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We’re not the most well traveled people (i.e. not trust fund babies), but early in our relationship, my husband and I shared a love of wandering. Back then (in the early 90’s), that travel took the form of road trips across the U.S. and back. Later, when we had more disposable income (and credit cards), we expanded our travel to Hawaii and overseas to Europe, Southeast Asia, and Mexico.
However, choosing a place for retirement posed a new challenge. We may like visiting a place for one reason or another, but was it a good place to live? How would we decide?
You may start to see a trend in our process, which admittedly comes from me. Yep! We started another list. What do we want in a location?
National language is not English
Close to the ocean – preferably waves for surfing
Warm climate
Easy travel to/from the US
Residency visa achievable
We both love SE Asia, specifically Thailand, but it did not qualify as “easy to get to” and the Thai government had recently changed the Visa process making moving there a bit more uncertain. We also looked at Central America (Nicaragua, Honduras, Guatemala) but we didn’t have enough experience with the area. Mainland Mexico was a candidate, specifically Mérida where you can get a beautiful old colonial house to restore for about $60k USD, but the ocean was calling. In the end, it came down to familiarity and a place that met all of our criteria.
For a number of years, we had been taking a bunch of friends down to Cabo San Lucas to rent a big house in Pedregal (the gated community above Cabo) and play rich for a week. One trip, we followed a friend’s advice and took the highway north up the West Coast to Todos Santos, a charming little artist community about an hour from Cabo.
Back then, the streets weren’t even paved in Todos Santos, but we fell in love with the old, colonial brick architecture and the diversity of the people who lived there. Beautiful golden sand beaches dotted the coast to the north and south, interspersed with surf breaks. The agricultural town of Pescadero was lush and green, a welcome break from the endless (but beautiful in its own way) brown of the desert. All this accessible by a 3-hour direct flight from San Francisco? Hot damn. We started to imagine that this could be our spot, so engaged a real estate agent and started looking at properties every chance we could get.
We now “own” property about a 10 minute walk from San Pedrito Beach in Pescadero. I’ll explain the need for those quotation marks in my next post.
To be continued…
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