One year later ….

Our journey of our ‘next steps’ for this stage of our lives has been over three stages for the past year:

June – December 2013: We leased up our house and our office for several years. Three huge garage sales later and many trips to the Salvation Army, we loaded the most essential and sentimental stuff into a 16 foot container that’s being stored in Ventura.

December – March 2014: We said goodbye to our friends in Ventura and had the wonderful opportunity to stay with my brother, Toby and his wife, Judy in their spacious home north of Sacramento in the foothills of the Sierras.

March 1, 2014: Our daughter, Michelle married a wonderful Christian man, Jim, whom we love, in the San Francisco area. We also had a great visit with our son, Marc who flew in from Honolulu for the wedding.

March 2, 2014: Don and I flew out of SFO on the red eye for Mexico City to attend a CELTA course put on by Cambridge University, learning how to teach English as a second language. We’ve been staying in a Quaker/Friends guest house/hostel called Casa de los Amigos.

We’ve had a fabulous time here meeting many people from all over the world and hearing their stories and hopefully touching a few lives as well. The Casa is involved with helping people who have come here with their immigration needs as refugees. We’ve made good friends with a young man from Cameroon and a couple and her cousin from Iran. Others we’ve met who’ve come through the Casa for a few days or a week are from the States, Canada, France, England, Australia, Germany, Nigeria, and the country of Georgia. Our lives have been enriched.

June 14, 2014: Don and I successfully completed our CELTA course!! Yay!! It’s been excellent but brutal. To have completed the CELTA course is something to be proud of. Our tutors were master teachers. We’ve learned so much. We’ve said we’d love to (tongue in cheek) take the course again for the excellent teaching and apply what we’ve learned.

This week has been good to catch up on naps and other stuff and get my batteries recharged.

We plan to take some short trips to towns we’ve heard a lot about: Puebla – two hours south of here and Queretaro and Guanajuato – two hours north of here.

Our next big step will be learning Spanish in an intensive setting (thanks for Rosetta Stone Michelle and Jim!) and we’re looking into several options that are available.

We’ll keep you posted …