1/ Getting There, Part I

You may find yourself living in a shotgun shack.
And you may find yourself in another part of the world.
And you may ask yourself, “Well, how did I get here?”

                         -- Talking Heads, “Once In A Lifetime”

Let me just say at the outset: this wasn’t entirely my idea. Back in 2012 I was leaving a restaurant when I saw the publication International Living in a magazine rack. The cover headline touted exclusive intel on the “10 Best Places to Retire To.” Thumbing through the pub I saw that their #1 recommendation was Cuenca, Ecuador, and two minutes later I was hooked on the notion that some future version of myself would be living in another country.

This should come as no surprise to anyone who has known me for any length of time. I have spent my adult life defying the idea of sticking close to one’s roots. It began a couple years after college, when I departed my native Rhode Island for a job in San Antonio, Texas. Three years later, having met wife-to-be Martha Rothe in a parking lot, I drove to LA and made the hop to Hawai’i. Martha followed shortly thereafter and ten years later, married and with toddler Julia in tow, we moved to the Great Northwest.

We found jobs in Seattle (Martha with ease, I with difficulty), bought a house in Queen Anne and raised our kids there. In time we came intimately to know the rhythm of the Northwest seasons: the nearly perpetual gray interrupted by rare, exuberant sunshine; the darkly expressive forests; the radiant mountain peaks; the expansion and contraction of the days. The years were measured in shoe sizes and homework assignments, soccer games and Little League tournaments. Our personal networks expanded, my work ebbed and flowed, our commitments grew more diverse and ever more tenacious. As I was finishing up lunch that day in 2012, I felt more deeply rooted than I had ever been, or had ever imagined being.

That magazine headline awakened a tiny germ of thought buried deep in my brain: the pernicious idea that time is short, the world wide, and life uncertain; that if I didn’t act soon, it would be too late to savor once again the uncertainty, the challenge, and the transformational juice that a move to an entirely new place can bring.

In recent years Martha and I had taken advantage of travel opportunities afforded us by our children’s growing independence. I had never before visited Latin America but, following Martha’s suggestion, we spent a week in central Mexico and I returned home under a spell. That there was a universe located literally next door that was so completely different, so rich with vibrant color, sound, warmth and hospitality, threw me for a loop. It was the first of many trips south of the border.

In the meantime, there was this business of Cuenca, Ecuador—still topping everybody’s list of best places to retire to. Of course, retirement was at this point far off in our future (it still is for me), but I thought it best not to wait too long to begin making plans. The logic behind choosing a destination went something like this:

A. Retirement = Reduced income. Therefore, pick a place where the dollar goes further. (Hint: forget the Euro Zone.)

B. Make return visits to family as easy as possible. Ergo, don’t live anywhere more than an easy day’s travel away. (Goodbye Asia, Africa and Eastern Europe.)

C. Choose a destination where learning a new language is a plausible possibility.  Conclusion: Duh, it’s Latin America. (Never mind that I didn’t speak Spanish—yet.)

It must be noted that these logical webs were being spun inside my head largely without Martha’s complicity. She was skeptical from the start about living somewhere else for any extended period, much less for the rest of our lives. So we/I settled on a simple, three-phase plan:

Phase 1: Live somewhere else for a month.

Phase 2. Live somewhere else for a year.

Phase 3. Live somewhere else permanently.*

* Disclaimer: Agreeing to Phase 1 carries with it no obligation, expressed or implied, to continue on to Phase 2—and certainly not to Phase 3. Fair enough!

According to this plan, we would see how we felt about each experience and decide in our own good time about further adventures. At any point along the way, we could decide to punt. With these caveats in place, Martha embraced my, ahem, our approach.

Even sight-unseen, Cuenca seemed the logical place to begin. It had the ringing endorsement of the experts at International Living, and it fulfilled the above requirements. We knew many people who had traveled to Ecuador and loved it. And so, in March of 2013, we launched Phase 1 by spending a month in Ecuador.

We started and ended the trip in Quito: a vast, sprawling, dirty, boisterous and altogether fascinating metropolis high in the Andes. We studied Spanish for 3 weeks in Cuenca, a charming smaller city in southern Ecuador considered by many to be the cultural heart of the country. We rode a bus headlong down precarious highways through the towering Andes. We soaked in volcanic hot springs and visited Inca ruins. We straddled the Equator (literally) and communed with tropical hummingbirds. It was a great month.

But not, apparently, great enough for Martha to want to spend a year there. So Cuenca and Ecuador were officially struck from the list of candidates for Phase 2; more scouting would be required. To that end, over the next five years we visited many more cities in Mexico and South America: Buenos Aires, Montevideo, Merida, Mendoza, Santiago, Valparaiso, San Miguel de Allende, Oaxaca. (Countries in tropical Central America were ruled out under Article 4, Sub-paragraph C of our contract: Stan is done sharing his home with centipedes.) These were more than sightseeing excursions; we were trying on cities like strange, colorful new clothes to see how they might fit. After all, we were going to have to wear them for a year.

No place felt quite right for one reason or another: too many gringos in San Miguel; far too many flight hours to Santiago; too much dogshit in Buenos Aires (I’m serious); too hot in Oaxaca. Still, time was marching on, and Martha’s retirement from Swedish Hospital—the perfect time to cut strings and go—loomed ever closer. As the months passed we were feeling more and more pressure to award the rose to one of the Bachelorettes.

After a quick dash back to Mexico to sample two more candidate cities—Guanajuato and Morelia—we decided that while either could suffice, neither caused our hearts to flutter like newly-met lovers'. But when we thought back to our earlier visit to Oaxaca we realized that this was the place we most wanted to return to. Thinking about being in Oaxaca simply made us feel good, and despite my aversion to hot climes we had great memories of our time there. After five years we had made our choice, practically overnight.

The die was cast. All that remained was to put our plan into action. How hard could that be?