Our Piece of Paradise!

Our piece of paradise .. just steps from the beach!

It’s been a while since I posted anything, so I figured I’d take a few minutes to update ya’ll with what we’ve been up to. In my last post I mentioned that we were ringing in the new year in Luquillo, Puerto Rico and spending the month of January there to escape the cold in Louisiana. Yes, it gets cold in the South, and we weren’t spending another Winter on our boat!

Anyway, it’s now the beginning of May and ... we’re in Puerto Rico! To sum things up, we went back to our boat on February 1st and came back to Puerto Rico on March 19th ... to buy a house on the beach in Luquillo!

Some folks may wonder if we’ve abandoned our dream of sailing “Nirvana” to the Bahamas. After almost 10 years of working on our sailboat, we’re not giving up on our dream. In fact, we feel bad for leaving our beloved boat, and we plan to sail her South this October. We were so close to sailing to the Bahamas this Summer, but sometimes you have to grab an opportunity when it arises.

We didn’t plan on switching gears and buying a house in Puerto Rico, but we fell in love with the surfer town of Luquillo, it’s beaches, and it’s people. As luck would have it, a house was for sale two doors down from the Air Bnb that we were staying at! The house wasn’t listed, but our host (the best) knew the owners wanted to sell the vacant house and he got us inside .. just hours before our flight home. The price was right, we made a verbal offer on the way to the airport, and we flew back to buy the house 5 days after our arrival back in Puerto Rico.

Since then, we’ve been busy finding a vehicle to buy (wasn’t easy when not knowing Spanish!), finalizing the paperwork on our house purchase (it’s a little different in Puerto Rico), and starting a ton of renovations on our house. It’s been about 5 weeks since we bought the house, and we’re just getting started. The language barrier mixed with “island time” can make things difficult, but I think we’re finally making some progress.

I can’t wait to show you “before & after” photos, but that probably won’t be till around July. Until then, here’s a few photos of the outside. The color is pretty plain, so we plan on painting our concrete     

piece of paradise a bright, tropical color. If you notice in the first photo at beginning of this

post and the 2nd photo below, we’re just steps from the beach. The photo was taken from our front porch!

The blue house is a hostel, and we love seeing all the visitors pass by to enjoy the beautiful surroundings. It’s hard to believe this is our house! The second photo below is from our rooftop, which shows the ocean, the river, and the untouched wildlife refuge to our right. It’s pretty amazing!

Our house is just past the farthest tower (condos). See all the untouched area?! This is just a peek of the miles of beaches that we can walk. The opposite direction has a couple of restaurants, but mainly houses. We’re glad that the beaches haven’t been ruined by miles of high rise buildings!

Here’s the left & right view of the beach at the end of our street ... lots of horses! 

From the wildlife reserve, you can barely see our house on the right of the river, next to the white two-story house. The two tall condos are barely seen at front right of photo. 

The beach away from the reserve and towards homes and a couple of restaurants ...

There’s so much more to share with you, but I have to get back to work. If you want to see more, check out our Puerto Rico album on our Facebook page, and watch for more new photos daily. Now that the secret is out, I can share them with you! 

One more thing .. if you wanna check out our house yourself, we’ll be renting it out once we’re done renovating. We gotta go sailing! 

Hasta luego .. until then. Mid-Life Cruising!