Hi everyone!! It sure has been a while. Well, my dreams have come true once again. In just a few days, we are returning to our happy place:  Spain; specifically, Andalucia. We spent the last year living in Phoenix, Arizona and while I do still love the place, it just didn’t feel like our “home.”   Arizona is full of stunning beauty and lots of sunshine. We love the climate (lots of sun, little rain, no winter, dry heat, long pool season) and the house we were renting, but the house wasn’t ours. Also, it was expensive. We felt isolated there. It just didn’t feel like home. We had left behind a wonderful group of friends in Málaga, as well as having wonderful friends and family in Pennsylvania. So, to be living in Arizona where it felt quite difficult to make friends, we felt isolated and that is something we never felt in Spain. In addition to that, my husband’s job was not a situation he wanted to be in long term. It had a terrible work/life balance. Being told you can’t take vacation this summer?? Forget it! During the one year we spent in Phoenix, we did a good job of taking in many of the sights that Arizona has to offer, but ultimately, we decided we would wrap up our life there and go on another adventure.  

I was always missing Spain a lot. I thought about it literally every day. I began to catch on to many affordable houses in the Málaga/Córdoba/Granada area, if one is willing to live away from the coast and in a pueblo. The idea of being able to use some of our savings to purchase one and live MORTGAGE FREE / RENT FREE was extremely appealing, not to mention also the option to have affordable private health insurance. Best of all, we still have our visa/residency card intact until September 2026. I’m so glad I had the foresight to renew it in 2024 to have it, just in case. 

We are buying a house in a pueblo called Rute. It is in the province of Córdoba, just over the border of the Málaga province. We were happy to be within an hour of our friends and the beach. Of course, we would have loved to be in Málaga again, but this time around, we do not have Málaga money. We are returning under very different circumstances. Both rent and home purchase prices in Málaga have gone crazy in the last few years. It’s where everyone wants to be!  Málaga está en la boca de todos. Additionally, finding a rental in Málaga has become increasingly difficult if you do not have a Spanish job/on a Spanish payroll.   I didn’t want to play that game.   We got especially luckily when we moved to Málaga in September 2021 with a wonderful landlady and a piso (flat/apartment) that we liked a lot. She didn’t even mind that we had three cats. I don’t think we would get so lucky again.   

I will write more in the future about the place we will be living and making it a point to spend more time on my blog and social media accounts. We don’t know if our return to Spain will be permanent or not, but I’m done predicting too far into the future. Losing my job of almost 15 years last summer completely threw me for a loop. For now, we are going to enjoy Spain again, for as long as we can, while we try and figure things out. Spain offers us some freedoms that the US does not:  affordable housing, affordable healthcare, a fantastic lifestyle. If someday it doesn’t make sense, then we will return to our roots in Pennsylvania, but hopefully we can keep our Spanish home forever, as a vacation home or for retirement.