I am the only cat in the house with all of my teeth. Which is good, because I need my teeth for my two favorite activities: eating and murder.
When I get stressed, I like to use those teeth on Kaylee and Noxie when they come close to me. And I also yawn, which is really, really cute, apparently. And I can show all of my teeth.
This morning I chased Kaylee all around the living room and I think we knocked some stuff over but I really don’t care.
And then I jumped Noxie, and I jumped on him and wrapped my claws around him, and then I got shoved away by my mommy’s big foot.
But what am I supposed to do? All these boxes and paper and everything moving around and mess everywhere is making me really anxious.
And I like to relieve my anxiety with murder.
I lick
Look at my shiny teeth
My trophy from Kaylee
Ellie Smoit, the Adventure Cat, is chronicling her journey from her house in Colorado across the United States and to Mexico, with a little help from her owner, Lexie Greenawalt.
I’ve read about people jettisoning everything they own and moving to Mexico with just a couple of suitcases and a dream.
Other people pack all their things up and have professional movers transport them to their new, permanent home south of the border.
We belong to a third category, one we are inventing.
The Third Category
We love our house and its location in Colorado. We also realize that we won’t be able to travel forever, and its one-level, ranch-style living will be perfect for aging in place someday. Therefore, we plan to come back at some point. In addition, our kids aren’t out of college yet, and they will want their things when it comes time to move into their own places. So we are keeping the house and renting it out to friends. This decision means that we don’t have to get rid of everything. However, it does complicate things by forcing us to decide what we’re going to take with us and what we’re going to store for an extended period of time.
This is where our stuff will live
Filling a Truck
Since we have a truck, we decided to purchase a topper for it so we can take more with us, particularly since we’re also traveling with three cats and Lexie for the first year. At this point, we’re hoping we can get everything we want to take into the truck. (More on how that goes when the time comes.)
Storing the Rest
In the meantime, we’re left with deciding what to put into storage. That’s been difficult for several reasons. First, both and Lisa and I “collect” things. Not necessarily formally collect things, although I do have some stamps and coins that I collected when I was a kid, but more along the lines of accumulating things and keeping them on the off chance we may want them later. We had accumulated so much stuff that when we built the garage at our current house, we had to make it extra big so we could store all of this stuff.
Purging
We fit all our stuff in 3 of these. We are trying to cut down to 2.
Knowing that the more we store, the more a larger storage space will cost each month, which could produce a very large bill over many years, we realized we need to undertake a purge. Actually, it is more like a pare-down. It is my goal to pare down by one-third. I have a decent idea of what that looks like, since when we moved to Colorado in 2009 we moved everything in three 8’ x 8’ x 16’ PODS. Therefore, I’d like to reduce what we store by the equivalent of one POD, or 1,024 cubic feet.
Working backward from that number would require us to rent a 2,024 cubic foot storage unit. We’ve rented a 10’ x 20’ x 11’ (2,200 cubic feet) unit so the math works out. All that leaves is the pare-down. More on that later.
I can fit in them. I can fit in all sizes of boxes. It doesn’t matter if I can’t technically fit in the box.
I love boxes.
More boxes have been coming into the house. Some have crinkly brown stuff in them. It makes fun noises when I jump into it and play with it.
Sometimes Noxie and Kaylee want to come into my boxes. But no! They are MY boxes! I will kill them if they try.
I love boxes.
Inspecting
Well, I also like bags
Bubble wrap is fun, too
I’m keen on books
I really love books
I don’t care how small they are
Ellie Smoit, the Adventure Cat, is chronicling her journey from her house in Colorado across the United States and to Mexico, with a little help from her owner, Lexie Greenawalt.
Today everything fell into place for Phase 1 of the Mexico adventure. We sat down and planned it out, and then we took action!
Step 1: Figure out our dates First we looked at the calendar and Google Maps and figured out how long it will take us to drive to Guadalajara, Mexico, from Harrisburg, PA, where we will be visiting Grandma for the Christmas holidays before embarking on our adventure. We argued a little about whether the Mexican portion, after we cross the border at Laredo or McAllen, TX, should be done in one day or two, and finally decided to wait and see how the traveling went. (but we found a cat-friendly midway hotel just in case.)
The arrival date will be Jan. 10 or 11, 2019.
Step 2: Sign up for Spanish immersion classes
First I booked us for two months of four-hours-a-day Spanish immersion classes at the Guadalajara Language Center. They teach from 8:45 AM-1:30 PM, Monday through Friday, with a half hour off for lunch. Only $680 a month! They also have excursions to show you the area and give you a chance to study your Spanish, as well as opportunities to volunteer in the community.
Step 3: find a place to live
House La Holandesa
Next, I booked us for three months in a four-bedroom house in Tlaquepaque, in the southern suburbs of Guadalajara, Mexico’s biggest city, for a ridiculously low $850 a month. (that was through the foreign language school. the same property is $137 a night on Trip Advisor!) So lesson #1: Book local.
It’s called House La Holandesa. It’s in a gated community. The house has plenty of room for us all to spread out, even when Aryk comes home on Easter Break from University. It has a nice looking kitchen with granite countertops and stainless steel appliances, and a guest room! The most important amenities, though, are a parking space, and cat-friendly.
The house is about a ten-minute walk from the center of Tlaquepaque and 15 from the language school.
So we have a language school, we have a home. We have a plan. Now we are really getting excited!
Right now it seems like half my possessions are in the recycle bin out by the road, in an overflowing box in my office ready to go out to the recycle bin, in a trash can, in the living room of a local college student’s first apartment, or for sale at a local thrift store.
Going, going, gone
We plan to rent out the house while we’re traveling. That means our stuff will go into storage. A 10-by-20 storage facility costs $160 a month to rent. And it will probably go up every year. So do the math: If we are going to be gone 10 years, it will cost more than $20,000 to store our possessions. If a 10-by-25 costs 20% more per month, that’s $4,000 more to store our possessions.
Tens of thousands of dollars for stuff to sit in a dark, climate-controlled concrete cave for who knows how long.
So logically, of course, it makes sense to pare down, to take stock and keep only what we really need or want, and jettison the rest. It’s only stuff, right? We are going to learn to live without all these things around us and travel light for our adventurous life.
We made a lot of great memories in this pop-up
We have entered the Purge Phase.
The trash men
I know the trash men really hate us. Our purging creates giant piles of trash every Friday morning. They’ve stopped bringing the trash can and recycle bins back up to the garage and are just dumping them sideways in the driveway now, clearly disgusted by our garbage excess.
Giving it away
A college student at CU Boulder moving into her first apartment now has one of our coffee tables. The Grove Sale, a huge annual church yard sale for charity, got the wood-and-tile table and chairs, extra performance bike, office chair and more. ARC, the Thrift Store on Colfax, is getting tons of clothes. A charity bookstore has been the grateful recipient of 15 boxes of books.
Sad to say goodbye to this Wurlitzer
Next Door, Craigslist and Facebook Marketplace are my new best friends. Even a cat-clawed living room chair can find a grateful home if it’s free.
But oh, the pain
But when you’re getting rid of it, that’s when you realize how much meaning your stuff has, and how painful it can be to let it go.
Keeping: The gray cat mask Lexie made in art class in 4th grade. I can’t get rid of it, even though she thinks it’s really ugly. The bust Aryk crafted in art class in high school. The Boparder Hamm wine bottle from Germany.
Ditching: The arts and craft stuff. The giant L-shaped couch. The glass-topped dining room table from Bob’s life before me. The piano I bought from a pastor friend that used to live in a church I loved – pianos don’t keep well in storage. But damned if it doesn’t hurt to think of the hours our oldest child Aryk spent learning to sing while their teacher BJ played that piano in my living room.
But I will NOT miss this dining table!
My youngest daughter Lexie is better at this purging stuff. She had a huge smile on her face as she filled five boxes with kid and young adult books for a local nonprofit bookstore’s donation pickup. Bob also shoves books aside with nary a sigh. But I stroke each one lovingly, reminisce about the feelings evoked by the story within, and then sadly place it into the recycling box.
Sigh
So the bookshelves are mostly bare. The travel maps and books from all the journeys I’ve taken, both with Bob and before Bob are gone. The articles I wrote for a church where I worked 10 years ago have been recycled. The popup where we camped as a family all over Colorado was sold to happy family who are ready to start their own camping traditions.
The good news is the regret is gone within a day, and now I feel lighter. And really, we are doing our kids a favor. They won’t have to sort through a lifetime worth of junk when we die, because we’ve done a lot of the work for them already. OK, it’s a morbid thought, but a practical one.
I just left my office at Evergreen Park and Rec District for the last for the last time. I feel really sad. There’s a pain in my stomach.
I’ve never before left a job that I still loved.
Last night there was a farewell party for me. I had to get a picture with everyone I cared about – Liz and Laura and Marissa and Ann Marie and Heart and Heather and Jason and more. Before I left today, I printed out some of the pictures, wrote personal notes, and left them on their desks — just saying thanks for making work here such a wonderful experience. I hope I will be remembered with affection!
Then I drove (choking back tears) out of lovely Evergreen, with its elk and its mountains, its iconic lake and its charming old west downtown, and hundreds of familiar faces, many of which I will never see again.
I know I’m going forward to the next adventure, and the next phase of my life. But wow. I have to get through all this emotion first.
There’s no getting out of it. I just have to feel it.
We’re about to start an adventure. We don’t know where it will lead. It actually took a fairly extensive conversation just a few days ago to even reconstruct the evolution of how we got to where we are now.
I remember first starting to think about what it would look like when our kids graduated high school nearly 12 years ago when we lived in Mamaroneck, NY, just outside New York City. At the time, we lived in a 2400 sq ft house which, even then, had yearly taxes of $15,000. We saw the school district continue to raise taxes and saw that this forced some lifelong Mamaroneck residents from their homes as they could no longer afford the taxes. We realized then that we couldn’t afford to live there once we stopped working so began thinking about what we might do when that time in our life arrived.
Our Lake House in central Vermont
At first, our plan was to go live in our vacation home in Vermont. However, after thinking about that for a few years, we both came to the realization that we wanted more than that, and living in rural Vermont would be pretty boring, and colder than we would want at that stage in our lives during the winter.
By the time we moved to Colorado 8 ½ years ago we had already begun thinking about “hitting the road” in retirement. We began talking about buying a big RV and a big truck to haul it. We talked about traveling the country, exploring and seeing many of the great places that exist in this country. We talked about spending up to a couple weeks at each location, being in the south in the winter and north in the summer. We talked with people about what it would be like to spend the summer in one location and be camp hosts. We even talked about being seasonal Amazon workers. We looked at RVs at RV shows and found some that would work for us.
I was excited about that plan. I had a goal of visiting every national park and hiking and exploring every day. I thought we were set. All we needed was for Lexie to graduate from High School, go off to college and we would be off too.
A book changed our direction
That all changed a year and a half ago when Lisa went to the library to get some travel books for an upcoming trip to Belize. She came back with the book “The International Living Guide to Retiring Overseas on A Budget.”During the exceptionally rainy vacation inBelize, I read the book and immediately told her she needed to read it too.
From that moment our “set” plans changed. We realized that we could expand the traveling and exploration we had planned for the US to the world. We realized that we could really get to know parts of the world that people usually rush through in a few days and we realized that there were just so many places that we wanted to experience. We also realized that if we explored the world while we were still young, we could still come back to the US and explore it in our RV.
That’s it, we’re doing it. Our oldest child Aryk is off at university in England. Our youngest child Gavin has just graduated from high school. Rather than be empty nesters, my husband Bob and I are stepping off the treadmill and hitting the road to spend the next decade or two exploring the planet.
The family in London
Our oldest child Aryk is off at university in England. Our youngest child Gavin has just graduated from high school. Rather than be empty nesters, my husband Bob and I are stepping off the treadmill and hitting the road to spend the next decade or two exploring the planet.
We are relatively young and healthy, and the stock market has done good things with our investments over the last few years. So we are renting out our house just outside Denver, putting our stuff in storage, and packing up a few suitcases, three cats, our daughter (for a gap year) and our musical instruments and heading south of the border to explore Mexico for the next few years. We plan to spend three months at a time in different communities, mixing up cities, mountains, coast and historic pueblos, to really get beyond just a taste of this glorious country.
I know people think we’re crazy. Whenever I tell them the plan, they look at me uncomprehendingly.
Why are we doing this?
Because travel opens your eyes and heart in ways nothing else can.
Because meeting all kinds of different people expands your horizons.
Because learning a new language stretches your mind and keeps your brain supple.
Because settling in one place forever feels limiting.
Because the ocean is beautiful and the mountains are glorious.
Because thanks to social media we can stay connected to old friends and dear communities while we make new friends and create new communities.
Because Mexico has a low cost of living and high quality of life.
Because … salsa and mole sauce.
Because … bougainvillea and pelicans.
Because … waves and reefs.
Because … whales and dolphins.
Because … ruins and festivals.
Because … the Day of the Dead and Three Kings Day.
Because … tequila and mezcal.
When we’re done with Mexico, we plan to move on to Central America and South America.
When we’re done with Central America and South America, we’ll give the cats back to the kids, ditch the truck, fly across the pond (Atlantic Ocean) and begin exploring the rest of the planet.
Because life is short. And the world is big. Join us on the adventure!
I know people who have lived in the same place their whole lives. Most people, I suspect. My high school peers. Friends from childhood. People in my church, who tell me stories of their parents taking them to the same church when they were young. I have one family of seven cousins who have all settled down within 20 miles of their childhood home outside of Harrisburg, PA. I don’t know if any of them has ever journeyed any farther afield than the Jersey Shore – or even wanted to. I often envy their closeness, their sense of community. They are there for each other’s weddings, baby showers, Baptisms, every birthday, every Christmas, every Thanksgiving. They never miss. They know every street in their community like it has been tattooed inside their brains.
But that’s not me. That has NEVER been me.
A nomadic childhood Some of it was by circumstance. The fact is, I never even had a chance to live in one place my entire life. My dad was an accountant for GTE (and various evolutions), so by the time I was born, Number 3 of an eventual eight kids in an Irish/Italian/German/French, very Catholic family, the brood had already moved a couple of times. I started life in Williamsport, PA, my parents’ hometown, but only after they spawned their first couple of kids while living in New Cumberland, PA. We were in Billtown long enough for my parents to have me and my brother Michael before we were on the road again.
Warren, Pennsylvania. Syracuse, New York. Littleton, Massachusetts. Higganum, Connecticut. Mt. Laurel, New Jersey, where I finished high school and went off to Glassboro State College (now Rowan University) in South Jersey.
A nomadic adulthood
The first time I made the choice to move, as opposed to being moved, was after I graduated from Glassboro with a degree in mass communications and my parents announced that they were moving again, this time to Vienna, Virginia, outside of Washington, DC. The opportunity to launch my broadcasting career in the Nation’s Capital was so compelling that I went along.
DC was beautiful
I got a job in the news department of WMZQ, a Top 40 country radio station, and then at the Associated Press, which was the largest news organization in the world. As soon as I saved enough to move out of my parents’ house, I moved into DC, and then to Arlington, VA. Living in Washington was a fascinating experience, but I found a culture of pursuit of status and government bureaucracy a bit stultifying and champed at the bit to leave.
Traveling woman I started traveling. I visited San Francisco, England, Scotland, France and Switzerland. I backpacked through the Loire Valley and southern France. I joined the Ski Club of International Journalists and skied in Colorado, Italy and Spain.
Turning point
When I was 30, I decided it was time to pursue work abroad. An opening came up on AP’s World Desk in New York, the news agency’s way station to becoming a foreign correspondent. I considered a stint in New York a necessary evil to reach my goal – it would be crowded and loud, all skyscrapers and their shadows, with no nature in which to recharge. I would hate it.
Instead, I fell in love
I fell in love with Central Park
God, I loved Central Park
From the moment I arrived in NY, I was hooked by that dirty, cacophonous, unpredictable, multicultural, over-the-top, awe-inspiring city. I could almost feel the creative pulse flowing into my body through the soles of my feet the moment they touched the ground at Penn Station. When I went for my first glorious run in Central Park, I almost flopped into the grass on the Great Lawn weeping with joy. Something inside me was opened up. The world got bigger. I got the job, and the Upper West Side of New York became my personal nirvana. Three and a half years later, I was posted to Puerto Rico as a foreign correspondent covering the Caribbean islands. I had finally done it!
But oops, love Alas, love interfered with my “travel the world” dreams in the form of Bob Greenawalt, a fellow adventurer whom I met a few months before I was posted to PR. Bob also had lived in many places, including Germany, while serving as an officer in the US Army. He followed me to Puerto Rico, but there was no work for a high-powered IT consultant on that perennially depressed island. So after a couple of years we returned to NYC, a city we adored that offered employment for us both.
We got married and started a family. The adventure of parenting two gifted, autistic kids kept our feet on the ground for a while.
But after a decade or so in Manhattan and nearby Mamaroneck, the 2008 recession hit and Bob lost his job. We packed up the kids and the cats and headed across the country to the rugged mountains and of Colorado.
And that’s where we’ve been for almost 10 years. We’ve cycled up mountain passes, camped beside lakes, skied down black diamonds, hiked 14ers and drunk our fill of what this state has to offer. But the last kid has graduated from high school, and the next adventure awaits.
Posted by Lisa Hamm-Greenawalt
