Settling in and Preparing for School / Estamos Comodo y Preparando para un Año Nuevo

A few people have asked what our accommodations are like, so here is a peek inside our condo from the view of a tree frog on the window. Our condo is 2 stories with an open kitchen/living room. Our bedroom and bathroom are on the 2nd floor, while S & P's bedrooms and bathrooms are on the first floor. 

Conocer 'El Cabron Sucio"! The Dirty Goat is our CR car we purchased off two amazing La Paz teachers returning to the states. A 4WD diesel 2013 Hyundai Tucson. He's already confidently pulled us up potholed muddy mountain roads and across beach access roads with water crossings. This is a rare photo just after a car wash displaying El Cabron Limpio in all his beauty. When you come to visit the wheels and side walls will most likely be covered in light red mud and dust.

A fitting sign. S&P have been playing non-stop for the last three weeks. They have been outside or with friends for the majority of everyday. They will periodically check in to grab a mamon chino or a sip of water, before heading back out, to only return at 6pm when it gets dark to come in for dinner. We are so happy they are getting to experience the freedom of play both Cara and I had when we were younger.

Before attending the local bull riding event in Matapalo, we tried a new CR soda, Milory. Similar to Big Red and just as bad! No need to try this one again.

First scorpion encounter! As we were winding down from a day of playing, swimming, and hanging at the condo, we heard Parker give a horror film scream from her bedroom after her shower. Clearly something was wrong. When I walked in she was shaking with fear and crying that a scorpion was on her arm. I did not see anything until I picked up her towel from the floor and saw this little guy. We knew to shake out shoes before putting them on, but had not heard that scorpions also like to climb walls and hang out on towels! Thankfully she was just frightened but not stung. Lesson learned. I am now shaking out shoes, towels, shorts, and underwear to mitigate scorpion surprises.

Sunset at Grande between prep weeks for school.

On the hwy to pick up Nana from the airport I saw an awesomely Guanacaste scene of a sendero driving his cattle down the middle of the road to another field.

Nana to the rescue! While Cara and I were at professional development for the week, Nana took care of the girls. In the middle of the week we headed to Playa Grande to enjoy the sunset.

Here are a few pictures of our new school, La Paz Community School - Cabo Velas.

The middle school, Casa Tenorio, has over 100 students. Here is our teaching crew! Everyone has been welcoming and helpful. Kathy, Carlos, and Jo are the vets and the two Spanish teachers, Deybel and Kattherine are also first year teachers. They have been so patient to speak Spanish with us and give us time to process and attempt to respond coherently. Jose is also pictured, the school's amazing music teacher. Amy, our instructional coach is also pictured.

The week wrapped up quickly. Although Cara and I both had a lot of work and preparation that needed to be done for school, we harnessed our 'pura vida', loaded up Cabron Sucio after work on Friday and headed to the mountains to show Nana the cloud forests of Monteverde.

It is about a 4 hour drive from Matapalo to Monteverde and we arrived just after 8pm to a family run hotel. They were super kind and accommodating and helped us plan our itinerary for the next 36 hours.

Colibris (hummingbirds)! In the morning, we visited the Monteverde Hummingbird Gallery, where we saw some stunning hummingbirds at the feeders they keep out on the porch. While we were getting buzzed by hummingbirds we were also lucky to meet Dennis, a local guide who specializes in birds, and we decided on the spot to hire him to take us to look for cool birds early the next morning! 

Next, we visited Selvatura Nature Park to show Nana some two-toed sloths.

Is it snake?! Yes, this was our first snake sighting in CR, a non-venemous tiger rat snake. We saw this crossing the street in the afternoon. About 2 feet long and nonthreatening, unless you are a rat.

We had dinner while watching two local fútbol teams play a match in a very thick cloud across the street. 

A band was also playing continuously and energetically just behind the grandstands. It seemed everyone in town was out enjoying a Saturday evening, though the clouds were so thick at times I don't know how they followed the ball.

That night we went on a night walk to see some of the nocturnal animals. While we never did see that green viper we were constantly warned to avoid by staying in the middle of the trail, we did see some frogs and amazingly adapted spiders and insects.

The next morning, we were out of our hotel before 6am. When we met Dennis, we were immediately rewarded by seeing a troop of white-faced capuchin monkeys traveling through the canopy in search of their breakfast.

From this same location we spotted several birds, here's one of them, the Motmot. Dennis was amazingly quick about identifying and finding them with his scope.

We then went with Dennis into the Curi Cancha Reserve in the hopes of some more bird and animal sightings. There wasn't much to see this morning, but it was a beautiful hike and a great way to end our time in the mountains.

We finished our time in the mountains with a great breakfast at Stella's before we hit the road to get back for our first day of school!

First Day of School! 3rd grade and Kinder, here we go!

The night before Nana was to leave we enjoyed dinner at Gracia. They have a beautiful infinity pool overlooking the ocean and the sunset.  

We are so thankful to have had Nana's support to help settle us in and give us the time to prepare for school. Some things have been difficult about the move, but we have been so fortunate to have the unwavering love and support of our family.

Summer Part 2 (Costa Rica) - "Los Dos"

We arrived at Liberia Airport on July 28th and met our prearranged shuttle to our condo. It seemed like a small miracle that all 10 of the large suitcases holding all of our worldly belongings made it back to us, so at this point we felt like things were already going better than expected. 

 

We spent the rest of the day unpacking, hitting up the local grocery store, and swimming in our condo pool which our back door opens up to. 

We really like the condo so far. The location seems perfect for balancing access to school, beaches, and amenities. Plus, as mentioned in the previous post, we have now tripled the amount of bathrooms in our home! It feels almost royally indulgent to be able to poop without someone knocking at the door and whining frantically that they have to go "right NOW". 

We wasted no time the second day and went out to explore our first beach, Playa Conchal (shell). It's known for being one of the most beautiful beaches in CR for the white sand caused by weathered shells and coral, and it's only 4 miles away from our condo! Most of the touristy beaches here have the "Tico Tax", where you pay an attendant 2 thousand colones (~$4 USD) to park and watch your car.

We bought 3 boogie boards from the awesome teachers who sold us the car (who were wrapping up their time in CR and headed back to the US) so the boards were waiting for us when Mike picked up the car on the second day. We broke them in on Playa Conchal and had an awesome afternoon catching waves and rolling around in the sand. 

Mike and I have been taking turns exploring different safe and fun running routes, and we scored big when we found this "finca run", which is a 3-5 mile run from our condo down a beautiful shaded finca (farm) dirt road with cows and mountains in the distance. 

Guanacaste, the region we are in, is dominated by ranching, so our town is surrounded by beautiful mountainous pastures and it's very common to see sabaneros (Costa Rican cowboys) leading horses down the highways. In our town soccer field (instead of a town square, at the center of many towns is a soccer field), about 200 yards from our condo, we were lucky to come upon the very neat tradition of Carreras de Cintas, where men on horses ride as fast as they can and try to lance a tiny quarter sized belt loop with a tiny 6 inch spear. So impressive!

My 42nd birthday was 3 days after we arrived, and since we were still getting settled we put off celebrating another few days because my birthday present from Mike and my parents was a trip to the mountains! We drove 3 hours to the mountainous area around the city of La Fortuna. We stayed at an AirBnB on a mountainside in El Castillo with a beautiful view of the cloud forests and Arenal Volcano, which was shrouded in clouds almost the whole time. 

One of the biggest draws to this area is the hot springs resorts. When we were here in 2022, S and I got to experience the awesomeness, but Mike and P missed out since they were back in Austin dealing with the most expensive poop in history (see blog post here), so they were excited to see what all the fuss was about. Volcan Arenal even peeked out from behind the clouds for a few brief moments! 

Mike and the girls went on a very rainy hike to see Catarata Fortuna (Fortuna Waterfall) while I was getting a birthday massage. Suckers!

We spent a rainy afternoon at the Butterfly Conservatory just up the road from our AirBnB, which had an impressive collection of butterflies from 4 distinct eco-regions of CR, and a solid collection of frogs. 

The adaptation of species never ceases to amaze me. If you look closely at the wing tip on the right of this Owl Butterfly, you can see that it looks a lot like the face of a snake.  

P as my favorite butterfly, the Blue Morpho. 

Our last day in the mountains we took a walk in the hanging bridges of the forest. This is me trying to be brave while the kids swayed the swinging bridge hundreds of feet up in the tree canopy. 

This is the first of many Ficus tree pics you'll probably see on this blahg. 

You can see Lago Arenal (Lake Arenal) from the lookout points. 

We got back to our place and promptly hit up a different beach (Playa Minas). We've been to 5 different beaches so far, and they are all awesome and have different draws. The kids wanted us to make them mermaid tails, but after making them we both stood up and just cracked up that we inadvertently both created huge phalluses. You can take the teacher out of the middle school, but you can't take the middle school out of the teacher! 

We rang in our first week of being in CR with our first ER visit! P was swimming in our complex pool and bumped her head on an underwater bench ledge. Our neighbors were hugely helpful and told us where to go, a 24 hour private medical clinic 5 minutes down the road, where P got stitches. She was so brave and, while it's very comforting to know that medical help is just down the road, I'm really hoping we don't end up back there in the next 2 years. It was a very exciting way to start off our time here. 

A neighbor we met on day 3 turned out to be a tattoo artist, so Mike wasted no time arranging to get a new tattoo to honor Hudson. She's very talented and this looks exactly like the paw print we took from him earlier in the summer when the girls were painting outside. 

One of the huge benefits of our condo complex that is already paying off is that S and P have met a gaggle of kids that they can run around the condo complex with. It has really helped their transition which started off rocky but seems to improve with each friend they make. The neighbors we've met so far are really nice and it seems like everyone looks out for everyone else's kids. 

A neighbor couple with 4 kids invited us to go with them to check out the tide pools at Playa Langosta. It was a fun and rainy adventure looking for cool stuff in the rocks and we saw crabs, sand dollars, lobster body parts, little fish, and lots of hermit crabs.

To celebrate two weeks here, we took a picnic dinner to watch the sunset at Playa Flamingo, another one of the most poplar beaches in the country and right down the street from our school, La Paz Community School @ Cabo Velas. 

The sunset was awesome, and it was a nice opportunity to reflect upon the past 2 weeks. Every day has brought a new fun adventure, from exploring a new beach to navigating the cell phone or car insurance systems here. But every day has also brought challenges. We knew it would be a hard move in a lot of ways, but there was no way to anticipate the exact ways that it would be hard, the particulars of the discomforts, or the terrible gut punch feeling of watching your kids struggle with a decision you made.  

We want this blahg to reflect our real experiences here in as much complexity as we experience them, the only limitation being our ineptness in reporting them. So to that aim, so far it's been good and not good, great and not so great. There have been moments of incredible beauty and heart wrenching home sickness, total relaxation and throat-tightening anxiety. A phrase that we used with our 2013 World Games USA team was "los dos" to express feeling two, often conflicting, feelings at the same time, and I think we're bringing it back. Because there is no lack of feelings happening here right now! 

Every day has gotten a little easier and it has really helped to get out of the condo and into the community. Mike and I start work next Monday, 8/19, and we're looking forward to the structure, social opportunities, and community building that we hope will come with that. 

The Move to Costa Rica

"When things are bad, make them good. When things are good, make them great. When things are great, mix it up." 

We heard the quote above from Scott Price during our ski trip last spring break. While we love it's message, we also recognize and are so thankful that our education and financial situation allow us to "mix it up." So mix it up we have. 

Why make the move?...

We love Austin. We have an amazing community that we have built over the last 20+ years, but in some ways this community served me and Cara more than it did our girls. Our neighborhood is not set up for freeplay and roaming. Furthermore, the Austin school system encourages and allows families to have school choice, which means friends may not be conveniently located just down the street or a block over. Play dates had to be scheduled rather than occur organically on S&P's whimsy.

Our condo and La Paz, the school the girls will attend, will hopefully provide communities and environments where the girls can play, learn, and grow independently.

Y por supuesto porque del idioma y la naturaleza. Cara and I have been eager to improve our Spanish speaking, and it has been a goal of ours from the beginning of our journey as a family to raise the girls bilingual and aware of the wider world. It is why we enrolled them in Zavala's dual language program, and why we primarily looked at schools in Spanish speaking countries. Costa Rica provides a soft landing for learning Spanish because Tik@s pride themselves on education and their ability to speak English. While the girls will get plenty of exposure at school, Cara and I will have to be a bit more deliberate about our study and seeking out interactions in Spanish. We also visited CR in 2022 and were gobsmacked by the natural beauty and access to incredible animals, forests, mountains, and beaches. Nearly 25% of the land and coast are protected as national parks or other protected areas, and we are so excited to explore many of those places. 

                                                 

Our one bathroom home seemed to be getting a bit smaller as the girls are growing, so it was either move to Costa Rica or renovate the house to add another bathroom. Costa Rica seemed like a lot more fun than a bathroom renovation.

Hudson was pretty nervous as we were packing and cleaning throughout the final two months. Many times we didn't have floor space for his bed so he had to improvise in some luggage.

                                                   

Shelby and her amazing family came by with a perfectly timed gift of new Costa Rican themed stuffies in the final days leading up to our move. The girls really didn't start to show their big feelings until we began selling their furniture and packing up their toys. Slothy and Parroty helped soothe those worries. 

HERE WE GO!