We Arrive, We Collapse, We Move In To Paradise...Right?

Part three of our ongoing saga about our move to living in Costa Rica...

Read Part One HERE...How Do We Live Our Lives? With Abandon and Lotsa Moxie!

Read Part Two HERE...Wecome To Living In Costa Rica ...Your Homecoming Includes A Shakedown At Customs!

Hindsight is always 20/20! Looking back now on our lives during the two years we lived there, our first few hours in Costa Rica and our experiences at the airport were warning signals of what our lives would be like and we probably should have booked a flight back to the US while we were still at the airport.
Leaving the US was for me, an opportunity to find a place where there was less government involvement and restriction in my life and a slower, more graceful way to live out my life. It was our attempt at finding a new frontier for us! Little did we know at the time that this was a huge fallacy and a total illusion created by my warped mind which has been addled over the years with too much work, too little pay back and far too many dreams of liberation. Paradise called and we were going to answer that call.

We hadn't just picked up and moved to Costa Rica sight unseen. We went to visit twice before doing the deed. We toured around, checked out houses and neighborhoods, even took a seminar about how to live and move there! Most folks there told us we should visit at least 10 times over the period of several years before making the decision to move there but who had several years? We saw houses like these and the bars were everywhere but somehow we just didn't see them in our excitement and our quest for adventure.

The contrasts are many and very wide but the bars are everywhere as is the poverty. To us at the time it was quaint. We either needed more coffee or an injection of something stronger for the wakeup call was not ringing through on the time machine. We were living the dream then and wanted it all NOW! We threw all caution and money to the wind and just jumped with nose plugs remaining still wrapped in plastic at the beach. Sometimes it really does pay to listen to those who have passed through the portals ahead of you. Sometimes you just gotta jump!

During our second visit we stayed with a nice Canadian woman who owned a B&B in the town were we wanted to live. She had been living there for many years, was fluent in Spanish...because it is easy to learn if you are first fluent in French, which she was.She knew a lota people, locals and foreign nationals and helped us to get a few things together down there while we were back in the States. That included finding us a driver who knew someone else who also had a large van and the two of them could pick us and the 27 bags, 8 cats and one dog up at the airport for a reasonable price of $100. A bit more than your usual taxi to the airport but it was two vans after all so we didn't object...until the end.

As I exited the customs conflageration I was finally allowed to go visit el banos and have never felt such relief in all my life before or since. While doing so Bryana was shouting orders to the drivers of the vans to get them loaded with our stuff and pets. I made her go on the van with the animals because I knew if I had to listen to them cry any more I would end it then and there, and I went with the luggage and the bags of jewelry which were blessedly silent.

As earlier visitors and touristas we were treated as sort-of-honored guests. We stayed in a hotel with sort-of-airconditioning and were driven around in taxis and tour busses with sort-of-airconditioning. Now that we were 'living' there all the amenities magically disappeared and driving down the highway away from the airport my tired face was assaulted by the night time air of beautiful down town Allejula, pregnant with the humidity of the rainy season and throbbing with diesel fumes. Yum! Donde esta el airconditioning?? Welcome home Dona Susan...this is it! Roll down your window and feel the breeze.

Don Pablo (not his real name) had been languishing at the air port for over six hours with his buddy Don Something-else-or-another waiting for us. Taxi drivers are used to driving folks here and there in Ticolandia (my pet name) and waiting endlessly for them so sitting there for six hours may have been a bit much, but what the heck! They were waiting for the new Gringas and that meant a new house, private school for their kids and a new wardrobe for the little woman as far as they were concerned. They coulda sat there forever.

If you don't know what Gringa means, it's the female version of Gringo, or she who is totally green around the gills, new at whatever it is, comes from America, probably the Texas oil fileds, with pockets filled with greenbacks lined with gold and stuffed in their undies. It means an opportunity and we were the ripest opportunity Don Pablo and Don Someone-or-another had seen in weeks. They were driving happily around in circles, a talent the Tico taxi drivers have perfected, with the two dumb-butt, tired gringas eventually getting us to our new home in the wee hours of the morning and adding yet another couple rooms to their new houses which they were going to purchase as soon as they had dropped us off and got paid.

Before I asked the damning question, how much?, I had them haul all our stuff inside, cats, dog, bags and jewels and put things in their right place. God bless our Canadian friend for having set up litter boxes, food and water bowls where we had requested and for making beds for us to collapse into. To this day I am in her debt. When we were finally ready to let the 'boys' leave I said it...how much? $600 Dona Susan! Whhhhhaaaaaaaattttttt! And I look back on that day and laugh about it because, after all, we WERE in Paradise, Right? Pura Vida!

We set the cats up in the 'maid's room' and closed the door. Most nicer houses in Costa Rica have a maid's room even tho' there are not many live in maids any more. We used our maid's room as our cat room and our babies were finally able to settle down peacefully and sleep it off. We tumbled into our makeshift beds and passed out cold only to be awakened the next morning at 6:00 a.m. by our neighbors who were also our landlords chattering like excited monkies in the forest who'd just found a new banana tree and getting the kids ready for school, which starts at 7:00 a.m. Since all windows must be left open because the air conditioning is non-existant there was no way to block the noise and extend our shut eye.
Still in awe of being there and not have anything to be cynical about...yet, I got up to sit on my little balcony and enjoy the early morning rooftop view from my bedroom looking over the Central Valley amidst the palm trees and the mountains. Believing then that I had found what I had been seeking all my life, I was at peace...for that moment. Yes, Virginia, we were in paradise!

End of part three...yes there is more coming.

How Do We Live Our Lives? With Abandon and Lotsa Moxie!

It was pouring rain as we loaded our bags into the back of the Land Rover, our Toyota and Paul's broken-down old yellow-orange VW van with failing fenders, chunks of character and 1960s bumper stickers. That is, we loaded our bags...27 of 'em, and our eight cats, one dog, one mom, one daughter and half a ton of jewelry and headed off for the airport. Of course it was raining! What else?! The gods were crying with joy and sorrow, mixed blessings and grief for our leaving our lives and climbing into the tiny cigar with wings that would take us to a new beginning, the fulfillment of a hard won dream fantasy. We were moving to Costa Rica, the whole fam damily and doing it against all odds and when no one else had the balls to do so even though everyone seemed to want to run away too!

I'm a recovered Jewish American Princess or should I say Queen, a JAQ with a serious defect in my personality. I like taking risks and adventure and don't much give a damn about status, position or clout in the community. Not into stability, the right husband, the acceptable outfit or being politically correct. I grew up having many of my dreams bashed by circumstance or by mom and dad and learned when I became an adult that taking action and bringing into reality those dreams, fulfilling them and allowing myself to live and be me was one of the most important things I could do for myself...and for my kids. And so it was and still is. My kids might not agree with this, but I sure gave it my best along the way. We are all dream makers and in our family we do our best to live them too! So, Costa Rica became a reality instead of a moment in time where we might have been left wondering what would our lives had been like if we had not actually picked up and left.

For me and Bryana, the only 'material things' we are REALLY concerned about are our pets and our jewelry...and for Bryana, being young...of course she loves the guys...not that they are material things, but sometimes I wonder what Bryana actually thinks as she flings them aside in a steady succession of collecting. I used to love collecting them too but then I got old and the only men in my life now are the ones in men!oh-pause.. But who cares? We're not talking guys here, rather jewelry and fulfilling dreams...LOTS of jewelry. Two knap sacks full, my purse, a fanny pack, the back of all 8 cat kennels and all twenty fingers, two necks, four wrists and four ears. I'm talking a LOT of jewelry!

Yep, after years of dreaming about it, being afraid to do it, wanting it, swearing up a tree about it, threatening to leave and pulling back...FINALLY we left. She quit college, bored with the idea of a stable income and great clothes from practicing law and I quit my life bored with the idea of spending the rest of my days working 'til I was carried out in a pine box and disagreeing with whatever government was in power. So we did it. We sold everything we owned...have you ever tried to do that? It sounds easy but is not so easy. Believing we would never come back, we sold EVERYTHING in the house, in the shed, in the yard, the cars, the house and the shed...and packed what we didn't sell. We were down to basically nothing and that nothing filled the 20 foot container truck from one end to the other...with 200+ boxes and my adjustable bed and of course the 25 suitcases and two knap sacks, purses and fanny packs. What was left of our entire house was packed in a big truck and off we went! No one believed we would go, but we did it and lived to tell about it for another day.

Our trip was not originally about jewelry but very soon became a jewelry odyssey and an animal story of great proportion and humor. There was no way we could get all our pets on a commercial airliner safely, feeling confident that one or more might meet its demise in the holding section down under with the luggage. And since we figured out after hours of research it would cost many thousands of dollars anyway, we solved the problem by chartering our own Learjet airplane, a very small cigar with wings. Yes we did! We lived like the rich and famous for a few moments and it was such fun! Can you see it now? Each little party puddy cat and our corgi dog in it's own seat with a tiara or a jeweled collar holding a Martini or a Champagn cocktail and a cigar and wisking off into the clouds towards Costa Rica?

Our two handsome pilots were astounded when we appeared with our paraphernalia and through all the wet muck and the rain. Even with our menagerie, our soggy clothes and dripping hair they still found time to flirt with us. OK, OK! It perked me up for a few minutes and then I fell dormant again. After they loaded the 25 bags, eight kitties and the dog we both climbed on board clinging to our two knapsacks full of jewels, purses, fanny packs and sloshing clothing to make our great escape from American tyranny as we saw it. Winston sat cheerfully soaked in Bryana's lap, the cats slumbered peacefully under a blanket of sedatives, our jewelry slumbered peacefully wrapped in miles of bubble wrap awaiting the next adventure when we got THERE; and I tried to figure out how I was going to make a 6 hour flight without a potty except for an old 5 gallon bucket I brought along for emergencies. The thought of baring my over sized butt openly with no privacy to the two jokers in the cockpit was sobering enough to jam my pipes and help me hold it in for hours. To answer your question, our plane was so small there was no bathroom and to have one would have required a larger plane and an extra $15,000. So we flew to Costa Rica and I kept my knees jammed tightly together until we arrived. It never dawned on me that I would have to hold it in another 6 hours in the airport!

End of part one. I'll be posting this story in bit sized parts over the next few days, so be sure to come back to read the next chapter in our adventure! Thanks to the many sources for the stock photos, to numerous to mention individually. These are not our animals. It was just too difficult that day to take photos on top of everything else!