We left Irvine on March 13 with the house newly listed for sale.
The timing was intentional. Rather than sitting at home worrying about showings and open houses, we'd be in Mexico while the broker did his job.
We flew to Cancún to meet Shirley's family and spend a little more than a week at an all-inclusive resort.
After weeks of getting the house ready for sale, it felt good simply to leave.
Back on the Road
The first morning, I sat on the balcony overlooking the ocean.
The house was still on my mind. There had already been showings, and I was wondering what kind of interest we'd get.
But mostly I noticed how quickly the stress had fallen away.
We were traveling again.
And it felt good.
I pulled up Google Maps and started looking south.
Belize.
Then perhaps the Cayman Islands.
Jamaica.
We didn't have to go home immediately.
Why not just keep going?
When I mentioned the idea to Shirley, she immediately started thinking about an appointment she could reschedule so we could extend the trip.
We didn't.
But the fact that both of us immediately wanted to was interesting.
Cancún
The resort itself wasn't particularly memorable.
It was spring break, and the place was crowded.
There was music pumping around the property. Lots of people. Lots of activity.
We quickly realized that this wasn't really our kind of resort.
Still, we had fun.
We spent time with Shirley's family, relaxed around the property and enjoyed being near the water.
And we ate a lot of ceviche.
This is funnier in retrospect because Shirley had always been adamantly opposed to things like sushi, poke or seared tuna because the fish was "raw."
Ceviche apparently occupied a different category.
She liked it.
A lot.
We didn't know it yet, but this was becoming part of a much larger expansion of what Shirley was willing to eat.
A Thousand of Our Closest Friends
One day we took a catamaran excursion.
The idea sounded great.
The reality was an enormous tourist operation involving what felt like a thousand of our closest friends.
It wasn't terrible.
It just wasn't us.
The experience became another little piece of information about how we liked to travel.
We were discovering that simply because something was a popular excursion didn't mean we needed to do it.
Rio Secreto
One excursion stood out.
We visited Rio Secreto, an underground system of caves and rivers south of Cancún.
We put on wetsuits, helmets and headlamps and made our way through the caves, sometimes walking and sometimes swimming through the underground water.
It was completely different from the resort experience and easily one of the highlights of the trip.
This was the kind of activity we enjoyed: getting out, doing something, and experiencing a place rather than simply being entertained.
"I Live Here"
A few days into the trip, something else occurred to me.
I was sitting on the balcony working on my book.
Ocean in front of me.
Computer open.
Nothing particularly vacation-like was happening.
And I had the thought:
I live here.
Obviously, I didn't live in Cancún.
But for that moment, I did.
I wasn't on a one-week escape from work before returning to normal life.
There wasn't an office waiting for me.
There wasn't a school waiting for Shirley.
I could sit on a balcony in Mexico and write just as easily as I could sit in Irvine and write.
And when we were finished here, theoretically, we could go somewhere else.
That felt different.
Ready to Leave
None of this meant we fell in love with Cancún.
Quite the opposite.
By the end of the trip, I'd had enough of the crowds, the noise and the all-inclusive resort experience.
My final assessment in the notes was wonderfully clear:
"I can't get away from this place soon enough."
So we apparently weren't ready to live there after all.
And that's okay.
The point of traveling wasn't to love everywhere we went.
Part of the fun was discovering what suited us—and what didn't.
What We'll Remember
We'll remember sitting on the balcony looking at the ocean and feeling the stress of selling the house begin to disappear.
We'll remember pulling up Google Maps and wondering whether we should simply keep traveling.
We'll remember Shirley immediately trying to figure out how we could make that happen.
We'll remember Rio Secreto.
We'll remember the giant catamaran excursion with a thousand of our closest friends.
We'll remember spring-break crowds and music that seemed to be everywhere.
We'll remember all the ceviche—and Shirley happily eating something remarkably close to the raw fish she insisted she didn't eat.
And I'll remember sitting on the balcony, working on my book, and having the strange realization:
I live here.
Would We Return?
Probably not to Cancún, and certainly not to this kind of all-inclusive resort.
There was nothing particularly wrong with it. It simply wasn't what we were discovering that we liked.
We preferred quieter places.
We liked walking and exploring.
We liked good local restaurants rather than eating every meal at a resort.
And we increasingly liked having enough freedom in the schedule to decide what we wanted to do once we arrived.
But Cancún was useful.
It gave us another data point.
We didn't have to love a place for traveling there to teach us something.
On March 22, we flew home.
The house was still for sale.
A week later, we got in the car and drove to Las Vegas to answer a different question:
If we sold the house, where exactly were we going to live?