Author: p_c_neary@hotmail.com

It all started innocently enough:  “Honey, what would you think about retiring outside the US?”

“Sure, where?”

“Mexico.”

“Mexico, as in narcos-chopping-off-heads Mexico? Count me out.”

I would retreat for several days and try another approach:

“Dear, I found a place to retire with nearly perfect Spring-like weather year round!”

“Spring-like as in warm but not hot, not too humid? Where?”

“Lake Chapala. A bunch of Americans and Canadians already live there.”

“But where is it?”

“Umm, uhh, Mexico”

(Silence) “Seriously, what is it with you and Mexico?”

“I keep researching this place, and no matter what I look into, it comes up positive.”

(Long silence)

And so it went.  Judy conceded that I had convinced her that security was not an issue, based on the fact that I worked that issue for a living and had a good handle on it.  I mentioned the low cost of living, and she asked what about health care?  I told her about the good, US-trained and English-speaking doctors, and she wondered how we would get back to visit the grandkids.  I showed her the reasonable airfare to/from Guadalajara International airport, which was only 40 minutes away from the lake; she countered with our lack of Spanish.

It was close to the time to shop more seriously for the vacation log cabin, so I tried one last gambit: I told Judy we shouldn’t buy the cabin until we settled the “where do we ultimately retire?” question.   The Focus on Mexico site I mentioned had a week-long familiarization trip at a reasonable rate. They would put you up in a local hotel, give presentations about being an expat, and introduce you around the community. I asked Judy if she would go on such a trip; she agreed, if only to shut me up about Mexico.  It was scheduled for January, 2012, so we could experience the so-called Spring weather for ourselves. I opined that if nothing else, it was a nice little vacation. Judy committed to go, and I agreed that if we both didn’t love it, Mexico was off the board.

We had an uneventful series of flights through Houston to Guad (as the expats call it), and were picked up by the Focus team and driven toward the Lake.  As we drove down the highway, the Focus team leader pointed out of the van window and said “look, there is the lake.” Just off the side of the highway was a dumpy little lake that looked more like an overgrown drainage pond.  As my blood pressure spiked, I heard the team leader burst out laughing saying that is was just a joke, the real lake was over the mountain.  As we crested the mountain pass, a beautiful vista of a long, thin lake spread out in the valley beneath us. You could see a series of mountains which seemed to hem the lake in on all sides; the mountains make the lake look smaller, but it is really almost 15 miles wide and over 50 miles long. You can get a sense of the vista by looking at the header picture to my blog, which shows the view as one lands at the airport.

We arrived in the town of Ajijic (pronounced “Ah-Hee-HEEK”) and checked into the Real Chapala, our hotel for the stay. Ajijic is a picturesque little fishing village nestled on the north shore between the lake and the mountains.  If it hadn’t been discovered and rediscovered by expat artists and US army veterans back in the 1930s-1960s, no one would have ever heard of it beyond Guadalajara.  On one hand, the expats support art shops, nice restaurants, and a Walmart (no kidding).  On the other hand, it’s a 10,000 person Mexican village where burros might be grazing in your backyard.  Our first note of difference was the Focus team leader reminding us to use the large bottled water dispenser in out hotel room, even for teeth-brushing, since the hotel’s municipal water supply was not considered potable.

On Sunday, the Focus team took us on a tour of Guadalajara, and we got back in time for a nice little welcoming dinner where we got to know our colleagues in the program and the program staff.  That evening was the first time we could catch our breath and just talk alone.  I asked Judy to join me on a stroll through the cobblestone streets of La Floresta, the residential area surrounding the hotel.  The weather had been clear and warm, almost 60 F, but now the sun was setting and it was dropping into the 50’s for the night.

As we walked, I prompted Judy what she thought so far.  She said “I’m just not feeling it.” Half in jest, I responded: “What didn’t you like?  Was it the inexpensive meals and drinks?  The pleasant weather? The friendly people?” Judy shook her head, “ I just don’t feel a sense of community yet.” “Well, that’s fair,” I added, “but we’ve only been on the ground for 24 hours.  Let’s see what the rest of the week brings.”

As you may have surmised from the title of my blog, my name is Pat. Patrick, actually, but I go by any of the derivations of that name, including (soon) Patricio, as I intend to become an expatriate, or expat for short. This blog will record my experiences in becoming and enjoying the life of an American expatriate in Mexico.

The term expat is somewhat confusing. It simply means a person living outside his or her nation of citizenship. Some expats leave their homelands due to politics; several liberals and Hollywood types have declared they will leave the United States due to Donald Trump’s election to President. This type of protest-expat gets a lot of publicity, although they rarely follow through on the threat. So some people think expats must be running away from something. Other people think the word is ex-patriot, and believe it means one who is no longer a patriot or supporter of his or her nation. Finally, for many people, the notion of living outside of the culture you grew up in is just crazy. In reality, expats have a variety of reasons for being expats, and I’ll try to highlight a few by interviewing local expats from time to time.

I will at times segue into politics, religion, sports, or just general opining, because that’s what we all do, expats included. When I do, I’ll try to alert my readers with an appropriate heading, so those only interested in one type of post can ignore the others.

My journey to becoming an expat began, like so many others, by accident. Back in 2011, my wife (Judy) and I were preparing to buy a vacation house in the woods somewhere outside Washington, DC. I was about 5 years away from being eligible to retire from my government job, and we looked forward to continuing to stay in the DC area where I planned to work for the government as a contactor. We figured we had another fifteen years in the DC area before really retiring to somewhere warm and sunny like the US Southwest. We had plenty of time to figure out the final retirement location.

The vacation home, probably a log cabin in western Maryland, would be a weekend retreat, and a place where our two grown daughters, sons-in-law, and three grandkids could gather. For those unfamiliar with the DC area, there is a distinct cultural divide between Virginia on the south side of the Potomac river, and DC and Maryland on the north side. We had lived in Northern Virginia for thirty years, so the prospect of buying a house in Maryland felt like moving to a foreign country.

While beginning my research on the vacation home, I ran across a “click-bait” headline for “the 5 best climates in the world.” Now I have traveled a lot in my life, so I was curious what this article had listed as great climates, and I clicked on the link. That mouse click started my journey to becoming an expat.

A headline came up claiming these results for the world’s best climate were from the National Geographic Society. That was not true, although I only determined that much later. You can search the NGS website and archives and you will find no such article. Anyway, the first-place finisher was somewhere in Kenya, where living near the equator but high in the mountains made for a uniquely great climate. “Right,” I thought, I had never been there, but I wasn’t impressed. Second place was someplace called Lake Chapala, Mexico. Now I had been to Mexico: Cancun and Cozumel, great beach climates, but unbearable in the summer. The article described Chapala as Mexico’s largest freshwater lake, high in the Sierra Madre Mountains near Guadalajara. It said the weather was perennially spring-like, and the area hosted a number of American and Canadian expats. Mexico? Springlike? I closed the window on this obviously ridiculous article and went back to log cabin hunting.

But the description kept haunting me. See, my wife and I knew we wanted eventually to retire somewhere warm. I grew up in northern Indiana (South Bend), and the track of my life has been gradually southward and away from the snow. But we aren’t really beach types, and we don’t like high humidity. That’s why the Arizona/New Mexico area seemed about right, but we had lived near Fort Huachuca long ago, and it still got pretty cold. So perennial Spring was just too tempting to ignore. And the mention of expats meant there should be some way to verify the description. I started with a simple Google search for “expats” and “lake chapala.”

There was a wealth of resources: the Lake Chapala Society (LCS), a webboard owned by a local real estate company, several blogs, and something called Focus on Mexico which seemed to be a cross between a chamber of commerce site and a relocation service. Soon I was diving into the data available, and annoying the heck out of my wife. But that’s a story for another day.