Cockroaches - Alabama versus Mexico

We reside in both Highland Chiapas (SanCristobal de Las Casas) and at Lake Chapala (Ajijic, Jalisco).  I was born and raised in Coastal Alabama and that is where I married my native French  spouse who had only recently moved temporarily to Mobile to teach French at a private high school.  After a brief period living  in Mobile we moved to San Francisco and when we retired we moved to Mexico - both Jalisco and Chiapas -  two places in which we continue to reside some 17 years later.

I bore you folks with my origin and past and current residential status to talk about cockroaches, not to otherwise extoll the virtues of any of those places in which we have chosen to live over the past nearly 50 years but to share with the reader that which  we have learned through experience  about the chacteristics of these nasty bichos and thereby  pass along this wisdom to the few of you who might have an interest as you contemplate geographical retirement locations in North America. 

Cockroaches and, specifically what we in Alabama called "tree roaches" - that is, the huge gruesome, creepy monsters that are a plague in Coastal  Alabama at sea level and  at Lake Chapala at 5,000 feet altitude that we have lived with since retirement. We have only identified the small so-called "kitchen roaches"   where we live in in Highland Chiapas at 7,000 feet and even then only on rare occasions.

We are therefore (and not by choice) authorities on the giant tree roaches that are ubiquititous in Coastal Alabama and at Lake Chapala and have determined that Lake Chapala cockroaches are superior pests in one´s home to the variety of the pest experienced in Coastal Alabama.  The reason is not complicated.  Alabama cockroaches can and do fly about one´s home at night in the dark,  landing on occasion during the night  in one´s hair as one reposes in one´s bed trying to achieve a good   
night´s sleep  while surrounded by these monsters flying about one´s bedroom. Lake Chapala cockroaches, on the other hand,  do not fly and thus do not land  in one´s hair and upon one´s bedsheets during the night.  Rather, Lake Chapala cockroaches stick to their assigned territory on the floors or kitchen counters around one´s home feasting upon  miniscule bits of cockroach food undetectable by human beings  that these creatures identify here and there leaving us to our peaceful slumber while they fatten up during their evening food hunts.

In summation, if you detest cockroaches and, particularly flying cockroaches, as companions in your chosen retirement home, I recommend Highland Chiapas or, secondarily,  the no-fly cockroach zone around Lake Chapala and not Coastal Alabama or any other location on the U.S. Gulf Coast.