halfway to nowhere

It’s February, the heart of Costa Rica’s dry season. A fierce wind is gusting outside, as it has for much of this young year. Although we turned the calendar to 2023 more than a month ago, in some important ways it feels like this new year has just begun. After a seemingly interminable break, schools are back in session at long last. Junebug started class last Monday, and Munchkin followed suit the next day. Our break wasn’t quite as long, but we did take a few weeks off to coincide with the kids’ winter vacation and also to travel with our visiting parents (first D’s in December, and then S’s in January). This allowed us to prolong that end-of-year holiday feeling a few weeks into January, but our denial has now been thoroughly quashed. We’ve been back to work for a couple of weeks and are suitably stressed and tired again. That after-vacation glow did not last long.

S’s parents only spent a week with us this time around, but they also did us a solid by taking the kids to Disney World and the other Florida amusement parks after we wrapped our visit together to the Osa Peninsula. The kids had a blast, we enjoyed a week of peace and quiet, and S’s parents got to prolong their quality time with the grandkids. Win-win all around. We forget it sometimes, but episodes like this remind us of how little time the kids have spent in the United States as a result of our careers — so little, in fact, that their frame of reference is completely off-kilter with regard to certain things an average American takes for granted. Junebug, for example, remarked how cold it was in Florida — not nearly as cold as Maine, where S’s parents subsequently returned, but considerably colder than Costa Rica. As a result, she now thinks of Florida as a very cold place, a characteristic we would never think to attribute to the Sunshine State.

This February is also significant for us because it marks the midway point of our Costa Rica tour. Thanks to the six-month extension S secured, San Jose will be a 30-month assignment for us, give or take, depending on how bidding and the summer 2024 transfer season shake out. We arrived in November and will be marking the end of our 15th month in country in a couple of weeks. In this way too, it feels like we’re starting anew — a fresh beginning to the second half of our Costa Rica assignment. While we still have a significant chunk of time left to enjoy this wonderful country, friends who arrived not long before us are already thinking about their next move this summer. Such is the Foreign Service lifestyle.

It’s not quite time yet to narrow down a Costa Rica bucket list, but our friends’ rapidly approaching departure has got us thinking about some of the places we have yet to visit in Costa Rica. We’ve enjoyed a very busy travel schedule during the first half of our tour here, as you can see in our travel map above, compensating a bit for the travel opportunities that were shut down by the pandemic. Costa Rica is small, but it harbors immense natural riches, so there are still quite a few stones left unturned for us. Hopefully, by this time next year, we will have checked most of them off our list.