We both love to travel and we’re doing it extensively even before we met each other. John is originally from Prince Rupert, Canada and Florence from Paris, France. We met in Puerto Vallarta, Mexico back in the late 80s, raised two children, Jeff and Alison, who have since left to create their own lives in Canada and Portugal. That freed us up with even more time to travel outside of Mexico, most often to Europe.
We usually spend the winter months in Puerto Vallarta where, until recently, we had a publishing and marketing we’d started in the late 80s. Our main publication was Vallarta Lifestyles, a bilingual city/lifestyle magazine that was especially popular with the expat community. At its peak it had more than 300 pages per issue.
We also published a national travel/nautical magazine, Yates, y Villas, for many years, which allowed us to travel through much of Mexico. We also had a small hotel marketing and branding group, Mexico Boutique Hotels, which had us visit and stay at more than a hundred hotels through the country. For more than ten years we travelled Mexico in search of new hotels for the collection until we sold it in 2011.
We sold our publishing business in 2015 and retired. We retained our local real estate MLS service for Puerto Vallarta called MLSVallarta.com, the first MLS of its kind in Mexico that has been operating since 1989. But today we are no longer involved in the day-to-day operations, freeing us up again for more travel.
In 2013 we purchased an apartment in Nice, France and enjoyed six years exploring the French Riviera and into Italy. In 2019 we sold our place in Nice and bought an apartment in central Lisbon, obtained our Portuguese residency and plan to be in Portugal for the next few years or so. Or until the next adventure comes along.