From Michigan - U.S.

Hi.  I was a volunteer teacher in Ecuador for several years when I was young.  I fell in love with the Latin-American culture at that time.  I speak fluent Spanish. 
My husband and I first visited the D.R. in 2019 for our 20th anniversary.  We rented an apartment in Las Galeras and stayed for a month. We fell in love with the people and the country and the rustic area of the Samana peninsula.  We came back for six weeks in 2020 and rented a little house in town, where we sort of adopted and treated a sweet dog with mange.  (She has now been officially adopted.) 
We're in the process of getting things situated to move but I imagine it will take a while to make it actually happen. 
I subscribed to this forum because my heart is always in the D.R. now.  We have two dogs, a Boston Terrier and a Bichon who will be making the move with us when it happens.
We both need to continue working remotely a bit though, and our experience has been that internet service is spotty so that's really what's kind of holding us back right now.  We both work in the legal field and don't have enough money to retire.  We're in our 40s.
If anyone is from Las Galeras and has strong internet or any advice in general on the subject, I'd love to hear from you.  I may start a topic on that thread somewhere else if I can figure out where.
We haven't traveled around the Dominican much so we really only know the Las Galeras area, we have friends there now so that's where we planned on settling.  I imagine we should probably visit a few more areas before we decide.
I've had to live as a professional the last 20 years but I do not thrive in the suburbs of the U.S.  When I'm in the Dominican, the real person that I am (free-spirited artist) begins to breathe again.  I look forward to volunteer teaching, to shopping off the back of a fruit/vegetable truck and in the market, to cooking everything from scratch that's grown locally, making fresh juice every day, walking everywhere, having the ions of the ocean balance my spirit, and to having the time, inspiration, and freedom of soul to paint.