The Sea is a Salty One

We're getting our car and our boxes this week and I'm doing a happy dance! I've been living with a handful of belongings since 4 months ago. Imagining having only four or five outfits and one pair of shoes. I've been living out of a suitcase that long, and while it feels very refreshing not to be held back by possessions I cannot wait to get my stuff. I'll be able to paint again..mmmuhhahaha! The hold up has been because of a couple of factors: Overseas shipping isn't cheap so I didn't book one of the services that brings your stuff to you in a week. I went with a cheaper alternative. I knew I would be okay living for at least a few months without our things. Jim used to be in the military and we did a few big international moves. Which remind me, when the moving company picked up my boxes they exclaimed over how perfectly packed everything was. I laughed and told them this was not my first overseas move rodeo. I shipped the boxes at the very last secon...

Upon reaching my children's condo I slept in hard the next morning, sleeping so hard that I missed a couple of phone calls from Jim. When I called him back around 11am he told me that while sleeping at the Fort Lauderdale airport around 2 am he received a call telling him that his mother had just died. Thanks to Mrs. Satan and TSA he didn't get there in time. If they had just said sure come on over two weeks before, or agreed to help him get from the airport somehow to the nursing home (way too far for a cab, over and hour) he could have seen his mother before she passed. Ran through my errands, getting stuff for Costa Rica and taking care of banking and investment tasks before myself, our son and daughter got on a plane for San Antonio. We booked a hotel for the week after taking care to make sure all three of us had funeral appropriate clothing. Telling the kids was hard, I think our son took it the worse, he was struggling not to cry. When we arrived in San Antonio Jim m...

Sunday Oct. 8th ..and of course nothing goes smoothly. We took the 1 am flight from San Jose, Costa Rica yesterday no problem and slept the entire flight. Get to Fort Lauderdale with a 90 minute turn around time to catch our other flights, Customs and baggage has been told that the flight is filled with folks that got stranded in Costa Rica due to Hurricane Nate and they wave us on through so that there's plenty of time to make the connecting flights. We get to TSA security and it all goes haywire. I discover with some horror that my ticket does not have that usual security designation we always have -  TSA Precheck designation and started going right into a panic attack, no one from that particular Costa Rican flight has it and we get held up at security, I am starting to cry and panic now because it's been four days of crazy travel and almost no sleep. I get one person from the front of the line and  beg the supervisor to have mercy and let us through. He look...

Saturday, Oct 7th There's really no sleeping on the vinyl chairs of the airport, no matter how plush the blankets and pillows. We spent the night at the Liberia airport even though there were no flights going out to the US until afternoon the next day. Strangely enough, even with zero flights or activity in the darkened and mostly abandoned airport the P.A. System kept blaring out announcements, like warning you not to bring 10K in cash in or out of the country and that it's forbidden to bring seashells out of the country (oops! I've done that!). The announcements blared out every 15 minutes all night long! You'd finally drift off to sleep only be to jolted wide awake by an altogether too cheerful voice loudly warning you about various regulations.                                       Jim s...

Friday, October 6 th – Still in Tamarindo When we got up in the morning we had electricity and water, but no cable or internet or access to cell phone towers. We still could not call anything at the airlines. We had breakfast and settled in for another day without much to do. But the heavy rains ended a full day earlier than anticipated, the sun started peeking out from behind dark clouds. It seemed like everyone in town had taken to the muddy streets. Mid morning I decided to walk over into Villareal proper, to the closest grocery store, one run by a Chinese family that stocked a crazy variety of things. I needed to get Jim a pair of flipflops because his sneakers were still soaked through from the day before. Plus the storm had turned my already dying umbrella into a twisted unusable wreck. They had shoes for Jim but the only umbrellas bore images of Spiderman, so I passed on the umbrella and bought a raincoat instead. Plus I ended up with something even more valua...

I left off yesterday with us at a tiny casual restaurant on Thursday, October 5 th . Continuing on. This was the point where I finally found enough cell phone towers to call out. Coverage was down in Tamarindo along with everything else. I called our airline to tell them we were never going to be able to get to San Jose for the flight. I wanted to reschedule for Saturday or Sunday because the battery operated radio in the cafe had announced that Costa Rican president Solis had declared a state of emergency, ordering everyone to stay home and off the roads until further notice because of all the downed trees, flooding and washed out roads. I'd been watching right up until we lost power the weather sites and updates on this airlines own website, seeing nothing about my flight, but noting that they'd already announced that anyone flying their airline out of New Orleans or Mexico later in the week would be able to reschedule their tickets for free because of the app...

A lot has happened this month that does not involve internet trolls. Hurricane Nate hit Costa Rica just as we were trying to get home for medical appointments, banking and investment business and family visits. It did not go well, and then we got word as we were sleeping at the San Jose airport that my Maw in Law was at the end of her days. Things went nuttier from then, including a hurried trip to Texas and a family death. These are my notes hand written on those days sleeping at various airports. Going to take days to unpack. Thursday, October 5 th , 2017 – Tamarindo Costa Rica Today seems to fully encapsulate the frustrations and challenges of living as an expat in Costa Rica. It's been raining for days off and on as a tropical depression formed off the eastern edge of the country in the Caribbean. We have been told that in addition to the usual rains of the rainy season we are getting high winds and heavy rain bands that started Tuesday night, just as we climbed in...

Recently I had an experience that for me summed up what can happen when you're openly deceptive, yet behave like you're a person of integrity. A few days before Hurricane Nate I met a new taxi driver here in Tamarindo. We've become known enough in the community that some taxi drivers know where we live and openly shout up how much to take us to our beautiful house named after a local bird. Most are nice people, you get in the car, you hand over the money and chat while you're on your way. What happened was one day at the taxi stand by our house we were approached by a driver we'd not used before, Gus. Gus quoted us one price so we climbed into his lovely and cleaner that most taxis car. We hadn't gone more than a half mile when Gus turned to us and said that because it was suddenly raining the fare would now be double. Usually when one tries to pull a bait-n-switch like this we demand he pulls over and we get out. That day we were in a hurry, but my hu...

This has really been one hideously terrible week! Another round dealing with the government over importing out possessions combined with worrying about my husband's mind. Things took a loop into crazytown mere hours after my last post. Once Jim got back he wanted to walk back to that same store I had just visited. I agree to go because I'd forgotten to poke my head into the souvenir stand in that same shopping center that sells yarn so I could pick up a few skeins to crochet up a few more wash clothes. We set out on foot to the farther away store, about a mile. Jim got to talking to the guy in the store working the Moneygram counter (leading to further crazy doings a bit later), while I got my yarn and a bottle of Costa Rican chocolate/coffee/cream liquor to give Jim for his birthday on Sunday. As we left the shopping center it was twilight, and it turned nightmarish for me. Let me back up, about four weeks ago I was driving hear San Jose, near Escazu, when I suddenly los...

... go out in the midday sun. I just got back from walking to the grocery store, the far one and holy crap my sweat has sweat has sweat. I was trying to sneak away while Jim wasn't here so I could find some inexpensive little geegaw he's like for his birthday in two days. Plus, I'm out of butter, and meat. No Southerner can live without butter (and mayonnaise if that Paula Deen is to be believed) I'd take butter over mayo any day of the week. Going to the grocery store makes me glad my late father is not here. He had a thing about mayo that came from his great aunt Gloria making him eat sandwiches with too much mayo, and that mayo brand was Hellmans. He hated Hellmans like Trump hates Hillary. Hellmans is the only mayo brand available from the States here. He would die, or throw a fit to end all fits by Southern men. He also had an excessive love of mayo, making a scene if a family marrying, burying or other mass gathering of our Cajun clan happened. If mayo was n...

We've moved into the big house, but haven't been doing much. I've been felled by a cold that moved into my chest, spending most of my time horizontal either in the bedroom reading or laying on the sofa watching one of two television stations out of Miami when I'm not watching HBO. I've slept most of the last three days with the exception of yesterday morn when I staggered out to the nearby grocery store to get milk and juice. Our internet is down too until they show up to set up the new connection and equipment. Like I've stated before everything in Costa Rica takes three times longer and it three times more expensive than in the US. I'd also run through my box of hard-won Kleenex with all the nose-blowing and coughing I've been doing. Getting Kleenex in CR isn't always easy either. The only reason I ended up with a box is that I was driving the nice Chinese man in the grocery store in Santa Maria nuts for it. I'd asked him twice a week ...

My updates have been so sporadic this last month because I'm insanely busy here and I'm stuck in a sort of down mood. Damn gringos! That's a big part of the bummer for me here. The Monday night almost two weeks ago that I updated from was the beginning of my 'damn gringos' phase. Remember the last time I updated Jim and I were rushing about like the Keystone Kops, tripping over each other trying to figure out who we could bum a car off of to go fetch Jim's replacement from the airport. His replacement found her way to the person that was supposed to meet her and transport her up to the guesthouse before we could finish contacting folks to get to the airport. She arrived very late, after 10 pm, in a farming community that goes to bed at 8pm. She showed up, we all welcomed her before the landlord showed her the her bedroom, and we all shuffled off to our beds and piles of warm blankets. She seemed quite nice on first glance. The next morning ...

We had a long frustrating ride from Tamarindo to San Jose to catch our bus back to Copey. A word of caution using the GPS in Costa Rica. It does not always work right, sometimes has outdated data or cannot pick up the right place you want to go. We had a time with it on Thursday night when the people at Adobe car rental programmed in we wanted to go to the Tamarindo Condos in Escazu. We were seriously delayed getting on the road towards Guanacaste. On the way back it kept malfunction whenever we asked for the closest gas station, twice trying to send us down a dirt road or a residential area a couple of miles away from the local gas station. It refused to take the programming to get us back to the car rental place so we ended up pulled off the highway in Escazu (yet again) with me crying and mashing buttons like a monkey on speed while Jim rotated between yelling and yelling into the phone at the rental car place. This is all after I hit one of those car-swallowing pothole on a m...