The Journey Begins

“If you don’t get lost, there’s a chance you may never be found.” – Anonymous

For years, I yearned to travel and live abroad. The dream began when as a college sophomore, I earned a scholarship on the University of the Seven Seas. During my semester at sea, I studied on board ship as I sailed around the world, periodically landing at foreign and exotic shores. 

My journey took me to Lisbon where I visited a Fado nightclub, Barcelona where I marveled at Goudy's Sagrada Familia, Marseilles where I peered out over the Notre-Dame de la Garde at the Chateau D'lf, Rome where I stood in awe before Michelangelo's statues of Moses and La Pieta, Athens where I strolled around the Parthenon and looked down on the Theatre of Dionysos, Istanbul where I stared in astonishment at the bejeweled forearm and skull of St. John the Baptist, Cairo where

I traversed the sands of Giza riding up to the Sphinx and Great Pyramids on a camel, Mumbai where I scanned trees for funeral biers as vultures picked at their bones, Sri Lanka where I delighted in shadow puppet theater, Bangkok where I sailed on a royal barge to the Temple of Dawn, Hong Kong where I stared up at skyscraper jungles, Tokyo where I watched with rapt attention as whiteface actors performed Kabuki theater, and finally Honolulu where laborers loading bananas on a truck gave me a bunch before we left and sailed back home to Los Angeles.

These four months traveling around the world gave me brief exposures to new cultures and distant lands sandwiched in between days at sea and I promised myself I would one day return and drink more deeply from these and other cultures. Alas, it was not to be. Life intruded and apart from a three week trip to England ten years later, I never made it back overseas for any substantial length of time. 

Over the years, I had done some foreign travel, Paris, Kyoto, Buenos Aires, Puerto Valarta. But these were brief trips never more than a week or two and I yearned to actually live overseas and experience other cultures at a greater depth. I did live in Canada for eight years, but apart from Quebec (where I managed several short stays) the culture was not that much different than the U.S. (some of my Canadian friends would beg to differ). 

The Canadian experience did allow me to realize another dream – a writing career. During my last two years there, I wrote for an Ontario city magazine, Hamilton, and the national magazine supplement Today as well as worked as a stringer for the Globe and Mail and Toronto Star newspapers. 

Over the next few years, I completed a writing degree, taught English composition and continued to freelance while working as an editor, writer and communications director for several national associations. During this time, I also wrote a novel, The Para Ward, which won first prize in the Pacific Northwest Writers Novel Competition. But I became a victim of my own success.

A major PR success I engineered for one of my client organizations led its Board of Directors to ask me to serve as their executive director – not as an employee, but through a separate management company that I would form – I would become a business owner and no longer an independent consultant. 

I succumbed to the temptation and my writing receded into the background. The business was a success for a while. I ended up hiring a dozen employees. But I was miserable. There was some travel involved in the business, but it was not the journey I had planned to take. Some fifteen years later and after much soul searching, I finally sold the business, making little money on the deal.

For a short while, I tried my hand at business consulting, but then the recession hit and my new business failed. Now, some forty years after my original voyage, I once again returned to my dreams. In truth, I was never really a businessman and this financial reversal gave me the opportunity to return to the fields I loved – teaching and writing. 

For the next four years, I taught English at a local university. It was a part-time gig and I never made much money at it, but it allowed me to do some writing. I also taught English as a second language with Berlitz and later with Rosetta Stone in the hopes that this would prepare me for an overseas ESL assignment. South America and Asia especially appealed to me, but I also explored the possibility of teaching in Europe.

Unfortunately, while my domestic partner of the last 27 years supported me in most of my endeavors, she wasn't prepared to move overseas. And, after my reduced income and the declining value of our home led to further financial difficulties, the support ended; my partner announced she was leaving me. I remained in the house with my life on hold for the next several months while I waited for the bank to approve an underwater sale. 

For the past few years, I had regularly checked out websites offering advice on retiring abroad. Only a pipe dream at the time. But now, with the home sale imminent, my formerly sterling credit rating down the tubes, and worrying whether I would even find a suitable place to live in Seattle, I started thinking more seriously about living abroad. 

I considered in turn, Ecuador, Panama, Costa Rica, Mexico, and Thailand. Italy seemed out of the question now. Then I read an article touting Cebu in the Philippines as a beautiful city with white sand beaches, and a low cost of living where most people speak English as a second language and retirees are treated like kings. Sounded like heaven (a sugar-coated heaven I was to find out later). But I hadn't been to the Philippines and didn't know any one there. 

Over the last several months, I had done some online dating and decided to try a Philippines dating site with no expectations other than developing some friendships and finding out more about the Philippines. That's when I met Elsa.