We kept thinking about Mazatlan the past few years and just could not make up our minds whether to stay in San Carlos or move. We loved our house and there is no place with better scenery and cleaner air than San Carlos, not to mention wonderful friends and a great community. However, we did not like the too small town and all of its’ infrastructure problems with sewage running into the ocean in many places and two cartels fighting a turf war. Too many people were disappearing and being murdered weekly. Policemen and women were being assassinated regularly. But our main problem was that living in San Carlos was like being stuck on an island in the middle of nowhere with no airport and our nervousness with driving anywhere. Then Steve developed some health issues that required us to drive 700 miles roundtrip to Tucson every 2-3 months. For the second time, we drove all the way to Tucson for me to fly to Houston for a checkup and my flight was cancelled. One of Steve’s tests was cancelled on another trip up there. Then a tech misread the results on a test requiring us to stay in Tucson an additional two weeks for another test to see if the first test was right. It was wrong thank goodness. It was back and forth, back and forth for that long drive and all the expenses related to it. We had had enough!

In February, sight unseen, I rented a small apartment in Mazatlan as a second home so that we could make a decision. But first we needed a way to drive to Mazatlan. Because we are now permanent residents of Mexico, we could not drive a US licensed car south of the area we lived in. I bought a used Mazda to drive to Mazatlan. But then we couldn’t get license plates for it because the factory that makes plates for Sonora was out of aluminum and no one had any idea when plates could be made. We waited and waited and still no plates. We had bought a small motorhome in 2017 and had a ten year permit on it which was valid no matter our status so we drove it to Mazatlan in April and parked it in front of the apartment.

By the next day we knew what our decision was.