Mexico

October 2020-January 2021

Mexico was an easy choice as an escape from the US during lockdowns, elections, protests, etc. We have been many times over the years and it is very definitely home to us. Hector is Mexican so we are able to negotiate our way around with relative ease. We split the next few months between Puerto Vallarta and San Miguel de Allende, two wonderful cities but with completely opposite personalities. Vallarta is a free-wheeling beach city that caters unashamedly to tourism, and San Miguel is a more formal, traditional city in the center of the country.

This difference in city attitudes also affected their reaction to lockdowns: Vallarta stayed pretty much wide open with just an occasional curfew, but San Miguel was only slowly emerging from a very serious lockdown. Hotels had only just re-opened at 50%, masks and distancing was expected everywhere. San Miguel also had road blocks coming into the city to check for confirmed hotel reservations. We felt much safer there than anywhere we had been so far.

In San Miguel, we had rented a house so we were able to cook a lot but also enjoyed some of the many great restaurants there [The Restaurant, Moxi, Luna, Cumpanio, Atrio] We made some small getaways and fell in love with the city all over again. Christmas and New Years were quiet and intimate.

So, with melancholy, we returned to Santa Fe in early January 2021 to begin the long and anxiety-ridden process of gathering the required documentation for our residence visas for Spain.

4 very long months passed. After flying to the Spanish Consulate in Houston for our interviews, we were approved for residency and, on May 2, we raced to the airport in Albuquerque like Imelda Marcos fleeing the Philippines. It is no exaggeration to say this was a moment we had waited a decade for.