Traveling with our RV in 2004, we found PaaMul, which was an RV park in the state of Quintana Roo, Mexico. It was located south of Playa del Carmen, a small beach town that catered to tourists on the Caribbean coast of the Yucatan Peninsula. We were looking for a place to camp that would have access to a dive shop, and PaaMul fit those needs.

I wasn’t going to worry about their situation, as our next challenge was Harvey and his wife Alice. As we drove to Cancun to pick them up at the airport that January, I kept wondering what they would be like. Harvey, and likely Alice also, had lived their whole lives in the same small community as Carol, so I braced myself for more cracks about the number of Mexicans, showing distaste for the area, and not liking our open-air palapa.

After my class reunion, I told my husband Jonny about the invitations I’d extended to practically the whole class to visit us in Mexico. He just laughed and said, “Well, babe, you can get yourself, or us in this case, into some pretty good predicaments. I hope they don’t all come at once.”

At a recent class reunion in Kansas, when a group of old friends gathered, chatting about our lives since we’d last met, our families, new interests, hobbies, and jobs — or lack of because of retirement — the usual ‘catch-ups’, I mentioned that we live in Mexico during the winter months. Most were interested in that concept and asked lots of questions about where we stay and what we do while there for such a long period of time. Some even seemed interested in possibly doing the same thing. Yet there were a couple of friends who looked at me as if I had just sprouted a tail, from the flummoxed looks on their faces.