On Sunday afternoon, Rocky and I, along with our friends Eileen and Kieran, grabbed a table in the outdoor patio of a bar in a quaint fishing village called Viavelez. Two red and white fishing boats floated lazily in the small port across from the bar. Rows of green fish-trap baskets were stacked neatly on the shore, waiting for their next adventure. After a big drink of water and a couple of dog treats, our pup Wilma, found some shade under our table and was soon snoring. Our own water bottles were nearly empty after a 12 mile coastal hike and I was hoping for an icy cold beer on tap. Eileen and Kieran have lived in Spain for three years and have traveled extensively. They love to hike and explore the many spectacular coastal trails in Asturias. To our delight, they have introduced us to some of their favorites. That morning we had hiked from Viavelez to Playa Porcia. There, inspired by the warm, sunny day and our long hike, we took our first icy cold plunge in the ocean. Swimming in the ocean not only checked off a bucket list item but refreshed us before heading back on the trail.

As we settled into our patio seats, I noticed the busy young waiter hustling from one table to the next joking and laughing easily with the patrons who all seemed to know him well. People walking by waved and called out to him as well. Depending on what online report you believe, Viavelez boasts either 22 people or 1,769. Likely there are around 22 residents in the winter and closer to 2000 in the summer. Either way, this is a pueblito, a small village that only appears on a few maps and where everyone knows each other and apparently, this friendly waiter. Looking around, I guessed we were the only visitors and definitely the only foreginers passing through town that day.

After dropping off bowls of a crunchy snack mix and some beers at the table next to us, the waiter came over to take our order. He patiently let us place our drink order in Spanish before he started speaking to us in perfect English with a British accent. Having heard so little English in Asturias, we were surprised to find someone so adept at it in this tiny off-the-beaten-path village. Impressed, we asked him where he had learned to speak English so well. He chuckled and said he had just returned to Spain after living and working in London for three years. We were curious about what brought him back. The hotel where he had been working had not survived the loss of the tourist business during the pandemic. “One day you have a job and the next week you have F-ing nothing!”  Using an explitive helped him emphasize his point but saying the F word with his cultured British accent, made it sound less edgy and more entertaining. In fact, I’d never heard F-ing sound so classy!

Luckily for him, our server’s friend hired him to work in this harborside bar for a few months. He confessed that he would need to find something more permanent after that, explaining that the bar is only open during the three month summer tourist season. He added, “We have a saying in Spain: Bread for today, hunger for tomorrow. (Pan para hoy, hambre para manana.)”  A geologist by training, our young bilingual waiter longs to find work studying rocks rather than serving drinks “on the rocks”.  By returning home to Spain, he is hoping to manifest those opportunities. In the meantime, he is making friends and sharing stories at the bar in Viavelez, where everyone knows his name.

Our camarero’s (waiter’s) story is not surprising when you think about how many people were displaced worldwide by businesses having to close during the pandemic. As Spain prepares to reopen it’s borders and welcome vaccinated tourists next week, hope is in the air. We feel it in the plaza restaurants in Gijon, full not only during meal times but also in the evenings when people gather with friends to enjoy a gin-tonic (hin-tonik) or a vino tinto (red wine) and a pincho (an appetizer). Hope is palpable inside of the clothing stores and home goods shops where people are still masked and respecting social distance but now have their arms full of purchases they have just made.

In Gijon, a city of 275,000 people, the beaches have once again become classrooms for kids learning to surf, the colorful boards and swimsuits brightening the sand before the young surfers jump into the water to catch a wave.  Families and friends build sand castles and share picnics. The ocean is dotted with swimmers, sailboats, standup paddle boarders, divers, snorkelers, and even the occassional daring kite surfer lifting off the waves. Dog walkers and their pooches of every size, parents with strollers, roller bladers, couples holding hands and joggers maneuver around each other on the wide pedestrians-only boulevards. The city is vibrant, full of energy and excitement for most of the day, except of course, during siesta. Maybe because rest is built into the day and not something to feel guilty about, the city springs back to life after five and stays lively until the 1 am curfew. For us, living here is the tonic we needed after 2020: a year of isolation, worry and stress for us and everyone around us.

By choosing to retire early and move to Spain, we have chosen to live a simpler life. We have turned our backs on the prevailing advice to save as much as possible for retirement, even if that means working long past retirement age. Maybe we are courageous, or maybe we are foolish or maybe we fall somewhere in between. Never again will we feed numbers into an online test to determine how much money we need in order to retire with dignity. Dignity for us is spending the day hiking the Asturian coast with our friends. Stopping on a look-out point to share a picnic of soft crosissant sandwiches with smoked salmon and goat cheese; figs so fresh you’d think we picked them that morning; juicy papaya slices; tortilla espanola (a potato, egg and onion dish that can be eaten with your hands); and squares of dark chocolate for dessert. The life we have chosen includes time for naps, which are especially lovely when that means napping on the long soft grass growing just off the trail and overlooking the crashing waves in the cove below.

                   Siesta Time in Spain

Perhaps we should pay closer attention to the saying, “Pan para hoy, hambre para manana” because it seems to warn of leaner times ahead. For many years we played the game of owning homes, cars, furniture and too many shoes to count. Our pantry and both refrigerators were always full but our bank accounts were not. Our debt increased faster than our savings. When we decided three years ago to change our lifestyle, we knew we had to pay off all of our debt first. Our lifestyle had not been extravagant necessarily but owning a big house meant yearly surprises: a new roof, a larger water heater, new furnace, new windows, new flooring, new plumbing, and so on with no end in sight.

Selling the house and furnishings and moving to an apartment helped us change that. The timing was such that Rocky ended up working from the kitchen counter for a year due to the pandemic. As a result, there were many days when we questioned our own sanity but we both kept dreaming of something better, something easier. Recently, while walking the boardwalk at Playa San Lorenzo, we discovered that during our 2020 isolation, we had both used that very stroll along the boulevard as our vision of the future. We had done this walk in 2019 when we had stayed in Gijon for a week but without Wilma. In our separate visions of the future, Wilma was happily trotting along next to us just as she does now.

Now that we are here, there is no room for regret. Driving a car and doing yard work are distant memories. Stressing out about bills and home repairs is nonexistant. We will never have enough money in savings to get the official green light from those online financial planning tools to stop working and start living a balanced life. There are many things we will choose to do without that seemed important before. We need fewer clothes and far fewer shoes. What is most present for us now is walking and exploring our new city of Gijon; trying new foods; meeting others from all over the world who have also chosen a non-traditional path; keeping our brains healthy by learning Spanish; and our bodies healthy with yoga; an abundance of time to read, to write and to dream about where we want to explore next. We have plenty of “bread for today” and I’m quite certain we will not be “hungry tomorrow” because we have discovered a way to live easily within our means. This path is not for everyone, and it is not always easy, but we are glad we took the road less traveled.

Do we think about returning to the States someday if we hear the siren call of future grandkids?  Do we worry that we might not be able to afford to return? While the thought has surfaced a time or two, I think we’ve come to realize we can live differently now and if we do return it would be to another version of the simple life we have created here in Gijon. Robert Frost may have had a similar insight when he wrote his famous poem, The Road Not Taken. “…Oh, I kept the first for another day! Yet knowing how way leads on to way, I doubted if I should ever come back. I shall be telling this with a sigh somewhere ages and ages hence: Two roads diverged in a wood, and I…I took the one less traveled by, and that has made all the difference.”

On the trail to Playa Porcia

A couple more notes from the author:

For those of you who read the blog about names and the one before that on the perfect storm, you might be interested to hear that Nacho is a nickname for Ignacio! Thank you to a savvy reader who set me straight on that. If you missed either of those blogs, here are the links: https://upanddowndog.com/spain-where-no-one-knows-your-name/

Want to read more about Viavelez? https://saposyprincesas.elmundo.es/actividades-ninos/asturias/aire-libre/rutas-y-excursiones/el-pueblo-de-viavelez/