Our Next Winter Home

Only another five weeks here in the DR.  The past five months have flown by.  We are sad to leave but also looking forward to what comes next.

We'll spend a bit of time in Florida....and plan to go to Disney World.  Just being in the US for a few weeks sounds good.  Funny things we've missed!  We both want a steak dinner -  beef in the DR compares to the US.  Mashed potatoes sound really good right now....no restaurants serve mashed potatoes.  And we need to do some catch up shopping for things we just can't buy here.

Then we'll head into Mexico and plan to be in the Lake Chapala area around May 3rd.  We know we'll head back to Kansas City for a month or so the first of September.  But what to do after that?  Well, we've decided!

In mid-October we will check into a casita at La Cruz de Huanacaxtle.....commonly referred to as La Cruz by most gringos for obvious reasons.   La Cruz is about 30 minutes north of Puerta Vallarta.  The link to this casita La Cruz House.  The owner was very sweet and gave us a great negotiated rate.  She didn't really want to rent to us past mid-December at the discounted rate as that would be her high season so we'll only be there for two months.  This little casita looks very comfortable and they welcome Hermann.  I've heard many good things about La Cruz so very excited to check it out.

In mid-December we'll take the ferry over to the La Paz area and have a two bedroom house rented on the beach.  Matt and I went to La Paz two years ago and really loved the area.  At that time we made connections with a realtor who specialized in property in the ex-pat area of La Paz called El Centennario.  We actually came very close to buying a piece of property then.  We got back in touch with this realtor about finding a rental home and she had a few options, but the ones that were most appealing were out of our price range and the owners didn't want to negotiate.  Matt actually found the house we're renting and he's very excited about it.  Here's the link:  La Paz house.  Again, this owner was great to work with and she gave us a great rate for a four month stay, so we'll be there from mid-December until mid-April.

We found both of these properties on Vacational Rentals By Owners website, www.vrbo.com.  We've used that site for vacation rentals before and it really seems to work out for longer term rentals as well.  We found the Cabarete condo we're in now on that site as well as the Lake Chapala house that we're headed to next.  Hope that all our experiences are this good!

And we're having a visitor!  My friend Cher is coming to see us on April 6th and staying for ten days.  I'm so excited to get to show her around this area we love so much!