heading nowhere fast

We were “halfway to nowhere” in February. Returning to the office after hosting back-to-back parental visits and with the kids finally back in school after their interminably long holiday break, we had marked the halfway point of this assignment with a survey of the travels we had managed during our first year+ in Costa Rica. We had no idea what the future would hold for us after San Jose, but we were certain even then that this tour might well go down as our favorite Foreign Service assignment, easily rivaling — if not surpassing — our first overseas posting in Nairobi.

A little more than half a year later, we find ourselves in a similar boat — and a similarly reflective mood. A new academic year has kicked off after a slightly shorter, but equally adventuresome summer vacation during which the kids enjoyed some quality family time in the States while we squeezed in a pair of overseas trips to Greece and Colombia. We still have no inkling where we’ll be heading next, though we hope to get some clarity on that front in the coming months. With our future unknown and the better part of a year still left on this assignment, our eventual departure from Costa Rica is still far enough away as to feel somewhat abstract.

We’ve written before about the emotional rollercoaster that is the Foreign Service experience: the predictable pattern of peaks and valleys as we settle into a new post; the alternating cycles of excitement and exhaustion; the fondness we develop for local idiosyncrasies dueling with the weariness that accumulates when things do not work quite the way one expects them to. At this point in our previous tours we would have been well inside the 100-day pre-departure countdown when the urge to check off a few last items on the country bucket list is tempered by a much longer to-do list of administrative tasks and various logistical loose ends that must be tied up before the end of the assignment.

We’re approaching 22 months in country. By this point, pretty much all of the places we’ve served have felt familiar enough to be called home. While the passage of time certainly affects our recollections, it strikes us indisputable that in Costa Rica we reached this feeling much earlier and much more thoroughly than in our other overseas postings. That we had both lived in Costa Rica and spent significant time in other countries in the region prior to joining the Foreign Service surely made for a smoother assimilation curve. Watching our kids embrace the Spanish language — Junebug, in particular, talks with a full-on tica intonation — also speaks to an integration that is significantly deeper than the one we managed to achieve in earlier assignments.

In only one of our previous four overseas tours did we stay for more than two full years. We’ll have that luxury this time around thanks to a six-month extension S had secured early in this assignment. In addition to giving us more time in a country we absolutely adore, the extension also should enable us to see out this academic year rather than forcing the kids through a painful mid-semester relocation. Every move, no matter how well we plan and prepare, has been disorienting and disruptive; because Costa Rica feels so much like home, the next transition will surely be difficult too. It’s far enough away, though, that we can still afford to put it almost entirely out of our minds and focus on the things we love about living in Costa Rica: spending quality time with the friends we’ve made here and enjoying the natural wonders all around us.

Pictured from top to bottom: emerald tanager, bay-headed tanager, black-and-yellow tanager, and speckled tanager — four of our all-time favorite of Costa Rica’s dozens of colorful tanager species, photographed within the last month amid D’s quest for new species.