Category Archives: Tropical

Getting Ready to Go to Puerto Rico!

Well we are within a week of our departure. We are getting everything taken care of that we need to so we can be gone for a few weeks in Puerto Rico!

We need to pack for swimming, caving, house closing, hanging out, hiking our 4 acres, going out to restaurants, repairing / fixing the house, rain, sun and of course the unknown of which there are many in Puerto Rico.

We need to make sure our animals are taken care of. In preparation for this we got a mega feeder and a mega waterer for the chickens (all 6 now).


5 gallons of water                                                15lbs of feed

We figure that should make it easier for us to take care of them all the time, and pretty easy for someone to chicken sit while we are away (hey, free eggs! Thanks Charlotte).

We’ve been listening to more reggae lately, I guess it’s part of the whole tropical theme..lol.  I am not much for reggaeton scene yet, but some of it I do like.  We also really enjoy old salsa music (oye Hector!).

It’s coming up quick! In less than one week, we’ll be in Puerto Rico ready to close on our house!

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Countdown to Encanto

We are about to start the countdown to Puerto Rico, La Isla del Encanto (Isle of Enchantment). In approximately one month, on May 21 we will be on our way. We are planning on being down there for 2 weeks and we hope to close that Monday or Tuesday. We have lined up an air mattress (thanks Rosa and Summer and Stefan for this!) and will be staying our first few nights with the Kruses.

We’ve also called to cancel the other deal. We wish that it hadn’t worked out like that. The place in Isabela was an excellent deal with nice land and house, and we had every intention of buying it. On the other hand, if we hadn’t signed the contract for that place, we wouldn’t have been so bold with our negotiating to get the deal in Rincon talked down by $170,000 from what it was listed, and $270,000 discount from its original price! So it seems that everything has happened for a reason- it’s just sometimes you can’t tell it when it’s happening real time. 


Our place will be sort of near the border of barrios Puntas and Rio Grande

Our lawyer David, a friend of the Kruses, is also willing to close in Rincon and has asked us to remind him to pull the title work the week before we close to make sure no last minute liens are placed.

We have our plane tickets to Aguadilla. We still need to secure the car rental and find out what the situation is with the water/electricity. I would like to talk with the current owners of the house and let them know they can leave the hammocks, books, etc. We would love to have them. I’d also like to find out the history of the place. When it was first developed, who the builder was of the wood house and the cement studio cabana, etc. Some of that we might find out from the title search.

In any case, there’s a lot to be excited about! We are scared and happy all at the same time. This is a culmination of a lot of hard work and focus. Britton always says, “Step one: buy a place in Puerto Rico”. Boy there sure have been a lot of steps to get to Step One!

So stay tuned! In about a month there will be some major activity…

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Puerto Rico…A Little Closer

Today we got a little closer to Puerto Rico. (At least figuratively, but perhaps actually since the earth moved a little off its axis after that huge earthquake in Japan.)

We applied for and were approved for two personal loans that will help to cover the difference in buying the place in Rincon. We have also bought our tickets to Aguadilla and back leaving the last week in May and returning early June (2 weeks). And thanks to the kind Kruses, I think we have a place to stay when we first arrive. I am so excited today that I just want to do it now! But I know we must wait, and so I have been keeping myself calm by reading all about the tropical plants we can grow there!


A cool Puerto Rican plant

I picked up one from the library called Growing Tasty Tropical Plants. I am ready to grow, cook with, and eat kumquats, guava, cinnamon, yerba mate, passion fruit, dragon fruit, and miracle berries among many other strange and delectable things. Hurray for gardening in the tropics! And hurray for all these steps that are helping our dream bear fruit as well.

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It Came to Me in a Dream

Well I guess it’s as sure as it’s going to get so here is the scoopWe signed a contract to buy a place in Rincon!

A few weeks ago while I was sleeping Jack  (Cassie’s Dad who recently passed) came to me in a dream.  We were in Puerto Rico on a sunny day on top of a hill.  It was on the west side of the island and I could see the ocean from where we were.  I don’t remember all the details about it but a few things stood out. 

  1. Jack was waiting for us in Puerto Rico or already had a place.
  2. The house reminded me of playground equipment for some reason.
  3. The place had an ocean view.

When I woke up I told Cassie about the dream.  I had been waiting for Jack to visit me in my dreams and he finally did!  I remember telling him something like: “Well if you already had a place in Puerto Rico why didn’t you tell us!!! This would have been so much easier!”

Fast forward a week…Maybe a week and a half.  A Realitor calls me while I am at work.  I met him in PR when I was down there last time and we looked at a property.  He said that the sellers of the property wanted to extend an offer/price.  They knocked $270,000 off of their inital asking price!   Well I told him that I’d have to ask Cassie, but I am pretty sure we would make a deal. 

Here are a few pictures of the place.  I have some video to upload later on too.  There is a main wood house, a small studio concrete guesthouse and 4 acres of land.

This place meets nearly all of Cassie and my criteria.  It is a perfect compromise really.  It has some land to move around/build on, it’s located in Rincon and it’s affordable.   We really like Rincon because it will be an easier transition to move to, there is the possibility of making our own rental/vacation home business there, and there is a lot of great events and things going on. When I looked at this place before I didn’t take it too seriously because they were asking so much.

The house is a wood treated place which is good and bad.  It’s good because we will have a place to stay while we are down there.  It’s bad becasue we are planning to eventually take it down and put up a concrete house of our choosing.  I like this though because it is more of a ‘pay as you go’ option.  We don’t have to take out a major loan, we can design it how we want it and it has something we can use now.

Both of us are SUPER excited about it, and even more certain that it is the right decision.  The down side is that we have a contract on the other place near Isabela.  We are going to break the news to that realitor soon that we had something totally unexpected come up that will prevent us from purchasing that property.   There isn’t much money on the line so it is something that Cassie and I are willing to let go and chalk up to the cost of the other place.

This place in Rincon is going to require a lot of work and improvements to make it what we want.  That’s fine though.  We are looking forward to the challenge (as we’ve done before with our rentals)! And in the mean time, we can enjoy the sunset over the ocean from our literal dream home in the tropics- which will make it all the more worthwhile.

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