It really starts back in the winter of 2008. My husband and I were on our way to Jackson Hole, Wyoming to meet some friends for a ski weekend and I was emailing a friend and colleague, Lori, about her latest travel adventure. She worked remotely
as a contractor for HP and was somewhat of an extended team member of mine so we talked often. We were talking about her recent trip to Costa Rica and I said how much Shane and I would love to go there. She connected us with friends of hers who had a house there and told us they love to loan it out to anyone who wants to use it. I said, “loan it or rent it”? She said they probably wouldn’t let us pay them but connected me with them to find out.
Sure enough, no matter how much I tried, they wouldn’t accept money but insisted we go enjoy a week at their home in Playa Junqial in Guanacaste, Costa Rica. We didn’t argue and immediately booked flights for early April.
A few weeks later, we were in Donnelly, Idaho on another ski trip with our friends Brad and Sara. As we cocktailed in a hot tub one night in the snowfall, we pretty quickly talked them into joining us. A couple of months later, we boarded a plan to San Jose, Costa Rica to begin our Pura Vida adventure.
During that week in Costa Rica, we learned a lot about the locals. They were genuinely nice people. Everyone we met was friendly, accommodating, and didn’t expect a thing in return – much different than our usual Latin American vacations to Mexico. And, after a long drive from San Jose, we were rewarded with all the beautiful beaches the Nicoya Peninsula had to offer. After a week of attempted surfing on breaks no one should ride (you’d think the lack of a single other individual would have been our sign), navigating the river, rock and rut filled roads for hours, fighting off a scorpion, shooing a crab from our living room and having our rental car broken in to, we decided it’d be pretty cool to live there one day. So of course we also spent part of our vacation touring amazing beach houses with pools overlooking the ocean that were no where near affordable for us. But some day…
Fast forward 9 months, and we welcomed a new little girl to our family of four – us and my step sons Max and Charlie, age 11 and 8 at the time. We loved to joke that she was made in Costa Rica and even toyed with using Tica (the Costa Ricans’ term for a girl) as her middle name. But we were back in reality and went with the safer, more traditional route of passing on my middle name – one I always thought so was boring (sorry mom). Why’d I do that to my own child? My excuse: I was tired and just needed to complete the damn paperwork so I could be excused from the hospital.