"...Twelve hours past the scheduled arrival of our four-day vacation, we were finally landing in Puerto Vallarta.

After couple hours of sleep, we were lounging by the turquoise swimming pools on manicured tropical grounds , as I wished, doing nothing. I read for a while, then turned my eyes toward Puerto Vallarta’s El Centro to see her white houses and red tiled roofs hanging under saturated blue skies on the jungle cliff above deep blue waters of Banders Bay. This is when I fell in love with Vallarta with the kind of love we only experience with our first teenage heart burning feeling that nothing can reason with.

The next day we were looking for a small property to buy.

After a disappointing real estate agent showing, we hit a Laundromat.  The doped owner filled us on the gossip what sells for what, and who bought a 400 sf studio with an arched wood French door, Mexican tiled floors and cathedral ceilings, all for 22 thousand dollars just a week ago. It sounded perfect for what we thought would be a stepping-stone to retiring in 10 years. We found Dario and offered him 25 k to purchase his home.

Although this option evaporated right away, he walked us to another building pointing at the available, bank foreclosed 2 bedroom, 2 bath well structured condo, priced at 38k what obvious to me was an opportunity not to be ignored regardless to a rather mono toned elevation we stood in front of.

In those days I always traveled with a lot of cash, which was what I suppose a sward in times of Robin Hood. I believed I could resolve any misfortune with hard green on my belt, but never did it cross my imagination it will help us to purchase our future home. Sensing my husband’s approval, I emptied the pouch filled with two thousand U.S Dollars to a total stranger as a down payment to secure the sale of the condo that we did not even see inside.

In retrospective, even to my surprise, that the transaction worked out, seems to be nothing less than a will of mighty.

We have been living in Mexico for eight years now. So much has happened since 2002, the year we have liquidated our “middle class American dream life” and moved to Puerto Vallarta. Today, when I swing in a hammock and my thoughts revisit the self-driven stressful past in Colorado, I smile, because what was then only a fantasy of a perfect life, now I am living it.

Basia

If you wish to know the whole story, please visit:

_{http://liveretiremexico.maranabeach.com/}