We have come a long way. When we began writing this blog five years ago (five years!), we had no idea how to write a blog (the very first posts are pretty bad, lol) and we had only a vague idea of when we were moving to Puerto Rico. We had a contract to buy a finca with 25 acres in the jungled outskirts of Lares, Puerto Rico and were just waiting for the paperwork to clear, a mortgage to come through, and ideas for income sources when we moved to appear.

At the first property we tried to buy

We thought, perhaps, within that year.

But things changed; the title work didn’t come through cleanly. The mortgage companies said it was non-comforming and in general it just sort of fell apart. In the mean time, we kept working and living in Colorado and as we thought about it we became more and more drawn toward the west side and the ocean. We looked and looked for properties and visited PR various times. We even put in another offer/contract on a place in Isabela/San Sebastain, before we finally found and bought our little slice of paradise in Rincon, Puerto Rico.

The Prize! 🙂

Now, we are finally on the verge of the big jump. We have worked out the kinks. In just about 100 days, we will have left all that we know -our friends, family, jobs, home- and will begin our new life, from scratch.

Now that we are in the home stretch, we have to close down our life in Greeley, Colorado. I am finding that this is much like attempting to unravel all the various roots and ties we have here. And they run much deeper and tangled than I initially thought.

We are still selling nearly everything we have. This has been a much more emotional task than we thought when we started. Everything we keep in our lives has some sort of reason for being there. Sometimes they are very superficial, and other times, they have huge sentimental and identity attachments, like Britton’s Corvette or my jewelry armoire that was a gift from BK.

We are also trying to detach from opportunities and work we have here. While we have to remain somewhat present to our current lives, we also have to know that we just can’t get too wrapped up in the latest and greatest new event. As it turned out, at my work, one of the grant programs (a cardiovascular health disparities program) that I coordinated just happened to end too. We had a nice celebration to acknowledge all the work we had done over the last two years on this program.

There’s going to be lots of goodbyes

We are also going through our to-do lists. Like doctors’ visits, vet visits, making accounts paperless, arranging places for our too-sentimental-to-sell, too-bulky-to-bring stuff, checking off our Colorado bucket list (and occasionally adding to it). We are planning our going-away party. I also had some information to share with Greeley chicken enthusiasts who want to know what the chicken laws are, so I finally wrote a page here about the rules for chickens in Greeley that I had been meaning to write for some time.

Sometimes we still get so busy in our day-to-day chores we forget what we are moving towards! It’s important to keep our eyes on the prize, but we also can’t be so forward looking that we miss what we are doing right now. This life-changing stuff has been a good practice for a lot of things. Mostly of balance and of letting go.

Letting go of our egos. Letting go of our stuff. Letting go of money and comfort and jobs. Letting go of our identities (somewhat). Letting go, moving on and making space for something new entirely. Sometimes we get profound insights on why we are doing this and other times we break down (probably mostly out of fear) and start having alternate reality fantasies of what our life would be if we just stayed in Colorado. And, of course, we know that it would be good and fine, because we love our life, but it would be, well, the same game. Rinse and repeat.

We have played the game here in Colorado. We have played the heck out of it! We are really good players. We have won this game. It’s time to collect that prize and start playing a new game. Watch out, world. Here we come.