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.

The learning process and new decisions....

With the prospect of Mike going blind now firmly behind us and both of us working hard to get back into decent physical shape to minimize any future health issues, it was time for some hard evaluation.

We had learned that we did like being on the ground in another place and a different culture.  We had learned that the Charles Schwab checking account worked exactly as advertised and was perfect for us.  We had learned how to use Gmail and Facebook in ways that suited us.  We had learned that we absolutely hated flying long distances and we had realized we would now never be content without some significant exposure to other people and cultures in our lives.

The Peace Corps seemed like a perfect way to begin that process of living at least part of our lives outside the United States.  We continued to work on all the medical forms, made appointments for doctors, dentists, lab-work, diagnostic procedures and continued to move that process forward.  We had made the decision when we went to Spain for the TEFL course that we would live in the residencia, a far different environment than we had ever used for vacations (we had been of the 4 and 5 star resort and golf course mentality).  While it was a new experience for us it was also a rewarding one the we thoroughly enjoyed.

Our new perspective was that the Peace Corps would really take us back to our roots and help us learn to live very simply and frugally.  We started to realize that our perspective on the entire world and how we would live in it had changed.  Gone was the desire for more stuff or to recreate our American lifestyle and in its place was an insatiable curiosity about other people, places and cultures and a desire to not only see them but to live and experience life with them.

Suddenly it was time to seriously start getting rid of stuff.  We did not know exactly what the future would look like but we knew that we had some significant changes to make.  The house had to go, being a long distance land lord just did not have any appeal to us.  Getting it on the market became a priority for the summer.

First and most important we had taken the time over the holidays to explain to our two daughters what we were thinking.  They actually both thought the Peace Corps was a really cool idea and they were very happy for us.  They had mixed emotions when we told them we had decided to sell the house and that these could be the last holidays we celebrated in this house we had lived in for 17 years.  Then the really big thing….here are your sticky notes, go through the house, pretend we died, and mark anything you want to keep:  books, furniture, artwork, kitchen supplies, everything.  Difficult for them, easy for us!

We actually figured that we would need some kind of small storage unit for the things we would want to keep, thinking that we would need some furniture and maybe a few boxes of things to get restarted with when we came back to the States.  Assuming that we would leave for the Peace Corps sometime in the next 18 months as planned, we would be getting through sometime in 2014, and who knew what we would want to do at that point.

Then the real work began, with more learning, like how to use Ebay and Craig’s list, how to figure out what you should try to get for stuff you haven’t seen for 10 years,  and what charities you want to give things to that you either can’t or don’t want to sell. 

We also had to learn how to manage what we were calling our “leave behind” budget.  A storage unit, life insurance policies, property taxes, and all the other little things that we would still need to pay for even if we were living somewhere else. 

Learning new ways of dealing with each other was no small task either.  Never, in our entire married life had we spent so much time together.  We needed to work as hard on making our relationship work for both of us as we did on all the other stuff.   Two very strong personalities making tough decisions in the midst of very high stress can take a toll on any relationship and yet for us in many ways it seemed to help bring us together.  We began to see that even if we came to the answers from very different perspectives, we kept coming to the same answers.  

The idea now was to get the house on the market so hopefully it would sell by the end of the year.  Once the house sold we would become apartment dwellers, renting until time to leave for the Peace Corps assignment, whatever and whenever that might be. 

The idea of continuing to travel after our assignment just kept getting stronger.