OUR STORY
WHO WE ARE:
The elevator pitch: We are a family of five who enjoys a good adventure and loves to travel. We live in Northern California and just bought two homes in Bocas del Toro Panama that we live in part time and do vacation rentals in the rest of the time. We are describing and documenting this adventure to let you know this is a life transforming and doable thing and to give you some guidance on how you might make something like this happen for you and your family. Or you can just follow along with our adventures to see some cool pictures and for fun.
The slightly longer story: I am an interventional cardiologist in my mid fifties and I have three children from a previous marriage – Daniella, Dante and Nicholas, 19, 15 and 15 respectively. My girlfriend Lauren who I have been with for five years, has been adopted into this family and lives with me and the kids in our compound in Northern California. I call it a compound because my dad and his wife live there as well in a house I built them along with 29 animals (at last count). My mom and my x-wife live nearby as well so we have an eclectic but close family.
One of the things that is important to Lauren and I is leading a more sustainable lifestyle and growing some of our own fruits and vegetables and raising chickens and goats. We also have put in a big solar system to reduce our energy draw from the grid in California. We have been learning about off grid living for awhile and getting better at growing things, making good compost and the like. This is just background for our adventure I am going to describe throughout the blog.
Getting back to the point, we do enjoy travel and I think its really important for the kids (screenagers) to get off their screens for a few minutes, tune in, interact and get outside of their comfort zones. Now there are many ways to do that, but I chose to drag them out of the country down to Central America. Ha, reality check for sure. Lauren had lived in Costa Rica for a year and loved that and I had been south of the border a few times and really enjoyed it as well. So we researched things a bit and decided to go check out Panama. In a future post I will give more information about why Panama, but for now lets just say we found some islands in the Caribbean in the northern part of panama called Bocas del Toro to explore.
The short story is that we went down to vacation, fell in love, found property and spent the next year buying it. And being the impulsive guy I am, the short story should also mention that we loved it so much I bought a second home in the area. So we now have two homes which we are fixing up and spending time in and planning to vacation rent when we aren’t down there.
The plan is not to move down there full time at this point, but maybe eventually we will. Right now I have my two boys in high school and my daughter in college, so we are commuters from California to Panama. That brings a whole set of challenges that I will write about, but it does provide for a pretty amazing variety of realities.
I decided to write a blog to share our adventures and document how we have made our dreams a reality. Hopefully we can inspire one or two of you who read this to take a risk and follow your dreams too. If not, how about just coming and renting one of our places for an adventure vacation (and that alone may change your mind). I am going to describe how we did this and go into some detail on barriers, struggles and lessons that we learned along the way so maybe you can avoid a mistake or two. I will also do lots of posts about the area and also about the chocolate (cacao) orchard on one of our properties and how we are gonna make great chocolate ourselves. So poke around and see if this interests you or contact us if you have questions.
Cheers.
Tony , Lauren, Daniella, Dante and Nicholas
