Leaving Ecuador

The title is a misnomer.  That is, I'm not leaving Ecuador forever, just for the foreseeable future.  Things here haven't gone exactly to plan, and now I'm stepping up and ensuring our future will be even more secure and comfortable than before.  What was our plan?  Opening a bed-&-breakfast or restaurant or coffee & pastry shop, introducing pastries to Ecuador that its peoples and expats living here have never seen before, while in a warm and relaxing environment.  We opened a restaurant, Popacuchu Fire & Sugar Café y Pastelería, and quickly established ourselves at the go-to place for pastries and dessert.

The previous two years we won first place in the 'Best Pastries' and 'Best Guilty Pleasure' categories by the readers of Gringopost.com, a predominantly expat-oriented website in Cuenca, while becoming equally renowned for having the best soups in the city, all credit which goes of course to my supremely talented and beautiful wife Michelle.  Not to leave out her genius in creating a balanced menu, the salads she invented and her daughter prepared were incomparable, as were the paninis we served.  Where our plan failed is that we had not researched well enough the labor laws of this country, and once becoming better informed of said laws, realized with dread that we could never hire another employee and as our staff left us for whatever reasons, we could not replace them.

The last year of our business was the hardest, as it was just my wife, step-daughter, and myself running the entire café, and it was a slow death, indeed.  Towards the end it was rare to find a smile on my face, a week passing without my wife and I getting into a horrible fight, and for her a mental and physical exhaustion that one day off never really seemed to fix.  Salvation arrived with the sale of the café, and we quickly began developing our next business plan, a tour company (Popacuchu Tours) designed to attract high schoolers to Ecuador.  We were late in getting the company website launched and marketing emails sent to prospective schools, as we learned that most schools already had tours planned for the upcoming summer months, but encouraged by interest in our tours for summer 2018.  This is where I step in.

Our savings and sale of the café ensured our financial security through mid-2017, but we really hadn't planned on it carrying us for another whole year.  While my wife has been teaching expats Spanish and we performed the occasional catering gig, I've spent most of my time since we sold the café mountain biking and cycling, not knowing the language here or having any real talents enabling me to support our family in a foreign country.  Which brings me to trucking.

When it became apparent I was not going to make a significant amount of money here (min. wage is $362/mo., before taxes), a good job pays maybe $500/mo., I had to make the decision any man would make, and that is to return to the U.S. and get a job that would take care of the family.  Enter trucking.  What makes this such a brilliant idea?  Consider:
ONE (1)... There are a plethora of jobs in this industry available.  Get qualified, get hired.
TWO (2)... EVERYTHING I MAKE WILL GO DIRECTLY INTO THE BANK.  The jobs I will seek specifically are the ones keeping me on the road for up to three weeks at a time.  Time off or home time?  I'm leaving my home to drive a truck, so my home essentially will BE the truck.  This means:  no rent, no mortgage, no car payments, no insurance, no cable tv, no internet, no utilities... it's just me.

My wife has given me her support, 100%.  My vacation time will be spent returning to Cuenca, Ecuador, while hopefully I'll drive for a company that allows riders.  We've already talked about her visiting me for up to a month, riding shotgun in a big rig, traveling around the U.S. together.  Military families go through this often enough, one spouse away on deployment, leaving the other at home; we are approaching this in much the same fashion.  In fact, it puts us in a position to achieve our financial goals 5-10 years sooner than we had planned when we opened our café, so long term we will reach retirement earlier than expected.

Between now (Dec. 24) and the first day of CDL truck driving school in Billings, MT (Mar. 27),  I'll continue riding my bike while she continues teaching expats Spanish, and my wife and I will enjoy each other's company to the fullest; we are aware that time is running out on our lives together here, and I've noticed that we hold hands like we are school kids again.  We decided to take a chance when we moved to Ecuador 3 1/2 years ago, choosing a path very few followed before and leading us into the unknown.  This journey has proved very challenging, presented numerous obstacles, and continues to reveal unexpected twists and turns, but we couldn't be happier with the decisions we've made, have no regrets, and wouldn't want to be sharing this adventure, this life, with any other person in any other way.