Gringos in Paradise An American Couple Builds Their Retirement Dream House in a Seaside Village in Mexico

CHAPTER 1 A Rainstorm...A Goodbye Party...Crossing Over Es usted norteamericana?Si, soy norteamericana. We are rolling across the republic to the soft droning of my wife's Spanish language drills on the car's CD player. My wife answers with the same exaggerated singsong lilt as the woman on the disc, and it is starting to grate on me. Certainly it is a credit to Thia that she is using our five days of driving to the border as a time to begin learning the language, but it has something of the same effect on me that songs tallying bottles of beer used to have when returning from camp. It is Election Day, and it is pouring sheets here in Ohio as autumn lightning crackles down onto the plains. When we pull off the highway to fill up, I see lines of people outside a school building, holding umbrellas or turning their collars up, waiting to vote. Thia and I have cast absentee ballots in our Connecticut town before leaving -- as it happens, I was in the college class between the two presidential candidates -- but if there is any astral, or political, sign in our departure, it is not of our making. The election results unfold for us in a motel in Ohio, where it continues to pour. We wonder, in passing, what effect the lashing rain might have on the voter turnout here. Thia and I resume our drive the next morning, and the weather clears. She puts on her Spanish drills again (yes, she is anorteamericana,but I cannot think of a time in Mexico in the next two years when we'll be called that), and we strike a time-sharing compromise: I am finally able to tune into my newest toy, a satellite radio. With 120 channels, it turns a long drive into a continuous sampling of music, news, and sports -- Mozart, classic rock, crooners of the thirties, Debussy, even a twenty-four-hour Elvis channel, plus NPR and the talk shows, all thrashing out the election results. Although we are on our way to simplify our lives, it will not be without some of our society's more useful technology. Mine is the first generation since the rise of the Internet and the technology boom to try out the expatriate life. We may not need our TV -- we have not brought along a set -- but wedowant our laptops, our DVD players, our iPods, our Wi-Fi cards. Our car is a midsize used Japanese SUV I bought recently on eBay. It is hardly a smart choice of car, since it is not serviced in Mexico, and it is not particularly economical or environmentally friendly. But it is a strong, rugged beast, and we didn't want to trade it in for a lesser breed; at least it is a four-wheel drive vehicle. Mexico, as we knew from a previous visit, offered ample opportunities to test a car's constitution. The topes -- vicious speed bumps that appear out of nowhere approaching towns and villages -- were enough to require reinforced shocks, and any detours could involve streams, mud, and rocks. It also had enough cargo room for the stuff we were bringing for a first year's stay in Mexico. Thia decided suitcases would only be a nuisance to store in the apartment we would be renting, and a pain to pack in the car, so instead we filled sixteen large steel-reinforced plastic trash bags with our (all-summer) clothes, our laptops, a printer, a fan, our flippers, a multitude of CDs and books, a stereo, and a foldable bookcase. By afternoon of the next day, in Missouri, we switch off the satellite radio in favor of an audio book of Mark Twain readings. As we have planned our rambling route, we cross the big river not that far from Hannibal listening to excerpts fromLife on the Mississippi.We are in no hurry to reach the Mexican border. We have traveled with our boys throughout the United States and in Europe, and always enjoyed the going as much as the getting there. To easterners, Europe seems closer than Mexico. In the East, our superficial image of Mexico is shGolson, Barry is the author of 'Gringos in Paradise An American Couple Builds Their Retirement Dream House in a Seaside Village in Mexico', published 2006 under ISBN 9780743276351 and ISBN 0743276353.