A Year in Costa Rica

We’ve been here a month now so I figured it was a good time to reflect on what’s different here than at home because I feel like after a while, I’ll begin to forget.

The point of doing this whole year in Costa Rica was to mix it up and live life differently.  Sure, much of our lives are similar to what they were in Boise – kids in school and after school activities while Shane and I work (albeit a lot less), birthday parties, socializing with friends – but even the subtle differences and new “challenges” day to day are what make this an adventure.

Sweating to the oldies

I’ll start with sweating. I’m not a sweater. Or at least I thought I wasn’t. But it’s humid here and I’m definitely not used to that. The first week was kind of rough – just getting used to the different type of heat having come from high desert. But, I’d say the whole family has gotten used to it now. For one, we don’t fight it anymore. In fact, I haven’t worn deodorant or antiperspirant since we got here. Aside from post workout activity, I don’t smell. To that you say, “sure you don’t Tanya. You just can’t smell yourself-but you stink!” But I asked Shane. And trust me, he would tell me!

The rest of the family has gotten used to it also. It’s not uncommon to see beads of sweat on my daughters upper lip when we’re just walking around a market. And both Charlie and Shane take an extra shirt for most activities – because they are sweaters! But again, no one really smells from it. And we all drink a lot more water so I figure that’s a bonus.

As for oldies, this place LOVES 80s music – I’ve not heard so much 80s music since, well, the 80s. Power ballads and hair bands seem to be the favorite but it’s all at the ready whether you’re at a bar, in a grocery store, a taxi, or flipping through the channels – there’s always some 80s VH-1 for your listening pleasure.

Hi honey, can you stop at Hawkins Pac-Out on the way home?

I’ve said good bye to convenience.  It’s saved me a lot of money and probably isn’t too bad for my health either. I don’t stop for coffee or even have coffee meetings anymore. Well, except for my standing meeting with by bestie where we Skype – but even then I brew my own and just fawn over her Starbucks. I don’t hit a drive through when I don’t feel like cooking.  I’ve gone from having a diet soda every day to forgetting soda is even a beverage option. It’s just not readily available. Sure, you can buy it at the store, but it’s just not in your face with giant 18 packs where I can conveniently grab a cold one from the fridge.

What is convenient you ask? FRUIT! And as a result, we eat a lot of it!

Amazon Prime? What’s that?

But as far as saving money goes, this one has saved me the most: I can’t purchase anything online!  It’s kind of awesome. We just figure out how to do without or we search relentlessly for a store – an adventure in itself! – that has whatever we truly need.  For example, we needed batteries for the car remote because the key won’t unlock it. We must have stopped at 10 different places looking for them only to find them behind the counter at a specialty electronics store – and this was after much inquiry. And because I don’t have the convenience, I also don’t have the clutter! Less stuff is extremely liberating. 

Social media isn’t just for socializing anymore

The community here is pretty cool. We use Facebook a lot to figure things out. Whether it’s where to find a car, a mechanic, a special dress needed for Costa Rica Independence Day or just general information, there’s a Facebook group for it. I’ve even had people I’ve never met offer to pick things up for me from the city. And Shane hired a woman in San

Jose to take a car we wanted to buy to a mechanic so he could shave a day off his adventurous car-shopping trip. I think you can find help for anything on Facebook in Costa Rica. 

As a result, I spend far more time on Facebook now that back home – which I’d pretty much gotten down to about 2 minutes a month. But it’s for what I believe to be more worthwhile reasons than just filling the boredom gap or some people’s need to post a selfie – like this guy.

But to give you an idea how useful it is, take these scenarios:

• Fish market – A CRIA mom posted on the Friends of CRIA Facebook group that her husband had caught MahiMahi and Tuna and she’d bring it to school the next day for anyone who wanted to buy. So yes, we bought Mahi Mahi from a trunk in a parking lot – and it made great fish tacos! And if you’re not a friend of CRIA, you’d likely see it on Families of CRIA or the school’s active Facebook page.  Kids don’t go to CRIA? That’s quite alright – you can find all kinds of kid-friendly information on Families with Children in Guanacaste, Costa Rica.
• Puppy Travels – I’m part of a FB group called Expat Dog Lovers in Costa Rica “Paw a Vida”. It’s a wealth ofinformation if you have a dog here or want to bring one some day. Even though the same questions are asked over and over, no one gets feisty and says “read the other posts first”. People seem to genuinely like helping people here.
• Car Shopping – Buying a car is one of the most time consuming and definitely the most exciting purchase we’ve made in a long time. Yep, you guessed it. Facebook is the place to look. Not even a Facebook Market per se but groups like Costa Rica gringo classifieds which is literally just a group of people selling stuff.
• Workouts! People are fit here; it is part of the lifestyle. One mom is my Boot Camp instructor (this one found me on Facebook). It’s on the road to school and begins conveniently 5 minutes after school starts. It’s been a great way to meet a lot of parents. And, did I mention, I’ve never sweat so much?

The list goes on – if you want information, you can get it on Facebook. It’s practically replaced Google for some things becauseyou get personalized advice from someone who’s been there, done that and is interfacing directly with you about your situation. 

Enough about Facebook, other fun differences we’ve had the pleasure of experiencing include:

• Cars with hoods up. We jumped the same car twice in one day. And I feel if (when) we are in the same situation, it’d be under 5 minutes before someone stopped to help us.     
• Picking up hitch hikers – it’s a common way for locals to get to work so we figured we might as well contribute. Even Charlie and his buddies have used this means of transportation to get around. It’s quite brilliant actually.
• Driving windy roads and dodging cows, horses, Igu

  

  anas, pizotes, monkeys, people, tractors, gutters the size of the New York canal and pot holes the size of a bathtub – really nothing surprises us anymore.

• Pulling over in rain storms – it comes down that fast and that hard sometimes.
• Driving steep roads with giant ruts and rivers that would be closed indefinitely in the US.  One of our favorites is the Monkey Trail which is a “short cut” to Liberia from Brasilito.

I could go on but I’ll save some of the fun for future posts. Until then, pura vida!

We have two big dogs. One 90-pound, three-legged yellow lab named Dexter and one 10-month old 90+ pound (going on 150) Mastiff, named Luna. We were unable to bring to Costa Rica because of they’re extra large sizes. Well, unable might not be totally accurate. We could have driven the 72 hour trek  from Boise, Idaho to Brasilito, Guanacaste, Costa Rica. Or we could have flown them to San Jose (a 4.5 hour drive from Brasilito on a good day) for somewhere in the range of $1500-$2500, per dog each way – and we’d need to wait for the cooler months to avoid heat restrictions.

So, given we’d only be in Costa Rica for just under a year, we would find them temporary homes. Dexter is with Shane’s parents on a large acreage and Luna is with some friends in Boise. When we inquired about Luna, this is the response we were provided in email and we thought it not only accurate but hilarious so wanted to share it.

***

Shane,

We got back from Redfish on Wednesday and left for Costa Rica the following Tuesday. We had a hotel booked in, Brasilito, a small beach town near one of the schools we were looking into. But one of the places Shane reached out to to inquire about a condo for long-term rental offered to allow us to stay there for free. We were kind of hoping to stay in Brasilito, closer to the locals, but we couldn’t pass up a free place to stay. Needless to say, it was a gorgeous condo inside the gated resort community of Reserva Conchal. All the while we were there, we kept reminding ourselves this is not how we would live. Still Shane threw out an offer to the condo owner to see if they’d bite. They came back with a much higher counter offer. Easy decision. Back on track.

Still, we took advantage of the property’s amenities including the pools, restaurant and use of SUP boards. Seriously a great place for a vacation (here’s a great condo if you’re thinking of visiting). We proceeded to look at houses. The first house we saw, I fell in love with. It was a four bedroom with a small pool and a big yard. The style was very Costa Rican – tile floors, and all the bedrooms opened up to the pool area. It was a ways from the beach but close to school – a tradeoff I was willing to make since we’d be going to school daily and the beach less frequently anyway. Then we connected with a local realtor and saw three more houses. One was a significant climb up a rutted road. No thank you. Another was a condo in Tamarindo (the tourist spot in Guanacaste) that overlooked the parking lot. Also not our thing. And finally we looked at what could have been a promising house but it was filthy and the yard was full of trash. I couldn’t get past it.

Three strikes for that realtor which is unfortunate because he was so incredibly nice.  We really wanted to rent something through him but he just didn’t have the properties – and unfortunately that’s how it works in Costa Rica. If you’re interested in his or any other contact info, check out our guide as we list all of the contacts we’d recommend in there.

We looked at one more condo with great ocean views but in a dilapidated complex and two more houses in nearby beach towns. Both were options. One was a great option actually. A 3-bedroom with a big yard, a bunch of fruit trees and a giant pool just a few blocks from the beach and close to school and was priced exactly what our budget was. Seemed like a good sign.

But then we got a response from an inquiry on a penthouse condo back in Reserva Conchol. Again, we reminded ourselves we wanted a Costa Rican experience and a condo in a resort area wasn’t likely to provide it. Still, we went to see what we were going to turn down. Again, for exactly our budget, and the same price as the house, we were offered a furnished, two-story penthouse condo with 3 bedrooms, 3.5 baths and gorgeous views of the ocean and golf course we likely won’t be playing. Add to that the gated community (huge perq given the theft rates in non-gated communities), fitness center, tennis courts, pools, several eco trails and the cleanest beach stocked with kayaks and SUP boards all included with the rent and we decided that was going to be the best Costa Rica living experience for us all and we’d adventure on the weekends.

My husband thinks it’s funny, maybe peculiar, but I believe in signs and all signs pointed to Reserva Conchal. And that’s what we chose.

Here we are, in the middle of summer of 2017, just before the 4^th 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 4^th 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.

Even though we hadn’t been back, since then, Costa Rica has been a favorite destination of ours but not one we gave much more thought to over the years.

Four jobs later for me (two for Shane), we’re doing pretty well in our careers. He’s the president of an ecommerce company and I’m the CDO and a partner of a marketing agency. But that all changed within a matter of a few months and by June of 2017, we were both unemployed.

As we shared more time together pondering our future, we began to discuss more and more non-standard opportunities. We were both at a level in our careers that great positions don’t come along for that frequently in Boise, Idaho. So, as much as we loved our lives in Boise, we started to consider moving elsewhere for the right opportunity. Don’t get me wrong, we weren’t entirely open minded as we had a combined set of requirements that really limited us to a handful of places that equaled: Bend, Oregon, San Diego, California and maybe Salt Lake City, Utah.

I think I was ready for a change of scenery moreso than Shane so my mind was maybe a bit more open to opportunities we’d never have considered when we were both gainfully employed. One night I was looking at Facebook, something I had almost broken myself of entirely by this point, and I ran across a post that someone liked about a company who facilitated a year-long, world travel adventure for a group of 30-35 people homesteading and working for a month at a time in a new location. This along with knowing another family who’d just taken their kids on a world travel excursion for a year made me propose this ludicrous idea to Shane.

When I brought it up to him initially I prefaced it with “I’m going to pitch an idea the you’ll immediately hate but I think you’ll warm up to…” Sure enough. He said “no way” faster than I could tell him I’d already booked our flights. Just kidding. It wasn’t that bad, but my heart was set on it. I tabled it.

Not long after that, I saw a post – again on Facebook (old habits die hard), by a family that mentioned they were going to Costa Rica. And then I saw they had their house for rent. I put two and two together, did a little more cyber stalking, and learned they were going to Costa Rica for a year – and taking their family. So I mentioned that to Shane and to this he said “Now, Costa Rica, I’d consider”.

I immediately started researching online to find resources and within Prime days, I had a book about moving to and living in Costa Rica. Shane reached out to the family we knew and met the husband for lunch. We were sold. But there was seemingly no way we could pull it off before the school year started. It was mid-June already and there was so much to do. And if it didn’t all come together we could never pull it off. So we hem-hawed and we started to get cold feet. Fortunately, we’d shared our dream with friends.

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.