We have been in Albany a week and a half already and are settling in pretty well. We are in a great area that is close to everything and we can walk everywhere and explore like we did in Temescal. Our AirBnb is comfortable and a decent size with an amazingly cozy bed. Unfortunately it is against the wall so that makes getting into it and making it difficult. I have claustrophobia, so guess who has to do the crawling? I just love having fluffy bedclothes/duvets and there are a lot of them so we have a tendency to sleep in. So much for Glenn saying he only needs 6 hours of sleep. I think he is getting used to retirement. The warmth of the bed is good since it is cold in the house. And for me, I am never warm in the Bay Area. We only have 2 small space-heaters which we keep on all the time when we are home, just not at night. We are used to using a small heater since the apartment had one, but that one cranked out heat really well and we only needed to turn it on for 10 minutes. I love night lights both at home and when staying at a hotel or AirBnb, so I bring them with me. They make it so much easier to move around at night when things are unfamiliar. We are lucky to have a washer and dryer here so that makes laundry easy. We may have to have that as one of our requirements in Mexico too as we detest laundromats. The only real downside is that the Internet is horrible here and it takes forever to have things load. We seem to have this problem all over Albany though.
The AirBnb is a separate apartment in a house on a very quiet street. It has it’s own entrance which we like. There is plenty of room for us not to climb over all ourselves and our luggage, and the kitchen is larger than we are used to so we do not bump into each other as much. We really need to try and cook at home more since our budget doesn’t allow us to go out as often as we did when Glenn had a paycheck. Especially since we haven’t sold the house yet and we are living on savings, which is a bit scary. But there are some great restaurants on Solano Avenue, just a couple of blocks away, that entice us and too often we cave in to temptation. Every time we pay a check in a restaurant now we convert it into pesos and then look at the menus in San Miguel to see what it would have cost and are shocked. We can’t wait to get down there and save some money while eating well and of course enjoying a margarita or two.
With AirBnb a lot of the time you can get a great deal if you stay a month like we are (sometimes 20-50%), so we took advantage of that. We have used them several times before and will continue to use them in the future, especially when we can get an entire house or apartment for less than a hotel room. It makes things so much easier and cheaper. But we usually do not use them when the stay is just for a night or two since we have to pay the cleaning and service fee and sometimes that is high. We have been looking for an Airbnb or similar for when we expect to get to San Miguel de Allende. We are not too encouraged right now though since we are probably going down around Easter, which is an extremely busy time of year and there are limited places available in our price range. We will keep watch and hopefully once the house goes on the market and the open houses are over we will have a better idea time wise and then can lock in a place. We are only going to get a something initially for a month then spend that time doing our research on areas we want to live in long term. There are so many sections of San Miguel and each of them have a different flavor, even sometimes street by street. We may have to hook up with a realtor who works with rentals to find some of the unpublished places, and we will put a notice on the yahoo groups rental forum saying we are looking for rentals and see replies we receive. We aren’t as picky for the first month and have a slightly bigger budget, but we have a list of requirements for our permanent space and hope to find something suitable and reasonable with 2-3 bedrooms quickly. So much is up in the air right now, and a lot is out of our control. We have to get comfortable trusting in others and allow ourselves to be sure that everything will work out as it is supposed to.
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