Oct 19-23 Financial review and dinner out

The next few days we mostly hung around the San Ramon RV park and relaxed.  One important thing we did was to have a financial advisor review our finances and budget to double check that we were on track financially.  We chatted with the advisor for about 2 hours going over all of our finances and they came back with a 96% chance of our financial plan being successful assuming we stayed in budget.  In fact, their model showed we could spend several thousand dollars more a year than what I had planned.  We had left Sacramento just over a year ago so I also took the opportunity to review our bank statements and calculate our actual spending in the year since we left.  Our actual spending was a couple of thousand dollars less than my budgeted amount, most of which was due to being locked down in Oaxaca for six months. 

While our living expenses living in isolation in Oaxaca were low we did buy a lot of stuff so that negated much of the savings.  We did things like upgrade our kitchen faucet with a fancy new over $200 faucet and bought a bunch of new kitchen appliances including a very expensive Thermomix TM6 cooker.  It was comforting to know though that it looked like we were on track financially.  Being in the RV and the pandemic has really helped keep our expenses down.  Due to our limited space there is a strict limit on what we can buy.  The pandemic means we don’t go out much to eat or indulge in expensive experiences.  Frankly, other than wasting money on frivolous luxury goods like Luis Vuitton handbags we would have had a hard time spending more money that we did.

We did go into town occasionally to have lunch and we discovered a new restaurant named Bananas that was quite good. It was an American style diner and we liked it a lot.

One night we decided to spurge and went to one of San Miguel’s fancy roof-top restaurants for dinner.  The restaurant was named Quince and it’s entrance was an unassuming doorway just off the main square.  Here we were greeted with some hand sanitizer, a temperature check and asked to sign a guest book with our names and phone numbers, presumably for contact tracing later.  Up a set of nice lighted stairs we arrived at an Instagram worthy modern roof top restaurant space with wooden decks and lighted umbrellas.  One side looked out on the city and the other side featured a fabulous view of the main cathedral.  We were seated promptly by masked waiters.  The menu was accessed on our phones by scanning a QR code.

We rarely go to fancy restaurants so we started with Rosemary French Fries with Spicy Texas Queso, Grilled Harissa Marinated Shrimp Salad, and a Tuna Tiradito Sashimi plate.  Then we had our mains of a Yakimeshi Chicken bowl, Panko Crusted Sea Bass and a Quince Roll which was a sushi roll with Shrimp tempura, with tuna, salmon, yellowtail sashimi and avocado.  The food was all beautifully plated but mostly tasted average.  In the end Quince was more of a feast for the eyes than the tongue.  At least the meal, along with drinks and mandatory 12% service charge came out to less than US$80.  A meal at an equivalent restaurant in the US could easily cost two to three times as much.

On our last day in San Miguel we met our friend Deya at the Pollo Feliz restaurant.  We had noted on the way in that the play area was open and the kids had a good time playing in the play area.  Afterwards we walked around town a bit and got ice cream for the kids.  We ended up sitting on a bench along the street for a couple hours chatting while the kids played until it was time to head to bed.