Last minute details before we board the plane for Guadalajara. Get a haircut this week, a manicure/pedicure – who knows when it will happen again – if ever. Hmm… looks like I can still slip off the curb into melodrama sometimes. Another bottle of shampoo, more moisturizer, toothpaste, another 1 terabyte external hard drive for backups, a killer portable Bluetooth speaker that fits in my purse, an extra suitcase that will hold an inflatable mattress, sheets & pillows…
Wait a minute. An inflatable mattress?! You’re packing an inflatable mattress all the way to Mexico?! What the heck for?! Ahhhh. This is where a little travel experience comes in handy.
About five years ago, we stumbled onto this great book, “On Mexican Time” by Tony Cohan and it stirred up a curiosity to go experience Mexico for ourselves. So we took a sabbatical and spent three months in Mexico, starting out in the Yucatan in a beach house and ending up in the heart of San Miguel de Allende. It was an exhilarating, liberating adventure (for a later post), but no matter where we stayed, the mattresses were little short of throwing a sleeping bag on the ground. In a word, HARD! If we’re going to actually live in Mexico for a year, getting a good night’s sleep is not negotiable. Hence, the inflatable mattress.
In fact, if it weren’t for the weight restrictions by the airlines, I’d be taking at least two more suitcases loaded to the gills with all the various and sundry things one thinks of when trying to imagine what one might need to live from day to day in a foreign country. Especially when one has no clear idea – well, ok, not a hint of a clue – what one can get there. Or not.
The reality, however, of lugging half a dozen heavy suitcases into and out of airports, taxis, busses, for who knows how long to who knows where (at this point we haven’t even booked a hotel), prevailed and we restricted ourselves to one suitcase, one carry on and a small backpack each. McDean gets to carry the inflatable mattress. We’ve resorted, reduced, repacked, re-condensed everything so it fits into the allotted number of bags. They’ve all been weighed (on the bathroom scale), holding the maximum allotted weight, zipped, sitting by the back door and ready to wing their way to Mexico at o’dark thirty tomorrow morning.
McDean left his desktop computer safely packed away in Port Alberni and bought a laptop this week. There are a lot of things I’ll gladly share with the love of my live, but not my laptop. We’re both fairly computer intense and sharing one for the next year very likely could test the limits of ‘for better or worse’. I think of it as marriage insurance. He’s got a Christmas grin on his face, so I think it was good insurance.
We have this fantasy that, with all this free time of not having to go to work everyday, living in a foreign country where we don’t even speak the language, one of the things we’ll be able to discover, in addition to a new culture and a new language, is how to earn some additional income. After all, we’ll have our computers and an internet connection. What else could we possibly need? People do it every day, don’t they? Discovering that may be one of the most important and enlightening things we discover this next year. A new path built on hope and possibilities and passion! Yowzah!! Sign me up!
Sometimes not having a clue can be invaluable. After all, who knows what you might discover when you’re open and believe anything – absolutely anything – can happen?