What are we doing in Costa Rica?

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!

This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 22nd, 2008 at 5:43 pm and is filed under Philosophy.You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.