🌼San Miguel de Allende💀

Three & a half weeks was not nearly long enough to take in the beauty & grandeur of this quaint yet bustling town. SMA was the perfect spot to get started on this adventure, a bit of comfort in the expat community with plenty of opportunities to learn how things work & gain the courage to use & improve our Spanish skills.

We arrived near the end of October 2022 because I specifically wanted to enjoy the Dia de los Muertos celebrations & although SMA is not the top place for the spectacle, it was everything I had hoped & imagined. It was a week long celebration where the city transformed into an even more colorful site, with its shop doorways adorned with iconic yellow marigolds, calaveras & catrinas 💀

I am sure Dia de los Muertos deserves an entire post & I may circle back to it one day but that is not today, so on we go…

SMA is an incredibly walkable town, so that is what we did, we walked, and we walked a lot. Our first Monday was my day to venture out solo & move things along as though this is where we lived. First stop, a bank to exchange our American $$$ into Pesos. A young man directed me down a few blocks (in Spanish) I decided to pause on a bench in the Jardin as not to look like a total tourist scanning my google maps. Per Samantha Brown’s advise, I struck up a conversation with two American looking folks, Oklahoma it turns out. Your man directed me to a currency exchange app & then on to the exchange bank, one block down on the left.  Dollars exchanged 19 to 1, the best we would do over the entirety of our MX adventures. 

Second stop, the INM, or Instituto Nacional de Migración. San Miguel is a relatively small city, so by the time I was to the bank, I was a quarter way to the immigration office, so I decided to continue, 2km mas o menos. Arriving at the immigration office is when the real fun began. I realized I didn’t have a mask, which apparently was still a thing. I scanned the .gov QR code, which translated itself into English & was still not clear. 🤣  A women came out & asked me what I needed, I said the form to get my residency card as l already had my temporary visa & an appointment for finalization (all this in my ridiculous Spanish) She invited me in to the office & took my passport. I was still trying to make sense of the translated website & asked her if she spoke English, but not before apologizing for my subpar Spanish 😬 she said no, then added, “no more English.” Long story longer, I got outta there with 2 appointments, one for me & one for Dave. Will that be it? Who knows? Information is not super forth coming here. Would it be better if I were more fluent in the language, ABSOLUTELY!!

I would later learn that showing up & asking for help & actually getting it, doesn’t generally happen. We would also begin to realize the temporary visas were probably not something we necessarily needed to do as it began to be more of a time & money sink than was necessary but as with any adventures there is much learning along the way. You may notice that becoming a theme here, rest assured there are going to be many more opportunities for flexibility & learning at every turn!

🇲🇽 Mexico Landing ✈️ *Afterthoughts, Mistakes & Unexpected Upheavals

🇲🇽 I went back & forth a dozen times trying to decide from where to continue… from the beginning? May? Our first destination, Pagosa Springs?  I even began to confuse myself, so after much “choice paralysis” I am just going to start where we are, or close to it… Our Mexican arrival 🇲🇽

We left ABQ, NM on Oct 22 for BJX, Guanajuato, MEX. I have to say, we felt pretty proud of ourselves, having packed all our necessities & then some into our allotted bags. Unfortunately, we may have been a bit too focused on the physical stuff to remember to check a few key items we failed to attend to. 🤦🏼‍♀️

We arrived at the airport & realized neither of us had TSA pre-check, which is part of our Global Entry. If you travel out of the US at least once a year, like we do, Global Entry is a game changer! $100 for 5 years & way less lines ✈️ GE gives additional international advantages over the $78 TSA pre-check only or the $50 Nexus 🇨🇦 & Sentri 🇲🇽 We had, in fact logged our numbers with our airline but failed to notice the error when we checked into our flight the day before. This would be the first of our ridiculous rookie mistakes. 🤷🏼‍♀️ Note to self, double check all our carrier sites for our correct & logged known traveler number! But better to have made the mistake on the front end where we only had to stand in line with the regular people through security versus on our way home when we will skip the very long passport reentry queue.

On we went, ABQ, DFW, BJX. Not one, but three opportunities to buy 🇲🇽 pesos & we didn’t. Why, because we are fools 😬 Thankfully, the first few places we encountered took credit cards, which allowed us to have dinner & buy coffee ☕️ for the morning 🌤️ Rookie mistake #2.  Couple this with rookie mistake #3 & you will begin to wonder how any of this works out for us 🙄 Any guesses??? We brought one debit card, for an ancillary bank account we have (& don’t generally use as an atm) that also expired a month after we got here, IDIOTS!

Dave & I like to consider ourselves to be lifelong learners. Sure we read books & watch documentaries, but more times than not, our biggest lessons come from our mistakes. We are both really good at over complicating the simple & completely overlooking the potentially more important. I’ll get back to that when I write about why & how we ended up as temporary Mexicans 🪅

Needless to say, we made it…

Our first stop was San Miguel de  Allende, a town made popular by American GIs in the 50’s & 60’s who came here for post service education on the GI bill. San Miguel has one of the largest ExPat communities in Mexico. San Miguel is where we would spend the next month settling into this life, enjoying its spectacular beauty & experiencing some unforeseen upheavals.

We have learned along the way that there are a few amenities we will not forego… Air conditioning, swimming pool & washer/dryer, so far in that order 😆 Good internet is always a top priority since Dave is still working his remote 9-5 with Formstack. 

You might be asking, what do I do during all this time? I’m still keeping up on our finances, as this adventure does have a budget 😉 This adventure also has a plan, its loose most days but has about half a dozen firm destinations over our time here. 

Our initial plan was to be in SMA a few weeks before the FIG Balloon rally in León then head on to Merída in the Yucatán for Thanksgiving through Christmas with an eventual longterm landing along the east coast, Playa del Carmen, Akumal & Tulum 🏝 And that all sounded really good until we figured out what was about to happen around our visa & temporary residency process… best laid plans meets bureaucracy.


Not For the Faint of Heart 💜

I guess I feel like I have never really had a home. Home is specific people, home is freedom, home is courage & adventure, home is a place inside myself. Others along the way ask us where we are from… I am never quite sure how answer that question. Sometimes I say, “most recently, Colorado” other times “a little bit of everywhere.” Our love of travel & experiences & adventure are a cornerstone of our marriage ✈️ So it was not a hard decision to make another move. When we settled in COS in 2006 from Ireland (that’s another story) it was because we wanted our kids to have some stability & the chance to finish their school years in one place. I never believed this was our forever home & likely don’t believe such a place exists this side of heaven ⛅️ As high school graduations neared, my heart yearned to go & deep in my spirit I felt change was on the horizon. It would not be long before job changes & job losses & client cancellations & business closures & Covid would propel us forward into a completely new way of thinking & living 💭 Could we make a life “on the road?” Could we live with less? Could Dave continue to work? Could I find something to do with my time, since I would not be “working”? Could we be uncomfortable at times & could that be okay? Mostly, yes 😬

Many questioned our sanity as we had only recently, in 2018 done a complete kitchen remodel & even feeling strongly about our upcoming listing, remodeled & rehabbed all the bathrooms. I guess, I never truly believed Lange Ter. was mine but always wanted to leave it better than with what we started 🏠

Now, I was my own client. What would I have said to a client who wanted to have a garage sale, because, “I could get some $$$ for all this crap!” Or questioning myself, “how many toiletries & office supplies DOES one person need?” 🤦‍♀️ I will wax poetically later about how & why I became a professional organizer, yes it is rooted in hoarding, perfectionism & anxiety of lack. Thankfully, my desire for freedom & change was able to convince my other self that just letting go, opened my whole self to receiving what was to come.

With the house purged & stored & listed & sold, it was time to load the truck & trailer & see what lie ahead. Good God we still had a ton of stuff!!! Enough to fill the short bed of the truck, its back seat & any empty space in the 5×8 trailer that also housed the hot air balloon. It would literally take us the next six months & eleven transitions to get it down to two checked bags, two carry on suitcase & two personal items 🎒 to leave the country!

We have been “on the road” for almost 8 months now, two+ months of that in & around Mexico. Guess what, we still have too much stuff! Or I should say, things made it with us that we have not used or worn, not much but some. 🧳 There are other days we say, “gosh I wish I would have brought that, insert item here.” There has definitely been a learning curve & a need for greater flexibility & we have no regrets 😉