• When faced with a fork in the road and no directional signage, always take the paved road.
• It’s hard to spot sloths up in the trees when you’re always watching your small children on the ground.
• Ticos are known for being friendly. In our experience, Texans are generally “friendlier” than Ticos, but the Ticos are way more helpful. So while your Texan customer service person is more likely to greet you with enthusiasm, your passing Tico motorist is more likely to stop and help you fix your bike chain. 
• Breathtaking surroundings don’t mean a thing if you don’t have friends to share them with.
• It’s impossible to know what a place is like without going there. No matter how much we read about and researched our destinations, we were always surprised by the reality (in ways both good and bad). 
• Salsa Lizano is the key to a killer batch of gallo pinto.
• If you see someone jogging in Costa Rica, s/he is almost certainly not a native.
• This kind of adventure is worth all the hassle. 

Bungee cord. Our only gripe with this is that we only brought one. It’s excellent for Macguyver-style baby-proofing, securing groceries or a pizza box on your bike, and more. 

Swiss army knife. Whether we needed tweezers for splinter removal or a knife for slicing my flat-and-wound-up-in-my-bike-spokes tire free, this was an excellent and compact tool. 

Inflatable bedrail. Instantly transforms any regular bed into a safe place for Dean to sleep. 

Travel booster seat. This little thing was impressively sturdy and kept Dean well contained at home and in restaurants. 

First aid kit. Probably a no-brainer, but I was amazed at how often I turned to my trusty kit. I learned never to leave the house without it!

GPS device. Intuition is great when there are no road signs telling you which windy road to take, but knowing which direction your traveling — and maybe even having a map — is even better. 

What didn’t we need? A billion diapers. Every grocery store I’ve entered in this country has had them for sale. Other than that, I think we packed pretty admirably.

In Puerto Viejo:

• Wildlife. Finding frogs in the shower, hearing monkeys howling in the jungle, never knowing what’s lurking in the kitchen sink, huge blue butterflies, dozens of hummingbirds, giant moths, and even molting grasshoppers
• The view of the ocean as we biked down the driveway 
• The ice cream shop (it really is that good)
• Being surrounded by the most beautiful plant life ever. The unreality of opening the shutters in the morning and realizing what incredible variety and abundance we have in store for the day
• Picking star fruits off our own tree
• The fresh fish vendor and our tofu man
• The Loco Natural dogs. Come home with us, Rumba!
• Lack of marketing — bags weren’t printed with the grocery store name, zero billboards, etc. 
• Horses walking down the beach like it’s no big deal
• The smell of ylang ylang trees
• Hey, we may have complained, but it was a pretty magical place. 

Someone once told me that it takes two years after a move to make a place feel like home. That was certainly true for me when we moved to San Marcos; it took quite a while to settle in, make new friends, and feel like it was home. I’ve grown to love it there. We have amazing friends, I have no trouble filling the days with things to do with the kids, and I feel like a part of the community. But for much of the first year I felt isolated and grumpy. 

We’re now 2/3 of the way through our Costa Rican summer, and the current plan is to spend our last 10 days in the center of the country. That means we only have ~16 days left here. It’s nostalgia time! We can now take inventory of what we’ve experienced and learned. What will we miss? What won’t we?

On the one hand, I feel like three or four weeks would have given me an ample taste of like on the Caribbean coast. That part of me feels like we should have divided our time equally between several areas of the country. It wouldn’t have been a bad approach. Some of my complaints about the trip would have been irrelevant, or else I would have had the distraction of changes in scenery to ease them. 

On the other hand, I think the best kind of travel is that which allows you to get a taste of what it’s like to live in a place, not just visit it.  Would I have gotten that with just a two or three week visit? I think not. We wouldn’t have bothered to settle in, arrange tofu deliveries, or make friends. And if we weren’t about to leave, we would be experiencing so much more here. I know that on some levels we’ve only scratched the surface. Having our own home here, the kids attending school, finding work locally, etc, would all have been interesting and enlightening, I’m sure. We’ve been straddling two worlds rather than fully plunging into this one, and of course that affects the experience. 

Three months is a long time. Graham was talking again today about how much he misses our home in Texas. He wants to see his friends, sleep in his own bed, know what the days will bring. I miss the people, the pets (including our poor Frida dog, who just had her surgery!), the luxuries of middle class American life. But I’m glad we did this. Three months is short in the context of an entire lifetime, and I’m glad to have spent them doing something so unique.

The not-so-good side:

The journey took about 2 hours longer than we expected and we almost died. I know I have been known to speak… hyperbolically… in the past, but I swear I’m not now. As we were winding our way through one of the narrow mountain roads, an 18-wheeler driven by a complete imbecile nearly ran us off the road. We were in a stand-off for a couple of tense minutes as we were blocked in by a ravine (gorge? valley?) on one side and this dude to our left, front, and back. Some heroic driving by Zach (backing up on the windy road, pulling within an inch of doom to the shoulder, etc) finally freed us. I was leaning towards him in the hopes that shifting my weight towards his side would save all our lives. Seriously. Near collapse of Elizabeth’s nerves afterwards, not relieved until consuming half a bottle of wine with dinner. My precious children need to live. I don’t even know how to express how scary that was.

Arrived 2 hours later than anticipated at our hotel to find our reservation did not go through. We’ll be in very cramped quarters tonight in the standard room, which was all they had left. Also, no power at the hotel until about 7 pm, which was inconvenient but not, you know, life threatening or anything.

The plus side:

We got our rental car this morning with no major issues. Our Daihatsu Terios is compact, adorable, and has 4-wheel drive. The children were great on our drive. We saw a monkey crossing the road as we were leaving the Caribbean side! (Mommy: Graham, why was that monkey crossing the road? Graham: Because he wanted to go to the other side!)

Our hotel is AWESOME, even with a small room. The Arenal Lodge has a kids’ playroom, a very decent restaurant, a butterfly garden, excellent volcano views, and a playground! Apparently we can switch rooms tomorrow, and we’re hoping to get one with a view and enough beds for all of us. The nearest town, La Fortuna, looks really neat, and we’re excited to explore tomorrow.

This part of the country, with its rolling hills, lush greenery and COOL weather, is amazing. It is so beautiful and lush. Oh, and no bugs so far! We’re pretty excited about the break from heat, humidity, and mosquitos.

And, of course, we’re alive. And incredibly grateful for that. Life is very, very good. We are grateful.

Simpler, But Not Easier

Life here is simpler than in the States, but simple things are hard. There is less of everything except untamed wilderness: fewer people, less traffic, less media barrage, less stuff to buy, fewer choices. If you had a million dollars down here, nobody would know it because there’s nothing to buy except food, sundries, and what few garments are suitable for sweating it out in the jungle. Imagine, if you will, no Best Buy, no Home Depot, no PetCo, no Old Navy, no Barnes & Noble, no Bed Bath & Beyond. And lo and behold, your life runs perfectly well without them. Living here is uncomplicated, and generally low-stress. However, basic things take a lot of energy. Taking care of the kids here is a lot harder, because it takes both parents to get them out of the house. We don’t have a child care option yet, and no parenting staples like playgrounds and children’s museums. Stocking the refrigerator is a challenge, since we can only carry the equivalent of a single grocery bag in the bicycle basket. We go the various small grocery suppliers almost daily. By the time I have biked home with a full basket, I just want to drink a cold beer and go to sleep!

Bug Update

We’re adapting. Graham’s legs have downgraded from “Fangoria” to “merely bad.” To paraphrase Forrest Gump’s momma, the jungle is like a box of chocolates… We are constantly astonished by the variety and unpredictability of our insect situation. Case in point: two nights ago at dusk the entire house was enveloped in a swarm of moth-like creatures with slender black wings. We hid out for a while under our mosquito nets. It felt like an episode of “Tales from the Crypt.” Within about an hour, they were gone, and the spider camped out above our staircase was exhausted. We’re learning to live side-by-side with our six-legged friends. They are a fact of life here. On the other hand, when one of them flew straight into my right ear at dinner, all the way to my eardrum, I almost lost my mind.

Man’s Place in Nature

The first thing you think when you see this country is “OMG, it’s so beautiful.” After a few days, this evolves to “I am a stranger here, and Nature wants to eat me.” Now that we’re four weeks in, I can feel another transition. “Holy crap, I am an animal too! I really do belong here; growing up in a manmade world made me forget how.” I am becoming attuned to the natural world in subtle ways. For example, we had two straight days of rain this week. This morning, I knew the rain was finished because the cicadas were making a racket, which they never do while it’s wet. We don’t have any clocks. Honestly, we tell the time by looking at the sky.

I’m enjoying this in certain small ways. I love that on the property here Graham can be out of my sight and I feel comfortable that he’s safe as long as I know where he is. He’s not a huge risk taker, so he always comes back into my line off vision shortly. Even Dean can wander way more freely here than at home. The couple of times we’ve had a ride into town with the kids, there was no question that we’d bring the carseats. We did have them strapped in on the way from San Jose — my heart would never have been able to take the lane changes otherwise! — but they’re currently gathering dust upstairs.

Certain things are different here that make these safety things palatable. The drives have been short and slow. It’s a TINY town (I see the same people all the time) and people know each other and their kids. Cars are very accustomed to sharing the road with bikes and pedestrians and are generally very courteous. But it definitely puts an interesting perspective on things. I spent hours researching car seats when it was time to switch Graham into something bigger. I wouldn’t dream of leaving Dean unsupervised in our front yard in Texas. Yet maybe when we get back I’ll a slightly less paranoid mama? Who knows…

In an interesting twist, apparently Americans are much more cavalier about babysitters than the Ticos. I thought it would be easy to find some part-time babysitting here, but the idea was met with… well, not horror by our hostess, but no recommendations either. “I don’t know who I could trust — I mean, it’s your children!” were her exact words, if I recall correctly. Pretty different from the “Hey, that kid down the street looks old enough to dial 9-1-1,” approach to hiring sitters that a lot of Americans have. (For the record, our sitters in TX have all come from trusted recommendations or with references, but I haven’t been running their prints or anything.)  The only lead on a babysitter I’ve been able to get down here was from a woman who looked suspiciously like a “lady of the evening” who solicited me as I biked through town with Dean one day. Hmmm.

1. I do some work. Once I have made some useful software, the resulting code is transmitted over the network to one of my university clients.

2. They send me a check. It would be a lot easier if they paid me electronically (like with PayPal), but these are large bureaucratic institutions and they do things the way they do them. I use a mail handling service called Earth Class Mail which receives my mail and scans it, so I can see any checks or business letters on the web.

3. I deposit the funds electronically. I pay a monthly fee to use the same electronic funds transfer network that your gas company or your credit card company uses to automatically withdraw an amount from your checking account. I use the scanned image of the paper check to get the account number and bank routing number to initiate the transaction.

4. I transfer funds from my business bank to my personal bank. I can do this quickly and easily from my bank’s website.

I wasn’t sure this would all work until a couple of days ago, when I completed my first payment. From the moment my client puts a check in the mail to the moment I can go to the ATM and turn my hard work into ice cream and rum, it takes sixteen days to go through my Rube Goldberg system.

The upshot of all this is that I am warping some old, reliable rules of economics: that the income you earn and your cost-of-living are both tied to your location. In a country where the minimum wage is $2 an hour, I still draw a U.S. salary. And by the way, the demand for my software skills here in Puerto Viejo is absolutely zero!

We’re not exactly cleaning up financially; We’re still paying our mortgage and all the bills back in Texas. But I now know the model works, and it’s giving us a very memorable summer abroad.

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.

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!