February 2023: Waterfall Rappelling, Schengen Zones & Pre-Departure Jitters

The countdown is officially on! With February’s chill clinging to the air. We’re selling the house, brushing up on languages (well, mostly Spanish for now!), and strategizing our nomad retirement departure – it’s all part of the thrilling (and sometimes overwhelming) process of transforming our retirement dream into reality. This blog is our way of sharing the journey.

Random thoughts on a cold February day: I was today years old when I learned that ‘waterfall rappelling’ is a thing that exists. I was watching a video about countries where you can buy residency / passport and in the bit about Dominica they mentioned it. My sister-in-law confirmed they do it in Costa Rica as well and it’s fun. Hmmmm, gonna have to bear that in mind. I’m intrigued but have some trepidation

I’ve also just recently learned that one of my brothers-in-law is very interested in retiring to Costa Rica or Portugal because of the lower cost of living. He also has similar concerns to mine as to the state of politics in the US. 

Today I learned that my wife is developing a pretty serious case of short-timers disease as we approach the time to sell our house.  Pretty funny to me since when I proposed leaving in November this year she initially wanted to put it off for an additional year; now she’s hot to go, like, soon. I, on the other hand, am struggling somewhat with the ‘getting rid of stuff’ part of the process so, baby steps. I photographed all my Subaru and Harley Davidson branded shirts to post as available and started looking at donation programs for the ‘professional’ clothes I’ll be getting rid of. Looks like the local college has a program so I feel good about that

I also learned today that English is apparently widely spoken in Croatia. I’m excited about that because I started looking at some common phrases and Croatian is a tongue-twister of a language. Not crazy confident of my ability to become conversational in a year of occasional study. Since we’ve been working on Spanish I think we’ll be okay for casual conversation by this fall and Italian has some common roots so I wasn’t worried about being able to pick up enough to get around. 

I’m beginning to wonder if maybe we should do our time in Italy as stop #3 (April/May to June/July) and then up to England to finish out summer.  It’s hard to plan in 3 month increments to avoid anyplace they have an actual winter while minimizing travel expenses – once we hit Europe I’d like to stay at least a full year and that requires bouncing in and out of the Schengen zone. My original thought was 90 days in Croatia, then get out of the zone by staying in Montenegro for 90 days then 90 days in Italy and get back out of the zone by going to the UK but I don’t think we can avoid sub-50 degree temps with that routing. Still a lot of work to be done to get the scheduling right; it’s starting to look like maybe we do 2 or 3 segments in Europe then escape back to the Caribbean or Latin America for the winter months, LOL.

Between waterfall rappelling in Costa Rica, navigating Schengen zones in Europe, and my wife’s case of the pre-departure jitters, February is proving to be a month of unexpected twists and turns as we gear up for our mobile retirement adventure!