In 2017 my wife and I elected early retirement from our jobs and went off in pursuit of a whole new adventure. Up until that point we had good, stable lives, with steady jobs, great families, good friends, a nice house. Yet we felt we were missing out on something – we had both worked since our teenage years, without a break (except for some “time off” for Maricela to raise our children). We had taken vacations over the years, but they were always limited to one or two weeks at a time, due to the demands of our jobs. As we looked forward, we could clearly imagine our next 10-15 years: continuing at our steady jobs, along with their long commutes and corresponding stress, and the hope of retirement some time in the future, along with the hope that we would still be healthy enough at that point to enjoy our retirement. That didn’t feel like enough for us, so we decided to take a risk: we sold or gave away most of our belongings, squeezed as much as we could into our newly acquired minivan, and hit the road.

First we took several weeks to drive from California to Florida to drop our daughter off at university. Having just given up both of our jobs, we economized as much as possible, tent camping where we could, and staying at an AirBnB or hotel when the weather was bad.

As Californians, we are used to highly predictable summer weather: hot and dry, every day. We soon discovered that this is not the case everywhere. We frequently encountered thunderstorms or strong winds, which dampened our camping ideas. But we made the best of it.

After Florida we drove back to California over the next couple of weeks to pick up our dog who we had left behind for this portion of the trip.
Following nearly 8,000 miles crisscrossing the US, we drove another 1,300 miles south of the US-Mexico border from the crossing at Nogales, Arizona deep into the central Mexican state of Michoacan. Some people think we’re crazy to go travel so many miles by car, but it’s how we’ve always enjoyed traveling. We get to see more of the countryside, we get to stop and interact with people, and we have the freedom to make stops and detours according to our own schedule, not according to an airline schedule.

In a sense, that is the same reason we left behind our jobs – it’s not that they were bad, but we wanted the freedom to live life on our own terms. Making a long commute five days a week and working long hours puts a lot of constraints on living how we want. Of course it also provides financial resources that aid in living how we want. That is how we came up with the idea of moving to Mexico. We felt that with our small pension and our savings, we would have enough to afford a reasonably comfortable life there, more so than what we expected we could afford living in the US.

I have left out a lot of details here of our first two months of travel. This is because the initial focus of this blog will be on the move to Mexico and the transition to daily life there. Maybe I’ll go back later and write about our travels in the US. Stay tuned!