Enough Winter!!

UPDATE:  We found a place to stay in Chapala

We're Outta Here.....

The winters in the Rouge Valley of southern Oregon aren't like Michigan's or Wisconsin's (we left there in 2005, sick of the winters), but they're a far cry from Arizona!  The temperatures aren't horrible (although it was 35 degrees this morning), but the fog & rain are just unrelenting!  Mountains that we can normally see from our porch disappear in the thick fog.  Slugs and worms take shelter on our covered porches.  Everything is wet, whether it rains or not.  Okay, once in awhile the sun peeks out, but for the most part it's a foggy, damp, dreary winter in Oregon.

It was sometime around February 2016, in the throws of nicotine withdrawal and dealing with our terminally ill family dog,  that I proclaimed (ok, wailed), "I will not spend another winter in Oregon!"  How we were going to do it and where we were going to go, we didn't know, but we were going to figure it out!

Since that proclamation, our resolve to winter elsewhere only increased!  It wasn't just the mad rantings of a woman suffering from seasonal affect disorder while in the throws of nicotine withdrawal, or the frustrations of the man dealing with her....we both wanted a warm sunny winter!

Where To Go???

The options of where to go quickly narrowed when we considered our wants & needs:

• Sunshine and warm weather
• We wanted to explore a place we might consider for a future home, which translated to outside of the US
• We had to be able to drive there, as our furry family member wasn't going to fit under any airplane seat and for some crazy reason the airlines won't let you buy a seat for your dog!. 
• Meet Cheba (aka Sweet Pea, but that's for another post).  After we lost our Reggae girl in March to oral melanoma, our home felt empty, so we adopted this sweet Doberman-mix, who quickly found her way into our heart (and our bed)!

Mexico it would be!  Sunny, warm, we can drive there, and it's high on the list of potential retirement places.  We decided to check out the Pacific side and venture inland toward Lake Chapala too, where Sam's brother Dave and sister-in-law Paula have lived for the last 9 years.

Damn, we need an itinerary....

We really wanted to be free on this trip, figuring out where to stay as we went along.  Sounds great, but when you're traveling during high season, with a 55 lb dog, and are told over and over "don't drive at night in Mexico", some planning turned out to be in order.  So here's our itinerary, at least as of this first post....

• We'll be leaving Oregon around 12/23, spending the holidays with the kids in Arizona.  
• Then the morning of 12/30 we'll cross the border at Nogales and head to San Carlos for the next several nights.  We have a little casita rented that looks like a nice place to ring in the new year!
• Off to Mazatlan for a couple nights and some warmer weather!  A little bungalow outside of town is where we'll rest for a couple days.
• Lo De Marcos (about an hour north of Puerto Vallarta) will be home until 2/4.   Bill worked with a realtor out there to find us a rental house about 5 blocks from the beach and 3 blocks from the town square. Seems like the town has quite a bit to offer from little markets, beach activities, restaurants, even a doggie daycare!
• The rest of February we'll be staying at a sweet house in the Lake Chapala area, not too far from my brother.
• After that, we'll just have to see where the universe takes us.....

Now to get everything ready to go.....

Happy trails and positive vibes!

Bill & Sam