Hasta Luego

We came to Mexico with a pretty simple plan — hang out, visit family, live cheap, save money, get some projects done. It is hard, traveling and working for someone else, to carve out time for your own work and I had some work I needed to get done.

But sawdust in a hurricane has more permanence than our plans, so nothing we planned to do ended up happening. That’s how these things go. You adjust, tack as it were, and keep sailing. We loved our time in Mexico even if it didn’t turn out at all like we planned.

After I was laid off I went back to doing what I’ve always done, drumming up clients and writing things that made them happy. In my search for new clients I noticed my old friends at WIRED were looking for a full-time writer to do roughly what I’ve done for them on a freelance basis for years.

I applied. I talked to the editors. Some months passed. I talked to more editors. Then all at once I had a job and was hurriedly booking plane tickets back to the United States. While the job is remote, it involves products, shipping physical things to me. If you know anything about customs, you know that’s not something that’s going to work abroad.

We love Mexico, we’ll miss the people, our friends, our family, but this feels like the right thing to do, at the right time too.

The longer, more in-depth projects I’d like to tackle are still there. As I’ve discovered in last eight months, they’re projects that are hard to do without the stability of a regular paycheck. As a freelance writer you are either hustling all the time or starving. I dislike starving. A job with a steady paycheck eliminates the need to spend every free minute hustling up more work. It helps draw a line between work and play, giving you the time and mental space you need to tackle other things in your free time.

The last few days in town our friend Mike from San Francisco and a friend of his stayed with us. We showed them around as best we could while trying to pack up. It was good to get out and walk around town, show other people this wonderful little world we found down here. It also gave us an excuse to get out and visit our favorite haunts for the last time now, which always makes you see them differently.

Then before we really knew it we were stumbling up the street half asleep in pajamas in Elliott’s case, catching a cab to the bus station to catch our pre-dawn ride to Mexico city.

After scarfing a few tacos in the bus station and catching a cab over to the airport, we whisked through security and found ourselves climbing out of the smog, back to the United States.

There are plenty more stories to tell, and I do plan to get caught up eventually. Until then.