Our New Adventure
T-8 to departure for South America!
What’s up, y’all!
First, welcome to the new subscribers! We’re happy to have you here. Feel free to browse the archive at snaleracing.substack.com to see what’s been going on in the past. This newsletter originated as a companion to our YouTube channel, so you’ll see a lot of references to that.
For those of you who are long-time subscribers, yep, we’re up and running with the newsletter again, though slightly different this time, as you’ll see shortly.
I went back and took a look at our last post to see where we left off.
So much has changed since then! Let me get you up to date, and then tell you all about where we’re going from here.
First, we finished Danny Bonaduce! Here’s the final episode of that bittersweet saga.
Bittersweet because this was supposed to be my truck, and let me tell you, when it was done and I finally got to drive it, it was as awesome as I’d hoped it would be. I was sad to let it go. But plans change, and if you’ve known me for even a minute, you know that I’m always changing plans on the fly. Life’s too short not to try everything, ya know?
Between the time we bought this truck and when we finished it, that whole pandemic thing happened that really made us start questioning, well, everything. Both of us had always had a desire to live in a foreign country, so we started searching for 1) a country we both wanted to live in and 2) a way to make that possible.
Of course, when we started the YouTube channel, we had great dreams of becoming millionaires overnight, like a lot of people 🤣, but that just didn’t happen. So much for that retirement income idea. Not that we’re going to quit making videos.
The real reason we started it is because gnob spends all his time helping people on the internet solve their car problems, and it just made sense to be able to refer them to a video that would better explain what he was talking about.
Since gnob and I met in the automotive program of our local community college (Go Rogue!), making truck videos was an idea that we both had an interest in, so we decided to give it a shot. We laugh now - our very first video was only seven minutes long, but it took us days to make, because I had no idea how to use video editing software. I’m a Premiere Pro whiz now, but there was a LOT of cursing involved when I made the first one. Here it is if you’re curious:
Anyway, I think I’m rambling now. The point is, we spent four years searching for a solution, and now we’re finally here. We considered Portugal at first, and Costa Rica for a very long time, and somewhere in the middle we were thinking about Arkansas (which is kind of like a foreign country😜), but we ultimately decided on Paraguay. I’ll go into the details of why some other time, but in short, the residency requirements are much simpler, and the benefits are much greater.
After finishing Danny Bonaduce, the 1985 Toyota 4Runner project that took way too long, we put our house on the market. We got a couple of offers within a week, and closed with no issues. We were happy to sell it to a local young couple, instead of to a corporation trying to make a buck.
I always called it our “honeymoon house” and I hope this new couple makes as many happy memories there as we did. Though I bet they won’t feature the garage on YouTube quite as much as we did. 🛠️😁
We took another cross-country trip to Louisiana while we were waiting for the house to close. This one lasted three weeks, and it was so much nicer not to be in a hurry, and not trying to post a video every single day of the trip (like we did on last year’s trip). Here’s a few highlights:
We’ve been in Louisiana now for a few months, and it’s been great to visit with my family before we leave the United States for good. I’ve been in Oregon for the last eight years, so I needed some time with them.
But that time is coming to an end. We’re scheduled for departure the first week of October, and that’s next week, folks. We’re going to be driving to Miami and flying from there. We’re bringing our three dogs with us to Paraguay, and we want them to spend as little time as possible in a crate in a cargo hold, so we got the shortest flight we could.
Guess what? There are no direct flights from the USA to Paraguay. So, we’re driving to Miami, and we’ll take a few days to get there - one last road trip in the good ol’ USA.
We know people are curious about what this adventure is going to be like (I’m one of them! lol), and we thought reviving the old newsletter would be a great way to share it. Substack is a platform that can be used to monetize your writing, but that’s not how we’ll be using it.
So don’t worry, we won’t be asking you for money. There won’t be any perks to becoming a paid subscriber vs a free subscriber. We’re just using the platform because it’s a great way to get email updates out to our friends and family. We can include photos and videos, and it will be high quality.
I think that brings us up to date. When we do get new videos published to the YouTube channel, I’ll still include a link in the newsletter, but only because this newsletter is about what we’re up to, and sometimes, making YouTube videos is what we’re up to. 🎬You are welcome to subscribe to that channel, more subscribers tell the algorithm to push our videos, so while we appreciate it, you are not obligated!
I’ve added a share button here, so if you know someone else who’s interested, you can share this post. This may come to you via email, but there’s lots of other great authors on Substack, so if you want to check it out, you can also install the app and read our updates there, instead.
Ready or not, Paraguay, here we come! ✈️🌎