Last minute details before we board the plane for Guadalajara.\u00a0 Get a haircut this week, a manicure\/pedicure – who knows when it will happen again – if ever. Hmm… \u00a0looks like I can still slip off the curb into melodrama sometimes.\u00a0 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…\u00a0 <\/i><\/p>\n
Wait a minute. \u00a0 An inflatable mattress?! \u00a0You\u2019re packing an inflatable mattress all the way to Mexico?! What the heck for?!\u00a0 Ahhhh. This is where a little travel experience comes in handy.\u00a0 <\/i><\/p>\n
About five years ago, we stumbled onto this great book, \u201cOn Mexican Time\u201d by Tony Cohan and it stirred up a curiosity to go experience Mexico for ourselves.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 It was an\u00a0exhilarating, liberating\u00a0adventure (for a later post), but no matter where we stayed, the mattresses were little short of throwing a sleeping bag on the ground.\u00a0 In a word, HARD!\u00a0 If we\u2019re going to actually live in Mexico for a year, getting a good night\u2019s sleep is not negotiable. \u00a0Hence, the inflatable mattress. \u00a0<\/i><\/p>\n
In fact, if it weren\u2019t for the weight restrictions by the airlines, I\u2019d 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. \u00a0Especially when one has no clear idea \u2013 well, ok, not a hint of a clue \u2013 what one can get there. \u00a0Or not.\u00a0 <\/i><\/p>\n
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\u2019t even booked a hotel)<\/i>, prevailed and we restricted ourselves to one suitcase, one carry on and a small backpack each. McDean gets to carry the\u00a0inflatable mattress.\u00a0 We\u2019ve resorted, reduced, repacked, re-condensed everything so it fits into the allotted number of bags.\u00a0 They\u2019ve 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.<\/i><\/p>\n
McDean left his desktop computer safely packed away in Port Alberni and bought a laptop this week.\u00a0 There are a lot of things I\u2019ll gladly share with the love of my live, but not my laptop.\u00a0 We\u2019re both fairly computer intense and sharing one for the next year very likely could test the limits of ‘for better or worse\u2019. \u00a0I think of it as marriage insurance.\u00a0 He\u2019s got a Christmas grin on his face, so I think it was good insurance.<\/i><\/p>\n
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\u2019t even speak the language, one of the things we\u2019ll be able to discover, in addition to a new culture and a new language, is how to earn some additional income. \u00a0 After all, we’ll have our computers and an internet connection. \u00a0What else could we possibly need? \u00a0People do it every day, don\u2019t they?\u00a0 Discovering that<\/span><\/b> may be one of the most important and enlightening things we discover this next year.\u00a0 A new path built on hope and possibilities and passion! \u00a0Yowzah!! \u00a0Sign me up! \u00a0<\/i><\/p>\n Sometimes not having a clue can be invaluable. \u00a0<\/i>After all, who knows what you might\u00a0discover when you\u2019re open and believe anything \u2013 absolutely anything \u2013 can happen?<\/i><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Last minute details before we board the plane for Guadalajara.\u00a0 Get a haircut this week, a manicure\/pedicure – who knows when it will happen again – if ever. Hmm… \u00a0looks like I can still slip off the curb into melodrama…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":55,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-892","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"post_mailing_queue_ids":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mbear.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/892","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mbear.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mbear.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mbear.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mbear.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=892"}],"version-history":[{"count":51,"href":"https:\/\/mbear.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/892\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1254,"href":"https:\/\/mbear.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/892\/revisions\/1254"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mbear.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/55"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mbear.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=892"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mbear.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=892"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mbear.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=892"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}