Time flies when you're having fun

Wow! I can't believe we are very soon heading back to Canada after almost six months in Puerto Vallarta. Where has the time gone?

We need to make the trip north to visit family and friends, get updates from our eye doctors and family doctors, pick up a new batch of meds, and generally just cause a ruckus in Canada before heading back to Puerto Vallarta again. I am hoping that Jenny and Christine will be cooking a ham or a turkey while we are there for Easter...... hint, hint....

I think I might even pick up one of my guitars while I am there and bring it back with me so I can try to get my fingers back in shape again – it's been a whole year since I played anything.

We have come to know Puerto Vallarta very well in the time we have been here. It's actually amazing how many friends we have here – we have met more friends in the last 5+ months than we had in the last 5 years that we were in Vancouver. We are certainly having a great time now that we have sorted out our shopping and entertainment needs. We both agree that we have everything we need here – many places to shop, awesome places to eat and lots of fun stuff to do.

We are very happy to have found some great restaurants to enjoy the occasional favorite meal – one of our top choices is Seasons PV. The Manager (Barb) and Executive Chef (Lori) live in our complex and we have become friends with them. They opened Seasons PV at about the time when we moved to PV, and we were the first to do a Trip Adviser review. The food is a tasty mix of north American and Mexican cuisine and we go there whenever we can (whenever Cyndi says we can).... :-)

Other top spots that we frequent are Langostinos, Los Muertos Brewing Co, Polo's Restaurant, Mi Cafe, El Barracuda, El Rio BBQ, Cuale Paradise Restaurant (for shrimp), Cafe Roma, El Escondida Sports Bar; Que Pasa Restaurant and Bar, and of course Costco hot dogs when we shop there. :-)

The next six months will be the best indicator for us regarding a long term relationship with this city as everyone says it is unbearably hot here for many months starting in July/August. We'll soon see.

As the kick-off to our retirement "adventure" we set out to spend one year in PV. We have therefore started to ponder where the next leg will take us when we round the corner in the calendar to September again. We had originally hoped that we could head into the Caribbean to check a few spots there - time will tell – the US/Can $$ exchange rate is starting to improve for us Canadians and I hope it continues to head in that direction.... I am updating my spread sheet to input the latest info from the many source websites I have tagged, and hopefully that will help us to focus on potential options to explore for our new home. I have also added many more line items and several Countries / Cities to my spreadsheet. There are now 16 places that I have studied and scored based on what we are seeking for a retirement home. A few interesting (and telling) line items are the consumer price index comparison; the "corruption index" for countries; inflation rates; crime rates; poverty ranking for countries; and the environment performance score for countries (this is for Cyndi as her asthma is inflamed with pollution). It's interesting to compare these with data for Canada.

Anyway, for now we are happy to be here in Puerto Vallarta and we have a daily toast to each other: “to another great day”. :-)