Early arrivals

It was the 1980s and Massachusetts winters weren’t getting any warmer. So George and Pearl became among the first foreigners to come to this rustic stretch of Yucatán coast to build their dream house. More than 3 decades later, we see how their timing, and patience, paid off.

College professors George Ashley and Pearl Mosher-Ashley were still in their 40s and working in Western Massachusetts when the Yucatán coast started calling them.

It was the mid-1980s and a university colleague who had been called upon to increase his Spanish skills so he could teach the language, took a sabbatical in Yucatán. The colleague fell in love with it, bought a coconut grove on the beach, and built a house. Whereas today the coast is practically packed with houses, there were virtually no neighbors back then.

When he and his wife invited George and Pearl down to see their home in San Bruno on the Gulf Coast — it all looked pretty primitive, Pearl recalls. But they were set up with a real estate agent and ended up buying the triple-wide property next door. It stretches from the road to the beach. Such a property would be unaffordable to only the most well-paid, superstar college professors today.

The hitch? No electricity, no water, no telephones. The dusty road outside was a lane and-a-half wide, transportation via bus was very limited. And supermarkets were still a few years off.

They designed and built their own study house, which has stood the test of

The beach at San Bruno, and the house built by the Pearl Mosher-Ashley and George Ashley, in the 1980s. Left, the pair still resides on the property, which has since grown lush with trees and shrubbery that they planted themselves, and there are plenty of neighbors.

time, not to mention hurricanes, sun, and humidity. George took care of most of the repairs. “I got to learn the names of all the parts of a toilet,” he remembers.

Before they got electricity eight years later, they made do with candles and kerosene lamps, which sounds romantic but wasn’t.

“It attracted every insect known to man. I used to be covered with mosquito bites,” Pearl exclaims.

They also had a propane-powered refrigerator, stove, and water heater. A generator from the States was dismantled and packed into two suitcases — back when packing strange objects was something a traveler could get away with.

Phoning a friend in the 1980s was different than it is now, and in San Bruno, it was even more of a challenge.

The park-like property the couple bought in the 1980s is immense by today’s standards. Below, the terrace still has unobstructed water views.

“You had to go to Telchac and you had to go to a little corner store called La Guadalupana,” Pearl recalls. “They had the only phone that allowed an international call. The problem was that they would have to dial it for you, and you had to stand out in a corner of the store, where everybody was standing, listening to what you had to say.”

“When they saw us come in, they would gather in the store so they could hear the call,” George says. Why would people bother to listen to one side of a telephone conversation in a foreign language? Was there nothing else to do?

“Exactly. Life was so boring!” says Pearl.

One modern convenience they haven’t added is air conditioning.

“Never! We haven’t needed it in over 30 years,” says Pearl. 