Season One Finale

The Walkers Are Ready for a Break

Dec 14, 2024

Let’s get right into it, folks. Our last week in Nosara featured:

Not one but TWO(!) car breakdowns followed by full afternoons of speaking muy malo español to Costa Rican auto mechanics to try to get our wheels back up and running. Our car will be vacationing at a mechanic’s shop in Nicoya for the next few weeks
A broken-down quad (snapped front axle, thanks for asking)
A broken leash on one of Sam’s surfboards, and a subsequent swim-for-your-life moment back to the shore for safety

And, all the while, Wes has been in a crazy sleep regression, Wes’s amazing teacher Ms. Cinthya announced that she has to leave the school midyear, and we had to move out of our house so that the homeowners could use it while we’re away for the holidays. So, yeah, to say we need a break would be an understatement. Don’t get us wrong, Nosara is an amazing place, but a bad day in Nosara is amplified ten-fold, and we’ve had a string of ‘em recently.

But this is no sob story! There were highlights too:

A beautiful year-end holiday ceremony at Wes’s school
A super fun holiday cocktail party at our friend, Eva’s house where we finally felt like Nosara locals
An incredible hike to our local waterfall, Malanoche
Some really (really, really) epic surf sessions, including one very lucky encounter with an in-water photographer who snapped some amazing action shots of Sam (more on that below)

As we sit here on our flight to NYC, reflecting on the last 3 months, we are filled with so much gratitude and appreciation for this experience we’re in the midst of. We are scratching a lifelong itch of living at the beach, we’re learning how to power through a day-to-day lifestyle that is not easy, we’re testing our patience with speaking a foreign language to get by on a daily basis, and learning to live away from the comforts and familiarities of “home” in the US. While these past few weeks have reminded us that what we’re doing isn’t easy, that is not to say it’s not worth it.

Today, at the Liberia Airport, Wes was proudly telling anyone who would listen that he lives in Costa Rica (much to the surprise of the flocks of American and Canadian tourists who were certain that Wes was “one of us”)! And then he’d code switch right into speaking Spanish to the local staff at the airport.

And for our part, Wes’s parents feel proud of what we’ve accomplished so far, excited to see our friends and family in New York and DC, and…also exhausted by the past few weeks. As always in our family: Mixed Feelings!!!

We’ll be in DC 12/15 – 12/26, and then NYC 12/30 – 1/6. If you’re around, we’d love to see you, so drop us a line and let’s make a plan! Our normal phone numbers work again once we land back in the US tonight.

We’re going to take a couple of weeks off of the newsletter, so we’ll see you in the new year once we’re back in Nosara. Feliz año nuevo y hasta luego!