It all has to begin somewhere!
I will be the first one to admit that I never saw myself as a blogger but I’ve had people ask me about recording some of my story and lessons learned. So I thought I’d give it a try and see if anyone is interested in following me/us. Here goes nothing:
It all began about 2 years ago when Steve started receiving “postcards” from International Living talking about popular expat (definition: those who leave their country of origin and live in a foreign country) destinations. They touted that a couple could move to most of these places and live for less than $2000/month. We started dreaming about what it would be like to retire early and live in one of these countries. I dreamed about what it would be like to be able to speak Spanish more often and regain some of my lost skills/vocabulary. So, our next step was to become members of International Living and attend some of their conferences to become more familiar with how to go about this and what countries would appeal to us the most. We narrowed our search down to Ecuador and Mexico. We then decided that Mexico would be best for our first stop since it was close to the U.S. and process to get a Visa was fairly simple. My ultimate dream is to live in Spain, but we decided that that will need to be later on down the road. Last summer we spend 3 weeks in Queretaro, Mexico because it was the city that most appealed to us. We wanted to see if it would be a place we could call home. We really liked it. The people are friendly, we felt safe and we found a wonderful congregation (Spanish-speaking) that we want to worship with. We made plans to work 1 more year and then move in the fall of 2019. Then God threw us a curve ball. Steve was offered a buy out at Bell in November and if he took it, his last day would be Dec. 21. We prayed a lot about it and felt God was telling us to jump! So, he took the buyout and we put the house up for sale. Let me start by saying that God has orchestrated this whole “detour” so clearly that even an unbeliever would start to have doubts! Our house sold in 5 days. We had 2 people come to view it and the 2nd made a full price offer. I had decided to work another 6 weeks to give the school district more time to find my replacement and to buy us more time to get things worked out. Another thing that has God written all over it was that the closing date the buyers asked for was February 15, the exact date I had planned to put as my resignation date. We bounced between 2 plans. Option #1: Steve gets a truck driving job and bring in a decent income and we move to that location and live in our RV. Option #2: We find a Workamping jobs (Definition: working at a location in exchange for an RV site and some other perks.) Steve did a lot of truck driving searches and had several offers, but I never felt good about any of them. All of them took him on the road 5 days a week. I wasn’t sure I wanted to start full-time RVing while he has gone 5 days a week. So, I started looking at Workamping positions. I made up a “couples resume” which isn’t like any resume I’ve ever written and applied for 7 RV parks that interested us. We ended up getting offers at most of them (which really surprised me that so many were willing to give us newbies a chance.) But after more praying, we decided to take a position in Overgaard, AZ. It looks pretty up there…big pine trees and nice, summer temperatures. We are supposed to work 2 days a week, 16 hours each. (Sounds rough! HA!) We were happy with the arrangement and are hoping to make a little outside income that is mostly online, so we can transfer that income to when we move to Mexico. Oh yah! We still plan to move there…we are just going to do this for a while because it sounded like fun. We’ll do it until it’s not anymore and then we’ll pack up and leave the U.S.