Day 1
After years of planning, we finally set off for our year long dream trip that we had planned so meticulously for. So not true. What is true is that weeks ago, it flippantly crossed our minds that now would be the time to take a year off and travel with our youngest daughter before she starts high school. Simple, right? So not true, again.
When you plan to duck out of the world for a year, there’s a heavy organizational price to be paid. I made five lists, one for each person, which initially were appreciated, not. Later the girls were competing who had the most items
stroked off their list (a big mom win). The lists decluttered my head and made it able for me to fall asleep at night.
Downsizing sounds like such a cute, concise little compound word, but anyone who has tried to move the contents for a family of five (4 of whom are fairly sentimental girls/women) from a 4300 square foot house into a smaller
townhouse and 10×10 storage unit, knows it’s anything but cute or concise. We gave 34 large boxes to Goodwill, and yet, there was still so much left. Oh where are basements when you need them!
There were all the expected things on the list like, renew passports, finish Paul’s green card stuff, get more shots for people and dog, get foster dog adopted, leave a house, three schools, neighbors, jobs, help the girls get all their university info submitted, finding a new place for Kier close to the University, getting all the paperwork submitted for the virtual school for the youngest, give a third of the house to Goodwill, choose a country and buy some tickets to somewhere, then buy some onward travel tickets to somewhere else so they will let us in the country.
Then there were the unexpected things that popped up like the car dying for good, the green card taking twice as long as it should to be processed, our middle daughter deciding to come with us and doing courses online, our oldest daughter’s three week Bolivia trip falling right during our move, losing our Everglades tomato plant somewhere in the boxes (long story), wrecking a metal storage door frame until it looked like a dainty folded up Japanese
fan (longer story).
There were the uber important things to do like spending a week with each of my older parents doing the things near and dear to their hearts. Compiling my dad’s file cabinets of sermons into 2 large volumes, and planting 25 tomato
and 25 strawberry plants for my mom and feeding her lots of chocolate and pizza. Recording more family history for each of them.
I finished spending time with both of my parents on May 15, and came home to my ever growing lists of small, medium, and monster sized tasks to do. We’d decided to leave to somewhere on June 9. At least I had an end
date to organizational mayhem.
Visually I saw myself on this huge motorcycle (think Sons of Anarchy, Men of Mayhem), dressed in moto-black, blasting through boxes, papers flying in my wake, getting to the other end of the chaos. Oh yeah….visuals sometimes
get me through things. The girls would sometimes ask why I was smiling, if only they knew.
The end is here. Last night we finished what we could in the new house, all the important pictures were hung, we threw some clothes into a (never used for actual hockey) hockey bag, since this is still the only luggage we seem to
own. This morning at 4am we zipped up whatever was in there, made sure we had enough laptops for everyone and a spare, and got to the airport. Mayhem over.
It was only a two and a half hour direct flight to Costa Rica, time enough for a movie and a snack. After we picked up the car (adventure #1) and were driving through the lush mountains toward the Pacific beaches, we felt like we were finally able to exhale. The weeks of crazy prep were already worth it. We have a year ahead of us with lots of ideas but no agenda or commitments.
Madi and Kier fly up in a couple of weeks, after Madi does her mandatory Frosh orientation at the university and Kier returns from Bolivia. By then we hope to have a town we like and a place for the rest of the summer.
We arrived in San Jose at 10 am, we drove through the mountains, stopped for some chips at a roadside snackshack. The Costa Ricans simply aren’t fans of street signs, but we found our condo with only one direction ask (a new
record). It’s low season and we have the place almost entirely to ourselves, score. It’s a magical little complex surrounded by lush mountains, a little front porch overlooking the pool. We seem to even have our own cat, which
thrills the Cali. Everything is so green here! We explored the town, walked on the beach, ate yummy food at a family run restaurant.
Next we headed to the local grocery store, always a favorite activity anywhere we go. Many of the brands were familiar to us from Guatemala, which made feel rather familiar. There are three versions of Takis here which
Cali was excited about. Now she’s officially sold on CR. We grabbed coffee stuff, breakfast stuff, snack stuff, beverage stuff, all the mandatory stuffs.
When we get a to a new place we like to get a lay of the land of the town, beach, grocery store, restaurants. In the house we always sort out the coffee maker situation how the shower works, internet passwords, important stuff.
We ended the day with a relaxing swim in the pool and some of our favorite snacks, reflecting on having woken up in Miami and going to sleep in the mountains of Costa Rica. It was the perfect start hitting many of our favorite
reasons for going someplace new. Just one day of exploration and relaxation here has melted away all the stress of prep-mayhem for a trip like this. In my mind I stopped my huge moto before blasting into the horizon. I did a
squinty-eyed glance over my shoulder at all the organizational mayhem in my wake and gave a hint of smirk (you don’t smile when you’re on a machine this big, you just rev your beast) worth it, so worth it.