Packing again....

Our six months in Barbados have come and almost gone, and it's time to pack again. Our adventure here was a lot of fun, but also took a couple of those unwanted and unexpected twists and turns along the way.

The bottom line is that we met some really nice people here - some who live here and some who winter here every year - and they want us to come back in the future. We were also able to meet up with some of our family and friends and have some quality time with them while they were here.

We also learned a lot from our experiences here and were able to do direct comparisons between Mexico and Barbados. Barbados is very expensive compared most other places in the world and people who want to enjoy living here long term will need to bring bags of money with them. There is an extremely high "up-charge" on everything that visitors need to buy to live here, especially if they want to live in the way they have been accustomed to in their homelands.

We lived on the west coast of Barbados for six months and I am sure we could reduce our monthly living expenses if we moved to the north part of the island (St Lucy Parish) or to the south east (St Philip Parish) - but then a car and related operating costs would almost certainly become a requirement.

And seeing as the Barbados Immigration Department is not handing out residency cards to people who rent an apartment, we would still have to deal with extensions of stay, or leaving the island from time to time and returning again to renew our visitor's status.

All that aside, we did have fun visiting many of the beautiful sites here on the island. We enjoyed learning about the history of Barbados and meeting so many kind people everywhere on the streets and in shops and restaurants. So, all of the information we have gathered from our stay will get stored away while we explore the next stop.

We're not sure how we are going to squeeze everything into those 4 suitcases this time as we bought more stuff than we should have here. Our bags need to weigh less than 50 pounds each so we will need to purge.

Some of the few small items that we did buy here were necessary to make our kitchen more workable, and our home more livable, but they won't fit in our suitcases. So, they will be donated to various friends and charities in the hope they will be of use to them.

We have been busy preparing detailed "to do" lists:

• one for downsizing and preparing to leave here,

• the other to help us to remember the many little things that need to be done or purchased when we return to Canada for 11 hours.

This is the final post (for this trip), from our time that we spent in Barbados, although we might have to update our post on Scammers depending on the outcome of vacating our apartment.

We will be boarding a plane and heading for Toronto, Canada on Wednesday, March 29. Please make sure you come back to check out our next bit of news sometime in early April, when we post an update from our new apartment at Grand Anse Beach.

So, off we go to Grenada to put up with even more sunshine, palm trees, white sandy beaches and perfect sunsets. We will be switching from Barbados rum to Grenada rum (we'll let you know how they compare), for sipping on a rum punch while we contemplate the intermittent need to replace flip-flops and tank tops when they wear out...

...the harshness of it all...again.