Here we are, in the middle of summer of 2017, just before the 4th of July holiday. Our neighbors and family friends, the Robinsons, were at our house for dinner and we were talking about our dream to move to Costa Rica for a year but how we landed on this fall being too soon to figure it all out. We compromised and decided January would be a good time to go.
That would give us time to get everything in order after all. We needed to rent our house out first. Without doing that, it simply wasn’t financially feasible for us. And second, also along the financially feasible lines, we needed a decent sized savings account to fund our adventure. We were both freelancing but making a fraction of what we were making before so if we waited until the following year, we would exhaust our resources or we’d need to get jobs to sustain it – and that’s just a slippery slope back to “the usual”. And then there’s our middle child who would be a senior this school year. He’d have the option to stay since his mom lived in town but we hoped he’d want to take this opportunity – and that in itself would add to the budget.
So while we’re sitting there telling our friends about all the excuses for why we are holding off she said “I can’t believe I’m telling you this because I don’t want you to leave, but you need to go now. If you wait, you won’t go.” It hit shane and I both like a ton of bricks. We could hear our trepidation every time we said “but we still have to …” or “what if we can’t rent the house?” or “what if we run out of money?”. It was all just excuses to continue doing the expected thing – the “safe” thing – get jobs and carry on.
Thanks to KC giving us the proverbial shake and slap across the face a few times, we decided to go all in. Never mind that we had a week long vacation at Redfish Lake over the 4th of July where we’d surely have no internet connection to accomplish anything on our now, even shorter, timeline. Within a day, we booked plane tickets to Costa Rica for two weeks later to do some quick scouting – check out the school, look at housing, understand the phone and vehicle purchase situation, and, most importantly, was Costa Rica as great as we remembered it from over 9 years ago?
Fights booked for a week and a half later, we headed to Redfish Lake, one of the other most beautiful places on earth, and tabled the planning until we returned – with the exception of one thing – listing the house for rent. If we didn’t rent it for enough to cover most of the mortgage, it was deal breaker.
Fingers crossed, we went to the Lodge, got a solid internet connection, and posted the house for rent on Trulia, Zillow and Craigslist. Then we promoted it on Facebook and Nextdoor and emailed it to friends. And then we waited. One day, nothing. Two days, nothing. Three days, a bite! A family relocating to Boise for a great job at one of the hospitals inquired. The only problem was they wouldn’t be able to come see it or commit until July 22. That’s pretty tight having a goal to be in Costa Rica for the start of school on August 16 but we took it as a positive sign and figured we’d just start the kids in school late in Costa Rica if we needed to.
Meanwhile, after one inquiry we’re pretty optimistic, perhaps naively so, that we’re going to rent the house. Before the week ended, we had another inquiry. Again, someone relocating to Boise and wanting to live in the area which we lived. They were already in town so they came to see the house. It was a perfect fit for their growing family. They also had an 8-year-old girl (who immediately hit it off with our own daughter), a 2-year-old boy and a baby due to arrive any day. It was as if it was meant to be for both them and for us. They really are the nicest family and you couldn’t ask to have someone better live in and take care of your home while you’re living for a year in Costa Rica. They loved the house and the ‘hood and we loved them so we inked the deal – but not before our scouting trip was complete. So we packed for a week and headed to Costa Rica to find a home and hope it didn’t get rented out from under us as we finalized our own house rental.