Buying into our wild idea completely.

Late summer turned out to be a time of momentous decisions for us.  The Peace Corps contacted us and asked if we would be willing to delay our service for a full year, to which we agreed.  With Marilyn’s accident it was going to be difficult to obtain medical clearance in time to serve earlier.  I was informed that since I had turned 50 I would need to have a colonoscopy in order to clear medical.  Oh joy!  At this point however, we were beginning to wonder if serving in the Peace Corps was actually going to be in our future given the delays in our medical clearance process.

As Marilyn continued to improve from her hand surgery and whiplash we began discussing what we would do if we were unable to serve in the Peace Corps or if our service was again delayed.  Trying to time the sale of our home and ridding ourselves of all the things we used every day was going to take time and it would be a process that once started, could not be stopped.  After much discussion, we came to the conclusion that we still wanted to live abroad, see the world and experience new cultures.  Our friends were beginning to think we were crazy at this point and some of them wondering why we would want to live abroad or spend so much time together.

What followed was a series of life changing decisions as we now bought into our wild idea completely.  We decided not to replace Marilyn’s car and instead try to share one vehicle.  This was going to require some serious coordination which we figured would be good practice for us.

We also decided to go ahead and put our house on the market and try to get it sold by the end of the year.  This would give us a time frame in which we could organize all of the other things we needed to do.  Most importantly, we made the decision that we were going to just go, rather than wait for the Peace Corps bureaucracy to drive our actions.

From our reading and research we had developed the thought process that we might be able to “follow the sun” by living in Europe during the summer and then in South America in, well, the summer.  We really hate to fly however but we had discovered this really interesting fact; cruise lines relocate ships from the Caribbean and South America to the Mediterranean in the spring and reverse this process in the fall.  There were some fantastic deals available that made a 3 week cruise cost the same as flying.  Since we would be in no particular hurry and the cruise provided the added benefit of covering 3 weeks of living expenses; this became one of our preferred travel strategies.

We then took a lovely 3 day break during which our friends from the TEFL course, Nathan and Frannie, visited us.  I’m not sure we got out of the pool other than to eat or sleep for those roasting hot late summer Arizona days.

 Both Nathan and Frannie were freshly returned from several months in Granada and we were able to catch up on the news of our other friends there.  We really missed Granada!

Back to work, put the house on the market and immediately we found we needed to make several more important decisions.  Where were we going to go?  When were we going to go?  How were we going to get there?  What were we going to do when we got there?  It may sound like we really had no plan at all but that wasn’t true; it was the details and advanced planning required that we really needed to address and all of these details dovetailed with each other.

By early fall and after hours of discussion we decided to begin this adventure with a return to Granada, Spain and take Spanish language classes.  It made sense to us to try to acquire another language and Spanish is spoken in a lot of places in the world that we wanted to experience.  Now began the research on language schools in Granada (there are over 40).  We were familiar with Castila because they provided space for our TEFL program and we knew they were a quality program.  While they weren’t the cheapest program there was the benefit of familiarity for us and they would be able to arrange housing for us until we were able to find a place.

Now we had to decide when.  That would be determined to a large extent by our travel schedule because Castila initiated beginner level classes every other week.  We had put this largest of decisions off as long as we could.  It was time to commit…. so we signed up for classes beginning in early May and committed to an intensive course for 12 weeks.  We found a 2 week cruise that left San Juan, Puerto Rico (a place we wanted to visit) in mid-April and traveled to Malaga, Spain which is only an hour and a half from Granada by bus.  We wanted to spend a few days in Old San Juan and by working backwards like this our departure date was identified.  Our departure would be on April 11^th; my birthday.

We put the house on the market and decided to join a very interesting group called InterNations that was forming a new Phoenix chapter.  InterNations is a networking group for people who are either living abroad or simply interested in traveling abroad.  It is a group of widely diverse people of many different nationalities and they are a friendly group of people.  In fact, not long after we joined we were contacted by an American who had been living in Granada for 3 years offering whatever assistance or guidance she could.  Amazingly, it turned out she worked for Castila and her assistance was both invaluable and appreciated.  Gracias Allison.  Te echamos de menos.

We felt were definitely on the right track, and the train was now running at full speed.