Making a little headway

Now we have a contract on a house, so we are making progress. Houses in Puerto Vallarta are usually sold fully furnished. That's nice, but it means we have to get rid of almost everything we own.

Environment

This is the map: http://www.puertovallarta.net/map/index.php. I guess you have to copy and paste this...sorry. But it's an interactive map, and I like it.

I'm thinking about the footprint I leave on the environment. I don't feel too guilty about life in Arlington. Our house isn't especially big, and our utilities are pretty low. But I need a lot of heat in the winter to be comfortable, even when I wear lots of layers. And I drive my car almost every day. We have two cars, and they are both in daily use.

If (when) we live in P.V. there will be a lot of changes. The area we like, on the southern end of the city (called the Romantic Zone) :) Is between the beginning of the Sierra Madre Mountains and the Pacific Ocean. It is only about 8 blocks deep in that section. That means we will be able to walk for almost everything: shopping, yoga, beach, restaurants...is there anything else?

It is tropical. The temperature is mostly the same...60's at night, 80-90 in the day. I have read that electricity is very expensive, over a very modest limit. Seems like a good idea to keep the citizenry from wasting power on too much A/C.

The worst part is toilet paper. You don't flush it. Just put it in the wastebasket. This has always been the case when we visited in the Cancun area, but we were sure hoping it would be different in P.V. Finally, instead of just hoping, I checked it out. bummer. (Later note: our house has a septic tank, and we can flush toilet paper. Whew!)

Cooking should be a change. Imagine fresh fruit and vegetables all year long, They say you can get just-caught fish at the dock. I'll want to learn Mexican cooking. I like Mexican food, but I've never tried to cook anything more creative than tacos with an El Paso mix. I hope to keep my pre-packaged food use to an absolute minimum.

Environmentally, I think it's a good move.

How would we live?

When we first thought about moving to P.V. I assumed we would live in a condo. A nice modern place, with Mexican tile in the kitchen and a view of the ocean. Then a friend of mine, who just returned to Italy, posted some pictures of his place on facebook.


This place is gorgeous! So I've changed my perspective. Now I hope, eventually, we can find a nice charming place.....still near the ocean.

I've found a nice real estate agent in P.V. who sent me some pictures of his own home, that he sold last year.
These are images to dream by.

The internet is so wonderful for a quest like this. There is a webcam that I check out just about every day. I've played around with google maps and google earth, to get great views of the city. Sometimes I check out real estate listings and look at the pictures and locations.

We've been doing lots of reading. The most interesting book is "On Mexican Time", which isn't about Puerto Vallarta, (it is about San Miguel Allende) but it's an extremely well written book about an American couple who move to Mexico.

In June we will go to P.V. for 9 days and see what it is really like. They say the weather ranges from about 80-95, year around. It doesn't sound like summer is much worse there than it is in the DC area, but we'll find out.

If that works out, we will go for a month in January or February. That means I will have to tell my boss that I will be retiring. Ted already told the school that he will be gone for a month, with the expectation that he won't be teaching much longer.

The idea of retiring to Puerto Vallarta started with a piece on 60 Minutes a few months ago which described the excellent health care in PV, and talked about the large number of Americans and Canadians who have settled there.

We love Mexico, and have been there several times, but we still haven't visited PV. We already had a trip planned to Isla Mujeres (a little island off Cancun). Before we left, we had the big snow storm

Isla Mujeres was great! Just what we needed after what seemed like an eternity of snow. This was the view from our room.