“You smell the perfume of the white ginger and watch the palm fronds sway in the southeastern trade winds… slip into quiet, blue water that feels like velvet on the skin… walk along the white sand and scoop up shells, adding to a collection already spilling onto the patio table… Experiences like those — a daily pleasure on Roatan, Honduras — are, really, what enticed us to invest here.
Just this morning, perched on the railing of our open porch, I sipped my tea as horses galloped by with early riders. I swam for a bit, and from the water, I looked back at the island, rising to mountain forests. Nobody else was on our beach at Lawson Rock.
We never imagined we’d be able to afford an island retreat — let alone one right on a secluded beach. But we’re here pretty much full-time these days, enjoying the beautiful, open-air house we had built — and an incredible quality of life — for a fraction of what it would cost us elsewhere in the region. The truth is: We’re living a dream retirement we never even dared dream about before we came here.
Leisurely Days and Comfortable Lunches. Our days are leisurely. Climbing into our diesel 4-door pick-up today, I thought: “How nice to NOT have so many luncheon choices as one does in the big cities of the world.” We’re at Que Tal Café in five minutes — it’s the place to meet-and-greet, always peppered with locals. Friends, stopping in as we are, chat about the past weekend, ask if we got their email. I’ve never tried much else on the homemade comfort-food menu, since I adore the cranberry chicken salad and locally grown lettuce with Kim’s salad dressing, served in a little silver pitcher. We linger over two, three refills of iced tea, our glasses wet with condensation puddling on our coasters.
Another day, it’s lunch at The View, on the east end of the island. It’s a 20-30 minute drive from our place, past farmland, banana groves, and chickens miraculously walking the tightrope that makes the shoulder of the 2-lane highway. I stop en route at the new bakery to pick up some little raspberry cheesecake squares as a gift for my friends. We sit in the shade on The View’s deck, overlooking the 190-degree stretch of multi-hued water — turquoise, then green, then periwinkle blue. It’s hot, but even so, we all order the warm shrimp marinara soup, the best on the planet.
A World Away, But Just Two Hours by Plane. On days like that, it feels like we’re a long way from the United States. We’ve traded crowded freeways for two-lane roads that land crabs amble across. But for my husband and me, moving here turned out to be an easy decision. We joined the Agora Travel tour to Roatan on our wedding anniversary, back in March 2003. We’d traveled widely before that and always asked ourselves, “Would we want to live here?” But until we landed on this island, the answer was always, “No, too far from the children, grandchildren, and friends.”
The quick, two-hour direct flight from Houston to Roatan made our decision easy… as did the incredibly well-priced properties.
We Built Our Dream Home and Settled In. Within five days, we had bought lot #3 at Lawson Rock and met the Canadian designer who would build us our dream house. Actually, it wasn’t really our dream house, as we had never had thoughts that we could afford a home right on the water. But the description of our ideal home all but tumbled out of us in short order. We wanted a pod-style Balinese house. Hal Sorrenti designed it, and Nelson Abbott built it.
One year later, we moved in. The boxes piled high in our container on the ship from Miami, FL, held Pier One furnishings in reds and oranges. We brought everything, from refrigerators to light bulbs. And today we have an inside garden flourishing riotously and tables groaning under vases of newly picked orange birds of paradise, red hibiscus, pinks of the torch ginger, and leaves from the varieties of crotons.”
Exerpt from (Judith Allred post at escapeartist.com)
