< Magazine Index > < Index For This Edition > < Subscribe >

Escape Artist Sandy Caputo lives in the historic Michoacan city of Morelia, Mexico, nestled within the Sierra Madre Mountains 217 miles west of Mexico City. Ignoring the whines and worries from some of her more timid friends and relatives, Sandy followed the call of the wild, climbed out of the rut of the rat race, and headed south to freedom. Harper Collins has her recently completed manuscript, Shortcut To Morelia," and aside from freelance writing, she does video scripting to also help make her life a reality. Additional Resources Living in Mexico  Overseas Jobs  Contact Sandy

It’s not as if I hadn’t thought about it.  It’s not even outside my character to say yes to adventure and change.  But marriage and kids and career had continued to smack me in the face with practicality as visions of myself holed -up on some foreign shore, scribbling away for a living like Hemingway or Fitzgerald, grew steadily dimmer.  I’d held images of that other self dear for so long that any of the hundreds of people I called family, friend, or colleague – over more than fifty years of living the good life in America – could have told you that’s what Sandy would really rather be doing.  And then, incredibly, I looked up one day and found myself staring at the possibility of realizing it all.  It was called Morelia, Michoacan, Mexico – some 1,700 miles from my Tucson, Arizona, home base and it had taken me all of about 24 hours of being there to pull back and say, hey, I think maybe my time has come! And, you know what?  It has.   I’ve lived here for almost a year and a half, now, and it’s as good as any of those earlier imaginings ever was. Morelia is one of those temperate zone Mexican cities like Cuernavaca, San Miguel Allende, Oaxaca, and Guadalajara that feature comfortably warm days and cool nights, year-round.   And its home state of Michoacan is one of the most beautiful in all of Mexico – featuring green, rolling hills, tropical vegetation, a variety of fascinating indigenous populations with an endless panorama of fascinating cultures, and sites that range from sparkling beaches to lovely 15th century architecture.  Michoacan's landscape stretches from the Pacific Coast to Mexico City, almost.  In fact, Morelia is located on the eastern edge of the state of Michoacan and about 200 miles west of Mexico City.

On the foreign shore of Casablanca, Cuba, good friends and fishing partners Ernest Hemingway and Fidel Castro enjoy the good life during the filming of The Old Man and the Sea.

It was July, 1999, and I’d been invited to this city of a million-plus people to write about it for the edification of the U.S. traveling public.  I’d taken advantage of a  break in a packed itinerary of sight-seeing to grab some rays by the pool at the small luxury resort of Villa Montaña – a place originally designed as a private residence for Tyrone Power.

There, high above the city, a rare sense of quiet settled over me and I began contemplating not only the slower pace of life that was so clearly evident, but also the obviously lower cost of living.
 

. .

My normal life consisted at the time of balancing the responsibilities of heading the PR efforts of one of Arizona’s most award winning ad agencies, being there for kids and grandkids, working toward a master’s degree in Gerontology (through which I’d intended to become a uniquely qualified marketer to that growing, moneyed market), and writing the rare freelance article for some magazine. This agenda normally translated to eighty-hour work weeks, five-hour sleep sessions, and a growing sense that it was impossible to accomplish everything – at least with the level of excellence I believed each separate thing deserved.  My income was good.  My work, stimulating.  My family and friends, important to me.  But the more I learned during my hours at the university about how we as a people are handling aging in America, the more I became aware that the rat race I was a part of was only going to get worse.

The new old , especially those residing in the USA, are more vigorous, more open to the pursuit of things fulfilling, and more likely to live twenty years beyond what even the most circumspect  financial planning had prepared them for.  My studies only made me realize that I was looking down a long road of continued need to keep doing exactly what I had been doing. Yikes! 

Thus the dawning that perhaps there was a better way.  Newly divorced and with a very tiny nest egg, I sat there by that pool in Morelia and began toying with the idea that I could, if I was careful and brave enough, risk walking away from security to gamble on making life work for me on a saner and more personally fulfilling scale.

I returned to my job from that freelance writing assignment and gave all those niches of responsibility in my life six months notice – a sense that such was the least each was owed preventing me from just never ever pulling myself away from Ty’s intended swimming hole. 

By then I had worked out a scenario that could keep me from dipping into personal funds.  I’d consult for the agency, I decided, and focus on building my writing output for various publications.  I’d, meanwhile, work on publishing a novel that had been for too long on a back burner and maybe even find the time to begin a book on what taking off on such an adventure can be like. 

I knew from my studies that untold numbers like me are out there – rapidly reaching the same conclusions as I about how replete the golden years are going to be with both danger and opportunity.  Hopefully, they would read about, if not actually dive into, what it was I was considering. Well, let me tell you how those early plans eventually materialized. 

Over those intervening six months of tying up loose ends, my boss moved from first saying consulting would never work from such a distance, to attempting to change my mind about even going, to deciding that maybe I should remain his PR director in a cutting-edge, virtual office capacity until I got this publishing bug out of my system.  I could travel back and forth when my physical presence was required for important meetings or managing special events and the like.  Our original agreement was that I would give this idea of escaping to Morelia a year or two and then return to what those in the States call normalcy. 

I couldn’t believe that good fortune.  In fact, I couldn’t handle it.  I felt so guilty about trading those long hours for peace, tranquility, rest, and the opportunity to pursue my own interests that I immediately proposed accepting less compensation in return for a guaranteed minimum workload of 30 hours a week .  This, so that I could maintain the company’s carriage of my health insurance. 

A word of advice to those of you who may be persuaded to follow in my footsteps: don’t fall victim to this impulse! 

Not only is health insurance, in my estimation and with some hands-on experience, not that essential a factor in constructing a foreign lifestyle support system – my particular agreement worked against my ability to accomplish what I wanted. 

The workload and subsequent compensation indeed sustained my meager needs in Mexico, but the hours went way beyond the 30-hour minimum requirement for insurance coverage and began interfering with my ability to act on my growing sense that a thriving freelance career was what was most essential to my long term future.

The trips back to Tucson kept somehow escalating from planned two-week periods to six, eight, twelve week-sessions during which I rarely had time to even hang out with my friends and family. 

My days at the computer on agency business, even when I was back in my newfound city with my newfound friends, were giving me a reputation as a work-driven gringa.    And I was beginning to get curmudgeonly about the disparity in my hourly worth in Morelia versus Tucson.
 

So I bit the bullet a year later.  Resigned my position.  Cancelled plans to return to the agency somewhere down the road.  Dropped that dream-strangling hold that relying on U.S. -supplied health and medical security had become. And how has it turned out?  Well, you’ll have to read subsequent installments, here, for the final results.  But I now have my novel AND a half-way completed book called Shortcut to Morelia with a major publisher and here I am, discovering more and more ways to gain writing assignments via the Internet that appear to be paying off. I’m back to that original proposal of consulting for my agency and my living expenses of around $1,000 a month are being covered nicely under that arrangement at about one-fourth the number of hours I was previously putting in. Stay tuned to see how this all plays out.  I’ll enjoy giving you insights on how one blends into a foreign lifestyle.  I’ll be honest about the good, the bad, and the unbelievably fantastic.  And I’ll share with you some wonderful things I’ve learned about traveling safely; dining anywhere without later regretting it; and finding those little spots where  fabulously authentic traditions and cultures open doors of understanding to why living in Mexico can be a freeing, rejuvenating, fascinating, and totally charmed adventure.

One Flew Over the Cuckoo`s Nest - Jack Nicholson