What are we doing in Costa Rica?

It’s the end of a long day, but we’re all safe and sound in our lovable hotel room in San José. I predicted Dean would be difficult during air travel and I was wrong. He got frustrated a couple of times, but mostly he sat looking around, and babbled at us. Graham on the other hand was a piece of work. At the end of the short flight (Austin – Houston) he was crying and demanding to get out of the plane. At the end of the second flight, he sort of lost his marbles and kept trying to run away from us in baggage claim and customs. We’ve got seven bags and two car seats and only four arms between the two adults, so it was all we could do to keep G within line-of-sight. Our Sit ‘n’ Stroll was a lifesaver, thanks Mom!

We spent the entire afternoon and evening in the calm and quiet of our hotel room. Elizabeth took Dean out into the grounds for an excursion while I tried to figure out why I can get online with my laptop but not with our high-tech phone.

God bless room service on a day like this! I had my first drink in 12 weeks. No, I’m not a recovering alcoholic, I just wanted to see if I could abstain until we got here. Oh, that modest glass of red wine went down nicely. Elizabeth and I both ordered a plato tipico, which is the Costa Rican “typical” meal. It was simple, and perfect: rice, black beans, a small salad with ripe avocado slices and those bright pink pickled onions, and a succulent portion of seared sea bass. Elizabeth had the vegetarian version; Instead of fish she had beets, green beans, and a hard-boiled egg.

We’re spending one more day in San José before we take the last leg of our journey: a four-hour van ride to Puerto Viejo de Limón, our home for the next twelve weeks.

As I write this, departure is 11 hours and 41 minutes away. We’ve been planning this trip for nine months. When something is nine months away, you think you have all the time you need. I meant to be organized, well-prepared. But things have a way of taking longer than you think. And life has a way of “happening” while you’re making your plans.

Here’s the list of things that did not get done. I meant well, honest:

1. watch all 52 episodes of “Destinos” (I’m on #18)
2. get my routine blood tests and follow-up with my physician
3. write a User Guide to our house for Ashley
4. get a safety deposit box for all our most important documents
5. have our lawyer draft a medical power of attorney and advance directive
6. weigh less than 180 pounds (I lost ten, but fell short of my goal by five)
7. pick up all the poop in our yard
8. finish the five books I’m reading
9. renew my driver’s license
10. cook all the food in our fridge

I suppose it’s not too bad. There’s a lot more I did get done. I am now convinced that if you’re planning a trip longer than, say, three weeks, it will rapidly approach the quantum of effort required to move there.

Every couple of days, in the middle of endless preparations, one of us will look over and say, “Remind me again why we’re doing this?”

Without a doubt, it is easier not to take the trip. It’s easier to stay home. We could wait until the kids are older, or we have more money, or we’re retired, etc. etc. We’re going now because we can, and because we’re treating this as only the first of potentially many more “outings” like this.

I’m not all that interested in adventure. Though this is probably adventurous on some level, it’s not the adventure it would have been, say, fifty years ago. I hope we will learn a lot and become better citizens of planet earth. I hope my children will grow up comfortable with all kinds of people and different cultures, and this is just one small step in the grand scheme of things.

Naturally, while we’re in Costa Rica we want to be just as in-touch with our friends and relatives as we are now. With the magic of the Internet and IP telephony, it’s remarkably simple.

I bought a dedicated hardware Skype phone. For those of you aren’t the nerd that I am (read, everyone), here’s how it works: I plug the base station into a broadband Internet connection, and our friends can call us at our U.S. phone number, even if we’re in another country, even if we’re in another hemisphere.

We also get unlimited calling to any number in the U.S. or Canada. You might think something like this is prohibitively expensive. Not so, gentle reader! It costs $24 per year to hold on to our phone number, and $3 a month for unlimited calling.

You can get details at the Skype website.

When we decided to make this trip, we didn’t realize how much work we were going to have to do to get ready.

Usually, you can take a trip like this:

• buy some plane tickets
• book your accommodations
• pack your bags

If you have pets, you also have to arrange to board them.

Here, in no particular order, is a sampling of preparations we have to make for this trip:

• passports for the boys
• find a house sitter who will not kill our pets or burn the place down
• figure out how to get our mail abroad
• figure out how my clients can pay me while we’re gone
• buy some more luggage (not larger than 62 linear inches!)
• update our wills
• get a bank safety deposit box for our important documents
• get mini-storage for our junk that doesn’t belong in the house
• give away or sell a lot of other junk that we will never need again
• learn Spanish (thanks, Destinos!)
• get swimming lessons for the boys
• figure out how to get to the airport (12 weeks in the parking lot? I don’t think so!)
• try to put certain bills to sleep (cell phones, Netflix, auto insurance)
• get a Skype account and SkypeIn number so we can stay in touch while we’re gone
• start this blog!

That’s not a complete list by any means. All this is challenging, but fun too. That’s the whole idea.

When we tell people we’re taking our almost-one- and almost-four-year-old boys and going to Costa Rica for twelve weeks, we sometimes get a rather cross-eyed look that says “You’re going where with the what?”

Admittedly, this is a somewhat unusual thing to do. Most families, when/if they travel, will go away for maybe a week. How can we do this for twelve? Why go with such small children? Why Costa Rica?

It is possible because the nature of work is changing quite rapidly and radically. I left my day job at Texas State University fifteen months ago to become a freelance software engineer. Once I felt like I had my legs under me, I realized that I had freed myself of more than just the 9 to 5 workday; I was also free of any particular location. To make a long story short, I can work from anywhere with reliable Internet access.

Elizabeth and I started talking about different relocations we could do for fun and to learn a little something about the rest of the world. I was thinking Portland Oregon sounded nice.

I think most people imagine themselves one day being able to travel around the world, experiencing sights and sounds and culture, but probably as something in the distant future, perhaps earned after several decades of punching a clock. And certainly not something you do while your children are still in diapers! Elizabeth and I had fallen into a habit of saying, “When the kids are older, wouldn’t it be great if…” One day I just snapped out of it and said, “We don’t have to wait for the kids to be any older. We can still take those trips when they’re ten, and fifteen, and eighteen. But we can also go right now.”

We started reading about Costa Rica several years ago when we were fantasizing about, of all things, taking a vacation to an all-inclusive resort. Costa Rica is one of the stablest, cleanest, and safest places on the hemisphere. Certainly it is one of the most beautiful. We didn’t have to talk about it very long before we decided to go for it. If you’re going to take advantage of an uncommon freedom, you might as well put the pedal to the metal.

Costa Rica has some special advantages for our first experiment in location-hopping:

1. Being in the western hemisphere, I will not incur an awkward timezone penalty when communicating with my U.S. clients.
2. It is exotic without sacrificing infrastructure. I needs me some Internet.
3. The cost of living is low enough that we can pull this off without a financial hardship.

Time to sign off. With less than 38 days left to go, we still have so much to do!

Any family excursion into the jungle needs some good tech. This blog runs on the glorious WordPress 2.5. I decided to buy some credits at iStockPhoto.com, at least until we’ve got some fabulous photos of our own to share. My first download was the image you see here, and was the basis of our blog’s new banner.

More to come!

We just got sooo lucky. Our hosts at Loco Natural recently finished building a beautiful new house, and we got to switch our booking to it! Take a gander at the Bird House.

In just 45 days, 1 hour, and 2 minutes we’ll be touching down in San José. Not that I’m counting or anything.