More Mobile: Less Mobile? (Premium)

Last September, I wrote about my experiments with more mobile computing setups, and over time, I expanded that into a series of articles that described how I transitioned from a desktop PC setup to a portable PC setup and then took it on the road. I learned a lot during this, but more importantly, to me, I am surprised to report that I enacted real change. I now prefer this more mobile setup to what I had done before, literally dating back to my first PC in the early 1990s.

I’m still kind of amazed by that. But what I’d like to discuss here is the reasons for this shift and how that had changed over the past year.

Like many of you, I was impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic in ways I probably still don’t understand. I overate and overdrank, I lost sleep, I worried constantly for the safety and sanity of my family and my country, and I questioned everything. Including, of course, what was really important.

What one considers important will vary by person. But my wife and I had long planned to someday split time between two places, that someday being a vague future time when the kids were out of the house and we were free to become, well, more mobile. And the pandemic drove home the notion that someday could easily become no day because of fear and uncertainty. And that maybe it was time to start taking steps to make this future happen. After all, our kids were both in college at the time, and now, in 2022, our son is done with college and our daughter is about to finish her second year.

I spent a good chunk of 2020, that horrible year when travel was basically impossible, researching possibilities. For example, I looked at the so-called RV life because my wife and I had discussed possibly spending a year someday watching a baseball game in every Major League park and seeing the country that way. But after getting pretty deep into the specifics, and even looking at a few RVs, we both agreed that this life wasn’t for us. For many reasons, really, but it doesn’t matter.

As you probably know, we spent many years traveling to Europe, and from 2006 through 2019, we spent at least three weeks each summer there with the kids doing a home swap. Paris was, is, and will probably always be my favorite overall destination, but my wife has a preference for Barcelona, which I also love. And we have of course discussed and researched the possibility of moving to Europe or at least splitting our time between there and the U.S. But that was always going to be tough. Europe is incredibly expensive and there are serious immigration barriers. And since it was always in the future—someday—we never took steps in that direction.

So I researched that during the pandemic as well. And it just seemed daunting on so many levels. Plus, Europe doesn’t solve another issue that’s becoming more problematic as I get older: it has the same weather extremes that we’ve experienced in Boston and, more recently, in Pennsylvania. I can’t stand the cold, and I hate humidity just as much. Some of my favorite places—Washington D.C. and Paris, for example—suffer from both. And the compromises I thought I’d be willing to make to live in a place like Paris—a tiny sixth floor walkup with no air conditioning—are never going to happen, I now realize. I can’t do it. I won’t do it.

And so as 2020 shifted into the less terrible 2021, my wife and I started to think about what we would do, what we wanted to do. Vaguely, we figured that we might move around for a while at the beginning of this new more mobile phase, and then we would perhaps settle on one base where we’d spend part of the time, and then travel elsewhere otherwise. Or maybe we’d have two bases, ideally one in the U.S. and one internationally. Whatever. We’d figure it out. And job one was getting out of our expensive home in Pennsylvania, which we started decluttering and planned to sell as soon as this year.

But you know, things change. When we told our kids about these plans, we got some mixed reviews. Our son is already used to living away, but he likes to come home for holidays and events. And our daughter technically still lives with us when she’s not in school, though she of course ended up spending last summer away too, because that is what kids to do you, folks. Anyway, we agreed to adjust. Wait until our daughter, at least, has finished up school. See what happens in the interim.

(We also have pets to deal with. At one point, our daughter had agreed to take the cats and our son, incredibly, offered to take the dog, which is a huge time, effort, and financial burden. This didn’t make sense to us, and it still doesn’t. And while this may seem cruel, our pets are old, and we’re literally waiting for them to pass on before we do anything major, move-wise.)

In early 2021, I started researching Mexico. I wish I could remember what led me down that path, exactly, but my wife and I have often discussed visiting specific places in South America, Like Colombia and Buenos Aires, and it’s possible that it started with me looking at South and Central America. I don’t know. But at some point, I had that conversation with my wife that I wrote about in this past week’s Premium newsletter, which started with me saying, “You’re going to think this is crazy, but…” I had discovered Mexico. And it made sense.

Mexico had never been on my radar. When we lived in Arizona, I had visited the border area at least twice and thought it was disgusting. Our kids convinced us to take a winter beach vacation one year, and we ended up in Cancun, which I also didn’t like at all. (We later visited Puerto Rico on a similar trip, and I did like it there. Yes, I researched that in 2021, too.)

But looking at it with new eyes, I never landed on that one thing that made Mexico not make sense. It was affordable. It offered a range of climates, including that “Eternal Spring” thing I very much prefer throughout its interior. There are incredible historic and geographical places to visit, and incredible biodiversity and food. And there was Mexico City, a place that clearly rivaled Paris, New York, or London the more I looked into it. The “crazy” conversation starter came about because I knew that my wife, like me, and like most Americans, deeply misunderstood Mexico. And that there was something special going on there. We needed to see it.

And so we did. I’ve already documented this, but over the course of two trips in 2021 and then one in January 2022, we fine-tuned our approach to this country and came to understand that if we’re going to spend time here, it would be from a base in Mexico City. For many reasons. The consistent year-round weather. The centrality and ease of access to other places in Mexico. The non-stop flights from the U.S., which make getting there and back so much easier. And so on.

And then, unexpectedly, we came across an apartment at a time when we were very much not looking for such a place. This was the story I told in that most recent Premium newsletter, and what’s happened since is that we’ve come here again, met multiple times with our agent here, and with the developers of the property and a notary. And on Monday, we’re going to sign papers and give them a down payment. Assuming all goes well, we’ll be back in early April to finalize the purchase.

This is not what we talked about last year.

And this is not the future we expected when I started down this More Mobile path. I was expecting to move around. Now, we may end up having two places, one in Pennsylvania and one in Mexico City. We will still live in PA, and we’ll visit Mexico City, and then we’ll see where life takes us in the next two years or so. But for now, it’s not clear that a More Mobile setup is even necessary. I could just have a PC in both places, I guess.

But that doesn’t matter too much, in a way. I’m not going to change the way I work because, as noted, I like this setup. I prefer it. And I think the shift I made is still relevant and will make sense as time moves forward.

Assuming the purchase happens, for this year at least, our travel will be confined solely to Mexico City.  We need to furnish this place, get all the services (electric, Internet, etc.) going, and make it viable as a home. I can imagine duplicating my home computing setup there, but it’s unlikely I’ll leave a laptop there. Instead, I’ll travel with that.

Longer-term, we will use the apartment as a base to explore elsewhere in Mexico, and this setup will remain useful for that. If we spend a week in whatever place and I need to write or do podcasts, or whatever, I know what works. It’s smaller than our home—much smaller—and so we both won’t have our own offices. We have ideas about how that will work.

Even longer term, we’re not staying in our current house in PA. And whether it’s two years from now or whenever, we are still selling it. And so that is something we have to figure out. Will we move around the U.S. from time to time? I can see that. But we’ll cross that bridge later. Now, suddenly and unexpectedly, we have this new challenge to deal with. It’s exciting but scary. That’s life, I guess.

Anyway, we’ll see where this takes me. When we get home next week, we’ll no doubt start yet another decluttering push in Pennsylvania. I still have an office—and a house—to (mostly) empty, after all.