getting ready

Ok I have to admit that doing a blog requires finding time to write, and right now I am having trouble doing that. For anyone who has moved, and that should include everyone on the planet, this is work!!! What should we keep, what gets sold, what to throw out, you think well someone might want this piece of junk, you know what they say one mans trash is another mans treasure, sure hope so, we are planning a moving day sale in March, and I hope Lot's of people show up to buy our trash oops I mean treasures!! Meanwhile my garage is looking very crowded, it will sure look empty after the sale. I think I have cleaned out my closets and drawers 3 times now, it is just amazing how much stuff one has, everyone has told me not to bring lot's of stuff with us to Mexico, and in our case that won't be hard to do, we are only bringing what will fit in the back of our Escape, new life new beginning new stuff!!!
One of the reasons why we are moving is to get away from the mind set of having way more than one could possibly need. When you go to a country like Mexico and see how little you need to survive, you come back with different mind set, or at least some of us do. That really happened to me when we went to Costa Rica for a visit, very happy people living there without out all the frills.
Getting back to all the work that we are doing, trying to get everything together for the tenants, yesterday my husband, son, and tenant fixed some of the fence posts that were just about to fall over, we live on 3 acres with 2 barns so there is always plenty to do around here, another reason why we are moving. 15 years here and we are tired, time for some young blood to manage the place. Well that is it for this blog, I will try to write more often.

Our Second Visit

This is a picture of our friend Patricia, I found her through her blog Mexico Daily Living, and when I figure out how to do a link on my blogs I will post it, her blog is really nice, lots of pictures of Ajijic, it gives you a really good feel for the town. I contacted her and we got to meet up with Patricia a few times during our visit, it is great making friends through blogs, we had breakfast at this little restruant, the food was great and very inexpensive, we had to wait a few minutes for our orange juice because they were squezzing it, talk about fresh!!!

We were walking down the street when we saw these local boys having fun, so we asked if we could take their picture, they thought it was a great idea, most of the people that we met were very friendly. My husband knows a little Spanish so he would try it out on the shop keepers and they would answer him in very good english, we got a kick out of that! Right now we are both studying The Rosetta Stone for Spanish, it can be fun at times and other times fustrating, but I am learning lot's from it, everyone tells us that when we get there we will pick it up, so we are looking forward to that.
Since we thought Ajijic might be a good spot for us to settle down in we decided to go for a month, and live like a local, we took the bus to the different towns around the lake, ate at the local hangouts, spent time in the plazza, one thing that really suprised us was how everyone is out at night, they would be setting up food stands at 8:00, and all the families would be out, having a great time. We thought it was great, very different from where we live, they roll up the sidewalks at night in our town. The people that we talked to asked us why we picked the month of May to come for our visit, they say it is their hottest month, but being from Florida, we thought it felt pretty good.
We stayed at the same hotel for both our visits, Ajijic Suites, Elaine is the owner, and she is just great, they have a little apartment that we rented, it was just right for us, and a short walk to the center of town. She will even pick you up at the airport. We stay in touch through emails, and we will be staying with her again in May when we make the move. Well that's it for this post, hope you enjoyed it.

How it all started

On the malacon in Ajijic
People ask us all the time how did you find out about Ajijic? Well let me tell you, one night I was on the computer and I stumbled upon a blog called Jim & Caroles Mexico Adventure, on his blog he had some really nice pictures of Ajijic, I was very interested in this little village so I did some research, and contacted Jim, who was very helpful to us and answered all of our questions. We decided to go and visit in October of 08. I made our reservations and we were all set to go, meanwhile layoffs were going on where my husband worked, can you guess where this is going, yes that's right he got laid off! 19 years all gone ! When he told me the news I said well that may just make moving that much easier. So we stuck to our plans and headed for Mexico in October. I talked about Ajijic so much that our friends decided that they wanted to check it out too, which was really nice to have another couple along. We only stayed a week, which is not enough time but it gave us a feel for the place. The village is really nice we walked everywhere, the food was great and inexpensive, the people were so friendly to us, we knew that we would be back. We got to meet Jim and Carole, and we still email each other. Stay tuned for my next post, our second visit to Ajijic.

My First Post

This is my first post, and if you have never tried to set up a blog let me tell you it is an experience, of course if you are a computer whiz, which I am not ! it would be easy. My first problem I had was trying to get my picture up on my profile, I thought I had it in my desktop, in a folder that said Blog pictures !!! well guess what, it wasn't in there. I will now have to go and find it again. For all of you that are reading this blog, at least I hope there will be a few of you, this is going to be about our journey to Mexico, and what we find there. I will report on the good, the bad and the ugly. Of course we are hoping that it will be mostly good. Thanks for reading this post and hope you come along for the journey with us.