Goodbye Portland & Hello Costa Rica!

After a couple of years of itching, months of planning and plenty of hard work, the Roulier/Jones crew of five was finally ready to leave Portland after nine years and relocate to Costa Rica.  We love Portland and our dear friends and family but want to take our kids for a few years of extended travel, with some goals in mind:  Adventure, stepping back from our busy American lives, improving our Spanish, tanking up our vitamin D stores and spending time exploring new places and cultures together before anyone runs off to college.  We sold our house, moved into a downtown apartment for 6 months, unloaded a lot of things we didn’t really need, packed nearly everything else into a 5’ x 10’ storage unit, left a great permanent job and took only the bare essentials we needed with us.  Enjoyed several going away parties and finished scrambling to get everything ready to go.  More details at a later date maybe.

Goodbye, Portland!  We'll miss you.

The hardest part of actually getting here was definitely the moving out and packing process.  Being on the receiving end of a familial (except Erica) norovirus curse the last few days further complicated the task.  Maybe the gods of Portlandia were exacting some revenge because we were leaving the fair city?  Anyway, once we made it to the airport, it was smoother sailing.  The only surprise was the requirement by Frontier Airlines to have a return ticket to prove that we would be leaving Costa Rica within 90 days.  We thought there was a small chance that Immigration in Costa Rica would ask for this, but we did not think it was an airline requirement.  So Nik was able to buy refundable return tickets to satisfy the airline.

The redeye flight itself paled in comparison to the preceding week without a doubt.  We arrived about 6:00 am to sunny skies and warm air.  Before even leaving the airport our unlocked (!) iPhones were set up with local SIM cards, phone numbers and unlimited internet data all for $18/month each.  Local calls are about $.01/minute and it takes 3 local texts to burn a penny.  Google voice lets us keep US phone numbers and breaks the bank at $.02/minute for calls to the states with free texting.  But I digress.  Rental car renting was easy and we were off for our 30 minute drive to our first hotel.  Instructions on the map made for us by the rental car company included, as our first turn, passing a bridge, then sugar cane fields and finally making a right after another bridge, at the local guaro (firewater) distillery.  After a minor detour we arrived at our beautiful first hotel, Hotel Villas Escondidas, near Grecia.  The owners were kind enough to let us check in several hours early and all five of us slept for three hours, after only a small amount of protesting.