Back in Mexico! Boat Life in Isla Mujeres

Enjoying my 4-day weekend

Well, after the holidays, I started to get interest in my car at last and ended up selling it to the first person who made me an offer.  It wasn’t a bad deal, even though it was less than what I was asking. The people were nice, they had cash, and I knew I didn’t want to hold out for a few hundred more and end up waiting around in Florida indefinitely. (I remember turning down an offer on a car I was selling years ago, thinking a better one would come along, but it never did. Lesson learned!)

So now I’m officially car-less and it feels great. There’s a definite freedom in it, and it’s liberating to have such minimal bills. I’m now down to:

• $20/month continuous coverage car insurance (cheap insurance that covers you in case you drive someone else’s car and also avoids any lapse in coverage).
• $42 phone bill
• $500 rent (this varies, but that’s the max. I’ll pay)

So I flew back down to Mexico about a week after I sold the car, and here I am writing this from Mike’s sailboat, anchored just off the little island of Isla Mujeres, a 20 minute ferry ride from Cancun. I am staying here with him on his boat and I probably could work from here, too, if I wanted (it’s big enough) but I’m weird about work; although I’m flexible in a lot of ways, I need silence or else I get very distracted. 

I tried to find a little Airbnb studio here on the island that I could use for work, but everything was really expensive (by my standards at least) and I just wasn’t finding anything that worked. However, I had joined a Facebook group with places for rent (these are a great resource) and put out a post saying what I was looking for and someone named Cindy replied that I could rent a room in her house to use as an office if I didn’t find anything else. I contacted her right away and we set something up, so her house is my “office.” We agreed I’d pay her $10 a day (such a great deal) to rent a little bedroom in her beautiful, newly built house a block from the Caribbean.

View out of my office window

The routine now is that Mike takes me to shore in the dinghy at around 8:00 in the morning M- F and I catch a cab to Cindy’s neighborhood and walk the rest of the way to get a bit of exercise. This remote work setup has been going well so far. The Internet speed is pretty good, though not super fast, and it gets the job done (nothing has topped Antigua, Guatemala for Internet speed so far). The work space is quiet enough, even with Cindy and her husband, Steve, coming and going. Commuting to work has been different for me since I’m used to working from home, but it adds a bit of adventure to the mix (such as when it rained!) and it’s also nice to have more of a separation between work and “home.”   

A block from my "office"

I work until about 5:30 and then I walk/cab home and Mike picks me up or meets me to go into town to grab a bite or drink. “Town” in Isla is the north end of the island, where there are lots of waterfront restaurants, trendy shops and, of course, bars. The beaches here are gorgeous, with powdery sand and turquoise water. The weather has unfortunately been a bit cool, windy, and cloudy, but it’s still warm and pretty so I can’t complain!

To close out my first post since being back abroad, I’ve decided to resume my old Antigua habit of keeping track of how much I spent each day. It’s useful to look back on as I compare remote working locations. Here’s what we spent yesterday (I’m putting the total but Mike and I split things):

Money spent yesterday:

Groceries – 315 pesos

Lunch for two - 260 pesos

Laundry – 140 pesos

Drinks – 400 pesos

1115 pesos = 60 USD