We decided to keep our wonderful little house in Silver City and rent it out. [Silver City is a funky, fun, high-desert place to live in the far SW corner of New Mexico. If we decide to return to the States, we would be happy to live in SIlver City; we loved our three years there.] We decided to sell everything - and we did, except for a few things we put in a small storage unit - which will cost us $360 a year - something I said I would never do, it being (to my cynical mind) such a crass consumerist materialistic thing to do (!) done by millions of people: stuff, stuff, stuff and more stuff! Maybe I'll start a storage unit business ..... like products for old people and booze, it is lucrative and will have a big clientele for a long time to come barring a complete economic/political collapse!
Being an accomplished procrastinator, Dennis and I were taking the last few things to storage an hour before we were to leave! I have learned to "go with the flow" on this: I really do work better under pressure! Much of the process was fun; we had Estate sales and plied people with wine and other drink, and we sold things on the street for a few days and chatted with people. Now lots of people have our stuff, and there are many houses of our friends with things that will remind them of us, and us of our former possessions if/when we visit them!
Have you ever heard of an apostille? It's a protocol that authenticates documents if you need them for other countries ..... though of course Canada does not participate in the Protocol, so I couldn't get my birth certificate apostilled. [That may cause some problems.] We had to get documents verifying our monthly income, and we had to have police reports from the NM State Police, and our marriage licence (which is not recognized in Catholic Ecuador, but which they will accept as proof of our domestic partnership which, laudably, Ecuador has) affirming that we were not criminals. Everything has to be notarized. One gets the records from the appropriate bureaucrats; then sends them to the Secretary of State from which they originated, who "apostilles" them. THEN you have to send them to the Ecuadorian consulate, and they issue appropriate documents authenticating the apostilled documents .... and of course mucho dinero changes hands at every level!! We finally got the last needed things on Dec 2, and we decided to leave on Dec 9. I won't go on ..... but it worked, and we bought our Business Class One-Way tickets [Yippee; first time we have ever done that and it was great!] and after 4 nights of little sleep worrying about what could go wrong with the weight of bags, immigration officials, etc., we sailed through everything and our driver brought us to our lovely house in the San Miguel area of Cotacachi. A lesson relearned about Worrying accomplishing nothing! [The only point of Worry is to get one to ponder what alternatives there might be if Plan A fails.] So: enough of this. WE ARE HERE! We have rented a wonderful house - BIG! - for a year. Now to live in a new setting, learning a new language - I can manage so-so with the basics, but I intend to get much better!
Here are some pictures: This is our view from our front gallery [the Quebec word for a porch when I was a boy]. Cotacachi is right on the equator, so flowers and vegetables etc grow all year round. To the right is Mt. Imbabura, an extinct [so I'm told] volcano to the southeast. The Cotacachi volcano is to the northwest.
And here's the fountain in our back yard. The back yard, planted with fruit trees, is big enough for Queen Elizabeth to have a Tea for 500 people!
Here's Dennis in the kitchen ... all marble, as are the bathrooms, which have huge showers and the Master Bath a tub big enough to do laps in!
Our "neighbours" out the windows are Maria's cows! Rather thin, but they smell great as they are fed on grass!
So: more later. We live in a gated community. Our mentors, Patrice and Dave,who used to live in this house until they built their own, have been terrific, getting us acclimatized, where to find things, etc.
We are looking forward to our year in this wonderful new place, and once we get our Permanent Resident Visa (6-8 weeks), we will begin to travel, exploring Ecuador and other South American and Central American countries ..... though we may take 10 days of loafing on Santorini in May.
Cheers! Dennis is roasting chicken with fresh carrots and onions, and we are imbibing Chilean white wine ..... just fine, as we have uneducated and unsophisticated tastes, thankfully in line with our beer-budget level!
