Breaking Away to the Sun

Taking off for a longer term visit has so many “to do” items involved. Linda and I have spent the last two weeks getting ready and marking things off our lists. Kobi joined Linda’s sister’s family down in Eugene, Oregon. That was once again a heartbreaker for both Linda and I. We just love that dog to death and when he is not around we notice that he is gone every time we do anything. We know he is well taken care of and that all will be well when we return but boy is it hard having him gone.

We went to the Verizon store to see if we could shut down our phones like we do every year. In the past, it has been a pain in the ass to get this done correctly, but we were able to save some money and therefore we put up with all the hassles.  At the store we worked with a young fellow for about an hour. We found out that Verizon had changed their policies on suspending phone service. We also found out that our contracts were up at the end of December.  

Once we put all this together we found that our best option was to leave the phones on and keep everything status quo. The new suspension policy made it so we didn’t save all that much and it would be a big hassle we didn’t need. We will keep the phones set in airplane mode while we are down south, and ignore the fact that it costs us for nothing this year.

We flew from Spokane to Seattle, leaving home on Tuesday. Then we stayed the night at the Doubletree next to the airport. Larry and Maggie, our friends that we drove down to Melaque with a few years ago, met us for dinner at Scharp’s Roastery. They were staying just a couple blocks away and ended up on  are on the same flights from Seattle to LAX and LAX to Manzanillo, MX with us so that will make the trip a bit more enjoyable.

The appropriate way to install a wireless router. 

Once we landed and cleared customs, Larry invited us to hitch a ride in their truck, the Frog, Gary had driven to the airport to collect Larry and Maggie and he packed us in and took us to the Casa Grande in Melaque. That was a great thing and we ended up arriving earlier than projected.

Our casa is in good shape and all is well. We went out for street tacos and returned to find that our neighbors had just arrived. Our group at the casa is growing and soon we will have everyone settled in.

The first thing I did was to set up all the various antennas, and routers we would use to try to get better wifi at the casa. Tim, one of our neighbors, explained a little about what had gone on with the Casa Grande wifi incident of the summer. I think the end result is actually a bit better wifi and with our new tools, we may not have the problems we had last year.

Antenna adds to the look of the casa, don't you think?

Our contribution to the wifi solution is and antenna, and a small wireless router. I have provided some photos; I tried my best to make everything look as Mexico-ish as possible.  Once everything was up and running I connected to the final part of our internet solution puzzle. Before I left a good friend of mine, Steve Taylor, helped me set up a VPN (Virtual Personal Network) using our router at home.  Now we can connect via the VPN and have much more internet security while we are away.

The bottom line is we are safe in Mexico, in our casa, and we have a reasonably good internet connection.  What else do you need in life?