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travellight, what (approximate) area do you live in Mexico?  I had almost given up on Mexico but reading your post gives me new optimism.  For me its a worry about cartel activity and how they are shaking down so many businesses.  Here in Canada I met a Mexican who told me almost every business in her town had to pay the cartel to stay open and to stay alive.  I wonder how many expats blissfully support the local economy not realizing they are supporting their local cartel as well.  I thought it would help to live in a smaller community, hopefully without hardly any foreigners there.  I was thinking of Zihuatanejo, Puerto Escondido or Huatulco.  But even a place as small as Puerto Escondido has had numerous cartel incidents.  And my incidents I mean gangland slaughters.

Guadalajara is one of my favourite large cities ever.  Such a wonderful balance of big city amenities without the "edge" of Mexico City and with a fraction of the pollution, at least when I was there several years ago.  And what a market they have.  Just absolutely unbelievable.  I think its the biggest on the continent.  Check out their opera house.  What a building, what acoustics, what culture, what history.  Its one of the most underrated cities in the world.

I'd like to know if Cathy was determined to leave before her husband died.  A personal tragedy can colour our views on things tremendously, it can make us emotionally less stable, it can make us more careless when handling things and on and on.  And what was her husband's opinion of it?  Was he wanting to leave as well?  Sometimes when it rains it pours and a ton of bad things can happen in an inexplicably short period of time.  It seems grossly unfair and can easily make us come to conclusions we normally wouldn't.

Norman Z wrote:

travellight, what (approximate) area do you live in Mexico?  I had almost given up on Mexico but reading your post gives me new optimism.  For me its a worry about cartel activity and how they are shaking down so many businesses.  Here in Canada I met a Mexican who told me almost every business in her town had to pay the cartel to stay open and to stay alive.  I wonder how many expats blissfully support the local economy not realizing they are supporting their local cartel as well.  I thought it would help to live in a smaller community, hopefully without hardly any foreigners there.  I was thinking of Zihuatanejo, Puerto Escondido or Huatulco.  But even a place as small as Puerto Escondido has had numerous cartel incidents.  And my incidents I mean gangland slaughters.

I don't know what post you read Norman, because I don't see any recent posts of mine. But if you are afraid of cartels basically follow the money. Drugs are not the big money earners they used to be so the cartels have shifted focus to things like crops and are now interested in "green gold" or avocados.  Basically,  see what part of Mexico is making big money, it's there you will find them. that doesn't mean they will give up their favorite spots like Juares and Acapulco, but there will be new activity in the farmland.  there are also territory disputes which is what happened in Sonora recently. A group of Mennonites developed land that was thought to not be of value and the Cartel thought they should have it,  The owners of the land strongly disagreed, they are resident immigrants from the U.S. but have lived and grown in Mexico for many years..they were not tourists.

I live in the Yucatan.