I get asked quite often…how many more days? They’re all referring to the time remaining until Arlene arrives to join me here at Gran Pacifica.

Well today is the day she leaves Winkler and flies out tomorrow. I’ve mentioned many times it was bitter sweet to leave and when I spoke with her this morning, it was evident she felt the same. We worked hard to establish our little home back in Winkler and we loved living on 10th street with all the mature trees and large yards. But with retirement age creeping up, we felt we needed to make a move.

Latin America is starting to be a popular place for boomers to look in order to stretch their retirement dollars. Many of whom were hit rather hard in 2008. As most of you know, we’ve been fortunate to visit down here through our connection Patrick Hiebert, formerly from Plum Coulee, the town where we both grew up. Gran Pacifica was hit in 2008 as well, but it was one of the few resort/communities to survive and is now gaining some steam again.

We own a lot down here and our goal is to put a house on it that our kids can someday take over. When Patrick asked us to move here, I told him I’d need something to do. We went back and forth on that and settled on coming here to work for him and ECI Developments. Basically, I tell others what I’ve experienced here and invite them to come on down and see for themselves.

But back to the subject of this post. I had to come here alone to start. Arlene needed to finish up with the South Central RHA as it takes a couple of months when you hand in your retirement intentions for things to start rolling with her pension. So it’s been a lot of video chats, morning and evening. Thankfully, we have decent internet speed here so we seldom missed a session. It’s been the same with keeping in touch with Alex and Jacki. Alex and I used to meet every Monday for coffee. With his position at Mr Mikes, his schedule has changed, but I look forward to times when we can connect to catch up and talk things through.

With our previous trips, I tended to get all the details together and lead the charge. I’m not there to do that this time and it’s driving me crazy. I know I know, that’s not a drive…it’s a short putt…but I digress.

I have to trust that passports, tickets, boarding passes, gates, luggage etc etc all get looked after by Arlene and Jacki who is accompanying her on the trip. Trusting is such a hard thing for me to do at this point, but it’s just going to have to happen. I can’t fly out there just to fly back with them. It’s in someone else’s hands and whatever happens, happens.

Bottom line is I’m uber excited. Sharing this place with the one I love is beyond anything I could’ve imagined. We’ve never been apart for any length of time in what’s going to be our 37th year of marriage. So to say these past two months has been difficult is an understatement. Thankfully, I’ve been fairly busy during the day learning the new job, introducing people via the internet to our place in the sun. But the evenings get lonely.

Tomorrow that changes. I/we will still miss our family and friends back home, but at least we’ll now be able to do that together….

Cheers!