We landed in Mexico City on May 15th, one carry-on each and a pet carrier. No checked bags. It was our first extended stop as full-time travelers. The plan was ambitious: six months across Mexico, bouncing between cities, then back to the U.S. for the holidays before Europe in 2027. We made it 2.5 months.
That sounds worse than it was. Mexico gave us some of the richest cultural experiences we’ve had anywhere. It also humbled us in ways we didn’t expect.
CDMX is an assault on the senses in the best way. The city hums constantly — street vendors, car horns, music spilling out of doorways.
The standout was the Museo Nacional de Antropología, home to the Aztec Sun Stone and an incredible Mayan exhibit. We spent 2.5 hours there and left feeling like we’d only scratched the surface.
We also hit the Frida Kahlo Museum — her actual house in Coyoacán. It’s smaller than you’d expect, more intimate, and seeing her easel and paints still set up in the studio hits differently than viewing her work in a gallery.
Other highlights: visiting the Pyramid of the Sun at Teotihuacán before the crowds and the heat, catching lucha libre at Arena México (go for the crowd as much as the wrestling), and the street art everywhere — entire building facades covered in murals that would be gallery-worthy anywhere else.
Here’s the thing everyone tells you about Mexico: don’t drink the water, be careful with street food. We took that advice seriously. Bottled water only, brushed our teeth with it, the whole routine.
And the street food? Never got us sick. Not once. Some of the best meals of the trip, actually.
The problem was restaurants.
Roughly once a week, one of us would go down for a day or two after a restaurant meal. Nothing catastrophic — no hospital visits — but enough to wear us down. When you’re traveling, losing a day to your stomach every week starts to compound. It gets real old, real fast.
After a month in CDMX, we booked a private driver (Tori rules out buses and most shared transit) and headed to San Miguel de Allende. It’s a nice colonial town — cobblestone streets, terracotta rooftops, that pink neo-Gothic church that looks like a wedding cake. Quieter than CDMX, slower, the kind of place designed for long walks and longer dinners.
The first week was great. Then my wife got the flu that I’d been battling. Once she had beat the flu enough that she could leave the Airbnb, we celebrated by going to a restaurant where she picked up Salmonella from the tacos she ordered, and that knocked her down hard. She couldn’t keep food down. She was surviving on Electrolit and Ritz crackers. Then soup. It took her 2 full weeks to recover to the point where she could eat ‘real’ food. And even then, that was accompanied by nausea and fatigue. A full month in San Miguel, and she spent more than half of it recovering from one thing or another.
Salmonella was the breaking point. We had planned to keep going — Guanajuato, Oaxaca, maybe the Yucatán — but the math had changed. The food issues in CDMX had already been chipping away at us, and now the health situation in San Miguel made the decision clear. We called it. Sometimes the right travel decision is to leave.
Leaving was its own adventure.
We booked the same driver back to Mexico City on July 16th, gave ourselves a few days to revisit some things we’d missed the first time around, then headed to the airport. We were booked on a direct Air Canada flight to Montreal.
At the check-in counter, the agent took one look at Tori’s soft-sided carrier and shook her head. Too large, she said. We pushed back. She didn’t budge. Denied boarding.
So we did what you do in that situation: sat on the airport floor, opened every airline app on our phones, and found the next available option. American Airlines had a flight the following day. We booked it, grabbed a room at the airport Hilton, and tried again the next morning.
There was one new complication: flying back through the United States meant Tori now needed a screw worm inspection — a veterinary check required by the USDA for dogs re-entering the U.S. from certain countries. We found a vet near the airport who specializes in exactly this situation — she meets travelers at the terminal, does the inspection, and issues the certificate. A strange little industry we never knew existed. She showed up, examined Tori in the departures drop-off lane, handed us the paperwork; theoretically we were good to go.
Twenty-four hours later than planned, we landed in Montreal.
We’re traveling with a dog and planning to do Europe next year. That narrows the map considerably — many countries have complex pet import rules, long quarantine periods, or both. Canada is straightforward, and Montreal is only a short flight from the eastern U.S.
Beyond the logistics, Montreal checked a lot of boxes. The weather in summer is ideal — warm but not oppressive. It sits right on the St. Lawrence River, and the Old Port area has the kind of waterfront access we were craving after two months inland. Good food scene. Walkable. A city that feels European without the transatlantic flight.
More to come on Montreal. For now, here’s what we took away from Mexico.
The biggest lesson from these first two months is that full-time travel is not a vacation. On vacation, a bad meal or a sick day is a minor setback. When you’re living on the road indefinitely, those things compound. Your tolerance for friction gets recalibrated. The threshold for “worth it” shifts.
Mexico gave us world-class art and culture. It gave us mornings climbing pyramids and afternoons lost in museums. It also gave us a clear reminder that sometimes the smartest itinerary change is to cut your losses and move on.
No regrets. Just data for the next stop.