How I Ended Up In A City I'd Never Heard Of.

Linda out and about in Centro Histórico Querétaro.

Querétaro. It's a fun word to say. (Kah-RET-a-row). In 2011, it was voted the most beautiful word in the Spanish language in a Cervantes Institute contest. It is the name of both the city and the state I now call home. Officially the city is Santiago de Querétaro.

México is a big country - most Americans do not grasp this. One-fifth the size of the US, México is the 13th largest country in the world. Nearly three times the size of Texas. México has a variety of terrains, altitudes and climates - mountains, beaches, arid deserts, tropical rainforests. México is the beaches of Cancun and Acapulco. México is mountains of Ciudad de Mexico (Mexico City) which at 7,350 ft/2240m, is not even México's highest metropolis. México is the Maya Forest, the second largest tropical forest in the Americas.

Presa Santa Catarina near Santa Rosa Jáuregul in the state of Querétaro. Taken during my drive from North Carolina to Santiago de Querétaro .

So where in this large, diverse, beautiful country did we want to live? I thought about what was important to us. Safety, proximity to an international airport, climate and history - among others.

Andador Libertad - a pedestrian street in the Céntro neighborhood of Querétaro. Shot from our balcony at night.

We are not fluent in Spanish. I can communicate in basic terms, my partner can order a beer and swear. So we wanted access to English-speaking doctors, a large enough community of foreigners to have some English spoken without being over-run by Americans, as well as a place where we would HAVE to learn Spanish.

The plan was to create a list of the cities that met the criteria and spend a year traveling back and forth from our home in NC. Then I discovered it is expensive to fly back and forth from the US, but affordable to travel around México. That's how I ended up signing a year's lease in Querétaro - a city we hadn't even heard of a year before moving here. And all the why's ... well, that's the second half of this post. But to be honest, I am trying to get this site up, so I promise to be back and give you the second half of the story soon.