Adios to Puerto Rico

Our two months in Puerto Rico were glorious and it was difficult to leave, so we of course spent some final moments enjoying the beach in front of our apartment in San Juan.

We’re going to miss this view

Then we headed sadly to the airport, donning long pants and shoes for the first time in two months. Even Putzie came out to say goodbye!

Bye, Putzie!

This was the sight out the window as our southwest jet flew out of San Juan International Airport bound for Manchester, NH, where our truck was parked.

How New England Greeted Us

After leaving a balmy 84 degrees, we stepped out of the airport to a frigid 29 degrees at the airport. We also discovered there was a Winter Storm Warning for much of the next day, our primary travel day through New England. With the sandals barely off, we were strategizing an early wake-up (after getting to bed after 2 AM) so we could cover as much ground the next day as possible before the predicted 8-10 inches swept in.

Still, this was what we encountered on the ground the next day, after we drove across Vermont to Burlington, picked up our son Gavin and his cat Ellie, and headed south to Saratoga Springs, NY.

It was a knuckle-clenching trip, especially one spot on a back road in upstate New York where our truck slip all over the road. Bb managed to right it with no harm done, but it was a tense journey from then on out, and reminded Bob why he likes to live in warm climates in the winter!

We spent the night in the best La Quinta ever, in Clifton Park, NY, where Ellie and Kaylee negotiated a reunion between growls and hisses.

It was great to be with Gavin again!

On to DC

On Sunday, we rose earlyish and continued the trek south to DC, finally moving into the Lansburgh at 425 8th Street NW at around 4 PM.

Our condo is beautiful, and the location is superb — just a couple of blocks from the National Mall, and a block from the downtown Christmas market. It even comes with a bar and a liquor cabinet for us to fill!

We are excited to begin exploring the Nation’s Capital and spending time with family and friends!

Drive to Mexico 2020

Our second time driving across the Mexican border was a bit different from the first, even though we used the same crossing – Colombia Solidarity Bridge in Laredo, Texas.

Getting Us Into Mexico

The first time we crossed, in January 2019, we had Mexican Visas, the first step in attaining Temporary Residency in Mexico, because we expected to stay long-term. This time, our Temporary Residencies had accidentally expired because of the extra time we spent in the States taking care of my sick mother, and we knew we are going to stay less than three months, so we entered with Tourist Visas.

The difference was that this time, we each had to pay a Tourist Visa fee at a cost of $575 MXN, about $39 US. (Note that this fee is included in your airline ticket fee when you fly into Mexico). This entailed the initial stop at Immigration office, a stop to pay at the Banjercito window, and then another stop at Immigration to finalize our paperwork.

Getting our Truck Into Mexico

Next, we had to get the Temporary Import Permit for our car. This cost $400 USD, which is supposed to be reimbursed when you leave Mexico, plus a processing fee of approximately $51 USD. I wasn’t as prepared this time as I was previously and I had left copies of my driver’s license and passport buried in a folder in the back of the truck, so we chose to stand in the copy line at the border facility and get those copied.

Registering the truck

Next, we had to drive through Customs. It seemed as if every car was chosen for inspection, and ours was no exception.

Inspecting the Cats

This time was that they asked for documentation for the cats. We were traveling with only two because Ellie, the third, was now living at Champlain College in Vermont with Gavin, our youngest. Effective January 1, 2020, you no longer need a Certified Health Certificate to bring a cat into Mexico, but they can physically inspect the cats for open sores, health problems, etc., and you need to prove they have rabies vaccines. The Inspector made us pull out the paperwork, which unfortunately was stored in the far reaches of the truck, entailed a near-total unpacking. He very thoroughly reviewed the paperwork.

Noxy and Kaylee patiently waited during the truck inspection

X-Raying the Truck

Next, Lisa and the cats had to get out of the truck while I, once again, drove it through the x-ray machine. Once they reviewed the x-rays, we were free to go.

The truck x-ray machine
Our truck is inside this x-ray machine

In the end, it took us about 1.5 hours at Mexican Immigration and Customs. Fortunately, there weren’t lines (which is why we like Colombia), or this could have been much longer.

Welcome to Mexico!

And then we were in Mexico! We didn’t take time to celebrate, but pressed forward to get to our first night’s lodging before dark.

Lisa’s favorite sign

We drove about 6 hours to Matehuala, where we had a reservation at the same cat-friendly motel we stayed at last time, Las Palmas Midway Inn in Matehuala.

Our new Garmin GPS seemed to under-estimate our travel time, by about an hour both days. We didn’t run into traffic either day, so that wasn’t the issue. Maybe it was the fact that many of the Mexican roads we drove on incessantly changed speed limits, going anywhere from 110 kph to 60 kph and back. It may be difficult for the GPS to deal with that along with the fact that there may be few people driving those routes and providing route time feedback. It could also be that we drive the speed limit while many Mexican drivers don’t necessarily do that. I don’t really know how the GPS time estimation works, so this is all just a guess.

We love our new Garmin GPS

Another thing that may impact the time estimation is the number of toll booths. Overall, we passed through 10 of these booths at a total cost of $924 MXN, or about $50 USD.

Stopped by the Mexican Cops (the Federales)

Finally, the last thing that was different on this trip was we were stopped by the Federal Police on two occasions. The first of these seemed to be more friendly. The second one was at an organized Federal Police checkpoint. Here they pulled over several people and performed inspections. They asked me 3 times if I had weapons or drugs (armas, pistolas, drogas) and then had me open the back of the truck and open selected suitcases, even going to the point of asking me where my shoes were in one of them, which I had to subsequently dig out. They also frisked me. Asking me to empty my pockets, patting me down and having me lift up my pant legs. So, that was a different experience than last time as we weren’t selected for the inspections as we drove through several of those checkpoints before.

Nonetheless, we arrived in Mexico City with enough time to unload, park the car and find an extremely nice restaurant to have a couple of beers, dinner and watch the Super Bowl (in Spanish).

New Orleans, Part 1: Jazz and Jambalaya

We just spent a couple of nights in New Orleans to break up the road trip from Pennsylvania to Mexico City. We rented a lovely, pet-friendly cottage through AirBnB that had a kitchen, living room and two bedrooms, just a short Uber ride from the action.  It was pristine, affordable and super comfortable.

After working out and showering, we spent our first NOLA night on Bourbon Street, a place we barely got to explore last year when we came through because it was just too loud for Gavin. But this time, with Gavin off at college, we headed down there again. Mardi Gras is still a month away, so it wasn’t high season yet, and we headed out early to avoid crushing crowds and deafening noise.

Bourbon Street is the heart of the touristy French Quarter, and we were planning to go to historic Preservation Hall to see classic New Orleans jazz. For $20 seats on the floor, we would need to stand in line outside to get day-of-show tickets. After a day spent driving, we weren’t in the mood.

Bourbon Street

So we instead opted to get a more local experience recommended by our Uber driver, Joe. First we shared a mouthwatering dinner of blackened redfish and jambalaya at an oyster bar on Bourbon called Le Bayou. Jambalaya is a kind of dirty rice with spicy tomato sauce and andouille sausage. We also enjoyed hurricanes, a classic New Orleans drink with rum and fruity juices. Our waiter kept calling us “y’all,” so we couldn’t forget we were truly in the south. After filling our stomachs, we strolled along Bourbon, taking in the crowd scene, and even saw a school band marching up the road, followed by a small parade of what I assume was a krewe, a social organization that helps put on a parade or ball during the carnival season, which runs January and February.  

Bourbon Street is amazingly loud, even in the off-season, and the road is closed to traffic so people can just wander at their leisure. Musicians with saxophones, guitars or even just spoons and plastic buckets, entertain for tips on street corners. The shops are filled with colorful art, with candy skulls, masks, voodoo paraphernalia, and jazz accouterments.

We walked about a mile to Frenchmen’s Street, a locals’ favorite area. Frenchmen’s is lined on both sides with lively bars and restaurants. As you wander along the sidewalk, you can listen to the music blasting out the open doors and choose your poison. Most have no cover and a local clientele. We chose Marigny Brasserie, and enjoyed an hour of music by a sweet jazz duo. A drunken regular celebrating her 71st birthday alone plopped down next to me at the bar and I was friendly to her. That turned out to be a mistake as she subsequently kept hitting me to get my attention, then ranting in a slurred voice about the injustices of her life and why it was horrible that the bar was showing The Waterboy and Captain Phillips on the big screen when people should be getting to know each other instead. Since she sitting on a stool between me and the band, it was impossible for me to watch the band. I guess if you want to be where the locals are, sometimes you have to put up with a local!

But we ducked out and wandered, encountering an Art Market where local artisans sold jewelry, paintings, even hand-made three-string guitars.

The band at Bamboulia’s

On the second evening, we ate at Bamboulina’s, a cozy bar with exposed brick walls, and enjoyed incredible pulled pork and a wonderful blues band. If I lived in NOLA, I think I would go to Frenchmen’s every weekend and try a different bar each time! Our last Uber driver encouraged us to try Magazine Street in Uptown New Orleans next time, so watch for that blog in the spring when we pass through again on our way back north!

Up next … The National World War II Museum

On the Road Again!

After 7 ½ months back in the States, we are back on the road again – this time, bound for Mexico City!

We left Bob’s mother Jane’s house in Mechanicsburg around 8 this morning, with a considerably lighter load than the last trip to Mexico: no Gavin, no Gavin’s luggage, no Ellie the adventure cat, and no bari sax. They have all migrated to Burlington, VT, where Gavin is in their freshman year studying filmmaking. We were also able to leave a few things at Bob’s mother’s house. She passed away three weeks ago, and we will be returning in the summer to fix up the condo and sell it.

Bob in the truck with the cats, ready to go

But till then, we are getting on with our life! And that means driving south.  First stop, Athens, Tennessee, tonight! We are staying at a clean, cheap Motel 8 that accepts cats with no fee and has a number of dining options within walking distance, plus about eight cheap gas stations.

Tomorrow we will hit the road again by 7:30 or 8 AM and drive to New Orleans, where we’ll spend two nights. Then, after another day driving, we’ll spend two nights in San Antonio to break up the 40-hour trip.

The newest addition to our dashboard menagerie, an African wild dog that Aryk gave Bob for Christmas. (He needs a name)

If all goes according to plan, we’ll cross the Mexican border at Laredo, TX, spend a night at the Midway Inn in Matehuala, México, and arrive in Mexico City on Feb. 2, hopefully in plenty of time to find a bar with the Super Bowl on TV. Hasta luego!

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