So I was fairly well prepared for the basics of portioning off a portable version of my existence to transport to Canada. Then, when it was time to move on to Mexico, the journey was mapped out pretty smoothly again. I had learned about a beach town near Tijuana called Rosarito Beach, and I found a thread on 2+2 informing me that several online poker players had made the move. The most baffling thing was that I had not heard about Rosarito whatsoever in four months of trying to figure out relocation possibilities (and six years living in Southern California prior to that).
Thanks to those pioneering online poker grinders who had already made the move down here, I was able to create an easily executable timeline within a matter of hours, a plan that would take me from Canada to Santa Monica to the Baja peninsula in the course of a week. I drove from Vancouver to Seattle, stopped in Portland, OR and Multnomah Falls on the way to Bend, where I spent the second night. The next morning I had breakfast with one of my original poker heroes, Paul Phillips, who left the poker world behind a while ago to raise a family and work on a computer programming language called Scala.
I stopped at Crater Lake National Park on my way out of Oregon, spent the night in the Bay Area and, after a gorgeous afternoon drive down the coast through Big Sur, I was back in Santa Monica, CA the next afternoon.
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| Christ of the Sacred Heart, a few KM from where I now live. |
I left Canada on a Tuesday and was looking at furnished rentals in Mexico by the following Tuesday. I went back up to California to get my desk chair and my down blanket from my storage space, switched my phone plan from the "AT&T Nation with Canada" package to the "AT&T Viva Mexico" plan, and a week after that I was re-approved by PokerStars to play from my new location in Mexico.
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A surprising number of random acquaintances recently have told me they "used to go to Rosarito Beach" either with their family or during college party weekends. It is a town that clearly could have been a contender, before the double-whammy of the recession and the (media coverage of) violence in Mexico caused some very ambitious development plans to come to a halt. There are innumerable half-finished unfinished luxury condos, looming over the sort of picturesque mountainous seaside that you might associate with Malibu, CA or the Great Ocean Road in Australia.
I live in one of the half-finished condo projects, in the one completed tower out of four that were planned (still displayed in the model in the lobby). The second of the four towers has been constructed right next door, but is nothing more than a hollow concrete slab, and it doesn't look like construction is going to resume any time soon. In San Diego, my apartment would cost several times than what it does down here, but most nights there is, at most, one other light on my side of the tower when I look up from my first-floor apartment to the 20-stories above. It gives the feeling of a ghost town transposed onto a resort town.
Although Rosarito Beach might be down, it's not quite out. There are a few ex-pat subset communities, some full time retirees, some surfers who seem to have been around a while. And now there is the burgeoning online poker community, which by my estimate is at least 30 people strong (possibly more like 50), mostly young white guys in their 20s and 30s who all play online poker for a living. My apartment is several KM south of the town and where most of my fellow Poker Exiles are located, and interacting with my peers is tough after playing 10-12 hours of MTTs and not particularly wanting to drive 30 minutes at night on a poorly paved road.
The challenge of integrating with my fellow poker ex-pats, much less with the actual local community, is significant, but a major improvement just occurred when three grinders from the USA moved into an apartment upstairs from me. One of them had already relocated (to the Philippines) after PokerStars stopped offering real money games in their home state, Washington, due to legislation. Anyway, these guys seem to be laid back and funny, but most importantly, they play tennis (I am an avid "parks player"), and we have a tennis court in from of our building (the surface seems to be some hybrid of turf and dirt). And in December, my friend Jordan plans to become my roommate, which should be the next major improvement to day-to-day life and combating the isolating nature of the online poker lifestyle.
So, even though I am on a vicious downswing in poker (the first real "run bad" since relocating, so I have actually been very lucky overall), I am feeling more positive about the actual conditions of daily life in Rosarito and dreading the future less and less all the time.
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Next time I'll try to discuss more about adjusting to life down here, the solitary work environment, and why I am looking forward to going home this Thanksgiving more than ever before. In the meantime, check out this blog by fellow Poker Exile Marty Mathis, who already wrote most of what I was going to say on the subject of adjustment, perspective and the nagging knowledge that "you can never go home."