We’ve been looking for property in Puerto Rico again. It is kind of difficult for a few reasons. One reason being it is 3,000 miles away. The other is that the listings available are few and sometimes it is near impossible to get a hold of the realtor listing the property or if we do get a hold of someone they don’t follow up with more pictures.
Anyhow we are looking again and will make another trip once we see something of interest.
So I was over at the High Plains library here in Greeley the other day (a fairly regular occurance) and I was perusing their latest in new selections. I am always on the prowl for a good tropical book as you know, when I came across “Beautiful Maria of My Soul” by Oscar Hijuelos. I had no idea this was a sequel to his Pulitzer Prize winning “The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love” (which I hadn’t read or known anything about -maybe because I was 9 when it came out and his stories are a little, shall we say, adult in nature).
Anyway, I get all the way through the novel and fall in love with the style and story and find out that this is, indeed, the second telling of the same story, but told from Maria’s perspective instead of the Castillo brothers. It happens so often for me that I fall in love with the characters, setting and story of novels that by the end of the book I just want more…and this one has more, even if I do read it in a different order.
So today I went back to the library to pick up “The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love”… AND I also picked up the movie “The Mambo Kings” (starring Antonio Banderas) in old school VHS format (we’ll have to dust off the old VCR). I guess I have some reading to do and Britton and I have a movie for a chilly evening this week. Yay. Here’s a clip from the movie:
Have you seen the movie or read the books?
Tonight we took a short bike ride after work down the Poudre River Trail near our house. We stopped by where the big floods this year had taken out the bridge down by the dog park on “F” Street. They had fixed it and put in a new channel for the water and had taken out the old one that had been destroyed by the water.
They had left it standing on end and I thought it looked a bit like some sort of art sculpture. Then Britton noticed it looked just like a palm tree without leaves! The closest thing to a palm tree in Colorado -ha! I guess we’ll have to wait for Puerto Rico for the real thing!
A palm in Colorado?
Sure!
Britton and I have been having a lot of hardcore discussions that get to the heart of “what do we want to do with our lives?” Then we laugh and think, do other people have these strange conversations as often as we do? I have no idea, but I know that we’ve been having them a lot lately.
While our plans and ideas can change on a dime if an opportunity pops up (like a property with acreage in Colorado or a smokin’ deal on another rental), we think we have some semblance of a plan. So here goes. I think we are going to stay in Colorado working and saving for as long as possible (with the uncertainty of my job, that is one of the unknowns) until we have saved up enough to pay off another of our rental properties. At that point we believe we will be more financially secure. With all the news coming out of Puerto Rico talking about lack of employment and the consolidation of most of their banks into Banco Popular we think this would be wise. Plus, if everything, including housing prices, drop through the floor in Puerto Rico we’ll be better poised to jump on those opportunities.
So we’re not sure still on the exact ETA, but we do have an exact number in our head of how much we need to save up. And in this lanscape of unknowns, something exact is comforting.
We are getting another roommate here in Colorado and we really think we could make something similar (like a guesthouse) in Puerto Rico work out once we have our safety net of outside income locked in. We like meeting new people and know how to run rentals, so we think this would be ideal. Heck, if we can get people that want to live with us in Greeley of all places, you’d think Caribbean paradise would be a snap! So, onward and upward we go. Slow and steady and all that.