To sell or to give away

One of the Real Estate agents we auditioned told us something that at the time seemed intolerably rude: Put everything you own in the garage, give it all away to charity, paint the walls white and change the carpet. For us, being the first time we were going to the process of disposing of all of our belongings, we did not understand the rational behind the statement “give it all to charity”. We simply could not contemplate put all of our belongings in storage, let alone give them all away. We were doing that with a number of things we did not consider valuable, but there were pieces of furniture and art that we considered almost invaluable. This is when we finally decided to hire an Estate Sale company to do a 2-3 day sale. In retrospect, we would have been better off giving away everything to charity.

The reason is simple: An Estate Sale is no more than a bargain sale where people could not pay a fair price for the things we owned, so they make a low ball offer, and only by the second or third day. We went to all the trouble of arranging everything in a displayable fashion, but by the end of the first day, only a very few items had sold. We went into a panic, as we were less than a week to our scheduled departure from California. Fortunately, almost everything sold by the second day and we got only a small fraction of what we were expecting to get, all in cash. By then, I had closed my bank account and had only an investment account still opened. Ironically, the investment account would not accept my cash. So we ended up giving the proceeds to our daughter.

What about Genie?

Then there was Genie. As the closing day of May 4th approached, we had not made a decision on what to do with Genie. She was in the best health of her life, but we felt that leaving her with anyone, not even our daughter, would be too hard on Genie. So we decided to take her with us. But where were we going? Spain was closed to Americans and without signs of changing plans. We had sold our house and belongings, and our car was soon to be sold to an internet-based dealer. We had realized our mistake of selling too soon. But we were still convinced that Spring was the right time to sell our house. Without second guessing our decisions, we had 2 choices: 1. Rent a house for a month or two. 2. Start our Nomadic life in earnest by traveling to Mexico.

A New Destination: México

Yeah, México, why not. What we had seen of the country included places like Puerto Vallarta, Mazatlán, Cancún, Ixtapa, Mérida, Veracruz, and we had loved it. As we understood, México was admitting Americans, and we felt safe because we were vaccinated. We could stay in México 6 months or so and then decide whether we would stay there and postpone the plan to live in Spain. Then we started looking at possible locations for us to go to. Guadalajara, Lake Chapala, Querétaro and San Miguel Allende had good reputation among expats. Unfortunately, transporting Genie by plane was going to be an issue. It was hard to find an airline that would allow us to carry her in cabin with us. So we chose the next best thing: Go to México by car. After a few weeks we could return to the US and finally sell the car.

We also thought about going from California through the South West, but thought that was nothing new for us. We then saw an internet article saying that México was closed to foreigners too. But others claimed that they had gone from the US to México by car without any issues. We thought that if we could not cross the border we would go through the American South West after all. We were now free of any commitments and anything we owned could fit in our car, so crazy as it seems, we were starting our nomadic life and Genie was with us. Little did we know what we were going to encounter. We were not on a vacation, by any means. We were looking to stay for weeks or months in a country many consider dangerous, hoping to get accommodations for rent while we waited for Spain to open its borders.

The border authorities in Mexicali wave us through, but then our navigation system went black and we were lost in México, looking without luck, for an office of Telcel I had found the day before in the internet in order to get a new SIM card for our cell phone. The very first day in Méxican territory we were faced with the realities in a developing nation, and that was only the beginning. I have a word to clue you in on what happened next “OXXO”.