After the excitement of cows in the yard, I’ll admit, we’ve had a pretty uneventful next few weeks which, in turn, leads to boring blogging. If your not sure what we are talking about you can read about it by clicking here ----->Holy Cows

Friday 8/11- The morning started with a turtle walk for Ramie. They found 1 nest this morning and his team is on week number 5 of finding at least one nest on each walk. I wonder how long their streak will last before they get skunked. We’ll be sure to keep you updated in the coming weeks! So far, for Ramie’s 2 walks since I fixed his backpack for the 2nd time, he hasn’t had any issues, so my fingers are crossed that this last repair will last a while!!

I had a normal workday today so nothing exciting to talk about there, which was fine by me given the excitement of the cows yesterday!! This evening Geoff and Tracy wanted to go out to celebrate my birthday, and of course we were happy to go and hang out with our friends for an evening. Since the last time we went out together we had a little bit too much of a good time and felt icky the next day (ie. maybe a little bit hungover) we all agreed that this time we wouldn’t whoop it up quite so much! I just wanted something low key and casual, so we decided to go to the Jolly Roger bar and restaurant for a laid-back dinner. Ramie and I have gone to the Jolly Roger in Quepos numerous times when we were in Costa Rica on past vacations, but we have never been to the location here near Uvita. The Jolly Roger (both locations) are known for their chicken wings and that sounded absolutely delicious to me!! Geoff and Tracy really like their French fries, so they seemed to be looking forward to it as much as we were. We met at their house around 5 and made our way up the mountain to the restaurant. They have a nice ocean view from up there, but unfortunately it was overcast and rainy so it wasn’t as beautiful as it would have been on a clear night. Although we did get to see some very pretty lightning out over the ocean.

Do you see what I see?  No.... Not the cat!

What is THAT doing in the mountains of Southern CR?!

Always fun times with these two.

I will say, we enjoyed our wings and the french fries were really good too! We had a few drinks and some fun conversation with great company, as we always do when we hang out together. At around 7:30 we made our way back to Geoff & Tracy’s house to drop them off, but we pretty much always tend to hang around for a little while and talk. We had installed a camera in our bedroom again so that we could check in on Skye while we were out, and Ramie pulled it up to see what she was doing. We could see Skye moving around in her kennel, but this camera doesn’t have sound so we couldn't tell if she was barking and crying. We thought it would be best to head home since it had been about 4 hours that we were away and check on how she did this time. Unfortunately, when we walked in the door we could smell that she had an accident while we were gone. When Ramie opened the kennel she ran out of there faster than we’ve ever seen her get out before. Mostly, it seemed like she was just that excited to see us, not because she was scared or upset. Thankfully she didn't have poo all over herself like she did last time, so that was a step in the right direction!! We got busy cleaning everything up, played with her for a little while, and we were all in bed around 9:30. Skye didn’t even fight with us when we put her back into her kennel for bed time. Overall, I have to say it was a good and definitely interesting birthday week.

She spends her time chewing her kennel when we're gone

The photo below is a perfect example of how he locates the nest. The disturbed sand is the body pit, the actual nest could be anywhere in this location. He uses a broom handle with a slight point on it to push into the sand. When he pushes, it will only go in so far, but when he finds the actual nest the stick will drop another few inches into the open cavity where the eggs are located. You can see in the photo below how he pokes the sand looking for this area. Where the stick is below is the actual nest location and he will dig down until he finds the eggs.

Thursday 8/17- If you’ve been reading along for a while, you might remember back when we first moved into our new house I had to sew cushions for our patio lounge chairs. At the time, Breeze also needed a dog bed and we couldn’t find any good ones down here, so I made the dog bed to practice for the cushions. Since the dog bed turned out pretty well, I was confident enough to do the 4 cushions for the chairs. Well, it’s come full circle because today I made another dog bed. Fortunately, I wasn’t making another one because Skye destroyed hers (she hasn’t destroyed anything that wasn’t a toy), I actually made her a small pillow for in her kennel so she could have one in there and one out in the living room where she hangs out with us in the evening. It’s a little on the small side because we used some leftover foam and small pieces of fabric, but it’ll do the trick. She’s a small dog, and if she needs a bigger one later, then I’ll just make another one for her.

I think this will do just fine!

Its mine, all mine!

Thanks mom and dad, this is the best!

Fabiola also came over today for Skye’s 1 month follow up. Skye is now up to 8.5 kilos (or about 19 lbs) compared to 12 lbs to only a month ago. The estimate is still that Skye will be about 50 lbs full grown. She had the last of her puppy vaccinations today too.

When that was all taken care of, it was time for some human interaction for Ramie and I. Yes, we love hanging out with our puppy all of the time, but we like to get out once in a while as well. Derek & Joanne, a couple that we met through Loren a few months ago, own land up on the mountain where Loren used to live on and have just recently moved down here full time. Loren hooked them up with us a few months ago so we could share some of the things we’ve learned in the last 2 years and we’ve stayed in touch. Now that they are down here full time, we wanted to hang out again and went out for a couple of afternoon beverages and an appetizer to just spend a couple of hours chatting about life before CR, life in CR, and all kinds of things. We agreed that we would have to hang out more often, we always like expanding our Costa Rica network! Before we left today, we remembered to set up a camera in the bedroom so we could see what Skye was doing. We checked on her a couple of times and while she wouldn’t lay down and just go to sleep, she didn’t seem to be freaking out. Well, surprise to us when we got home- someone had broken out of her kennel!! It had been a while since we last checked in on the camera, so it could have been anywhere from just a couple of minutes, to up to 1.5 hours that she was out. We looked around the house and didn’t find any damage or any accidents, so whatever she was doing while we were gone, she was being a good girl.

Friday 8/18- Another turtle walk and more nests. 6 weeks straight and 100% success rate for Ramie and his turtle crew.

Puppies just grow so fast! We don’t know exactly when she was born, but based on when Red and her friends found the pups and took them in, we estimated that she was born right around April 20, so that’s going to be what we consider her birthday. That makes her just about 4 months old. In the not quite 2 months that we’ve had her, she has already outgrown the first collar that we bought for her. When we changed out her collar today, I thought it would be fun to compare how tiny this little girl is compared to our Breeze. She looks like a little kid wearing their parent’s clothes!

I think it's a little too big

Another thing that we’ve noticed with her growing is that Skye has lost a couple of her baby teeth.

Our little bitty baby puppy is growing up and she’s getting smarter too. Ramie works with her just about every day on her tricks and commands. 

• Sit (Was 10, still 10) She was naturally good at this from the beginning. No issues here
• Lay Down (Was 5 now 8) She doesn’t do it consistently with the command Lay Down, but if you tap your foot, she will lay down. Not sure how that developed, but it seems to work.
•  Stay (Was 2 now 4.5) She’s getting slightly better with this one, we make it a couple of steps but she still really wants to follow us. When she does stay, it isn’t for more than a few seconds.
•  Up [to stand on her hind legs] (Was 8 now 9) She’s got great balance on this. Eventually we want to teach her to “Dance”- or spin in circles when she’s standing, I think we can make her into a circus dog yet!
•  Shake (Was 7 now 9) Still seems to be one of her favorites. She always wants to shake even when we don’t tell her to. She’ll switch paws with the “other paw” command, but sometimes tries to shake both paws at the same time. 
•  High Five (This is new 6.5) Similar to shake, but our hand is in a different position. She seemed to pick up on this pretty quickly.
•  Follow [like heel to walk close to us] (Was 3 now 6) She still gets distracted, doesn’t always stay close.
•  Roll Over (This is new 1) She’ll roll over on her own when she’s playing in the grass, so we’ve decided it’s time to start putting a command to it.
•  Ring the Bell [to let us know she has to go outside] (Was 6 still 6) She’ll ring the bell better for Ramie than she does for me. I try to make her ring it before I bring her outside, but she just looks at me like I’m crazy, so I pick up her paw and smack the bell with it so she can get the hint.
• Come (Was 5 now 9) When I call her with an angry voice (if she’s somewhere she shouldn’t be) she comes running!! She’s so-so coming to Ramie. I think she knows I’m the tough one!
•  Off [off the furniture] (Was 4 still 4) She’s testing this- she wants to be on the furniture, I don’t want her to be on the furniture, this could be a tough one because SOMEONE in our house wants to snuggle with her on the furniture!

Ramie also noticed this very interesting caterpillar this week. It resembles bird poo, which is its camouflage. The red/orange fork (horns) come out when it feels threatened and secretes a foul smell. We could not smell it but I'm sure any predator trying to eat it would. This will turn into a giant swallow tail butterfly, which surprisingly can also be found in MN.

Saturday 8/19- Today was an exciting day, both for us and for Skye. Today was this little girl’s first trip to the beach! Of course, you just never know how a puppy is going to react to something new, and we know that Skye is pretty much a chicken when it comes to all things, so we weren’t sure how this was going to go, but we knew we had to give it a try, and if we do want her to become a beach dog, we’ll have to get her used to it. 

We brought her to the secret beach where there are plenty of ocean waves that might scare her, but this time of year there is also a shallow river/creek that drains into the ocean here. The water in this creek is very shallow, ankle deep or so typically, and isn’t as wavy and scary as the ocean. Before we even made it down to the beach, Ramie spotted something in the dammed-up logs behind the impassable bridge. This critter was completely unexpected, we didn’t even know they were here in Costa Rica!!

Hi! What ya looking at? Never seen an otter before?

Who knew otters even lived here!? And this one is big!! At first when Ramie called me over to see what it was, I thought it was a seal (which I also don’t think they have here) but then I saw legs instead of fins, and quickly realized I was wrong. And wow, this guy was big! We watched it hanging out on the logs for a little while and then continued on down toward the beach. 

We brought Skye to the river first. Yes, of course, she was very nervous to walk into the water. Since there was no one else around and we know she stays close to us, we left her off her leash and just started walking around the beach. Ramie & I crossed the little stream of water and were looking around on the other side for anything interesting that may have washed up recently, and Skye stayed on the other side of the water just whining and crying. We know she doesn’t like it when we get very far from her, so we figured that with a little bit of coaxing she would eventually come across to join us. She did, but she didn’t seem to enjoy being in the water too much.

Once she was across the water, she had fun running around in the sand, jumping and playing. Before long we walked down toward the edge of the waves to see what she would do there. As expected, every time a wave came up onto the sand and got too close to her she would run farther up the sand.

This sand feels so nice on my feet!

I LOVE RUNNING!!!

The waves are trying to get me... save me!!

Ramie and I walked close to the water’s edge, but she just wasn’t having it. She was enjoying running and playing, but the whole time she was out there she was making that squeaking noise like she was crying. She does that sometimes, I still haven’t figured out what it means. As she was getting more comfortable, we started walking further into the water, still only as deep as our calves, but if she wanted to walk close to us, she would have to come in the water. It was a slow process but eventually she was playing in the waves, very cautiously and only if we were close by, but she might have been getting used to the idea. 

Ooh, this is fun!

I think I changed my mind.

Mom! I'm Scared!!

We played with her in the water and made her as comfortable with the whole situation as we could. We only stayed for about an hour before we figured that was enough for Skye on her first go at the beach, so we packed up and headed back home. I do think that if we keep bringing her back to the beach she could get used to this and become a beach dog. Now we just have to make a point to do this with her!

The turtle and the toucan are new. The Heliconia was originally in our living room and we moved it to our bedroom.

We placed this one in the living room where the large Heliconia painting was originally

The frog went into the guest bedroom.

The artist does sell his canvasses unframed as well, so if you are ever visiting and find something you like you can roll it up and bring it home in your suitcase, then get it framed once you're back home. 

This was Skye’s first time at a restaurant, another first for her today! She couldn’t sit still at all! There were other dogs around, too many people, and she was just over-distracted. We drank our coffee and headed home. 

Once we were in the car, the exhausted little dog crashed!

New and improved!

Tuesday 8/8- Well, it’s that day again. I have made another trip around the sun. I can always count on dad to be the first one to send a text message since he gets up very early for work. Throughout the day I continued to feel the love from all sorts of family and friends sending text messages, calling, and of course, lots of messages on Facebook. I usually always work on my birthday because really, it’s just another day, but decided to call it quits early and was logged off by 1:00. All morning my co-workers were asking if I had any plans for the day and why I was even working, and I told them that all I knew was that I received instructions from Ramie a few days ago telling me that I had to “be available at 4:30” but that is all he would tell me. I spent a good chunk of time between 1 and 4:30 responding to messages and just hanging out. It was getting close to 4:30 but Ramie was not getting dressed up and I was just sitting around waiting for some sort of indication of what I was supposed to be doing. 

I had been trying to figure out what Ramie’s plans were since he told me about them and figured that it might be that he invited our friends Geoff and Tracy to come down to celebrate. My mom ended up calling to wish me a happy birthday at about 4:15, and since I wasn’t getting any sort of signal from Ramie, I told her that I might have to let her go at some point, and we continued chatting. While I was on the phone with her, I heard a car pull in the driveway and then Ramie talking to someone. I told mom I had to go and I went to say hi to our guests, but I was surprised when the two people who walked in with Ramie weren’t anyone I had ever met before. Ramie was talking to the guy and it was obvious that whoever these people were, it’s who Ramie was expecting. They introduced themselves and said “SURPRISE, you're getting a massage for your birthday!!” Ohhh now this all makes sense!!

It turned out that the guy was the husband just dropping off and helping his wife, the masseur, get set up. Unfortunately it had just started to rain so we had to set up in the living room, otherwise the plan was to have it outside by the pool. Once the table was set up and the massage was ready to start the husband left and Ramie went outside and tried to keep Skye busy.

I got to spend the next hour truly relaxing!! I haven’t had a massage in more than 10 years and it felt so good! This was the perfect birthday gift and was VERY much needed after the hellish work weeks I have had recently. It’s true that Ramie usually isn’t great at planning things like this, and he will admit it, but this was fantastic! I’d say he will really have to work hard to outdo himself in the future, but he doesn’t need to outdo himself, he can just do this again and I’m sure it will be just as great!!

Ramie had originally planned to order food for delivery for dinner, but we have never done that here and don’t really know how it works. Most restaurants don’t have their own delivery, but there are services (kind of like Uber eats but without any sort of app) that will deliver food, one of these days we’ll figure it out, but tonight wouldn’t be the experiment. Instead, he decided that we’d just go out to dinner after I was finished with my massage. As we were leaving the house I was given 3 options and ended up deciding to go to El Cardon for some yummy Mexican food. This is the restaurant that Tracy and I went to for our “girls night” a few months ago and we thought was absolutely delicious. We’ve been meaning to go back so Ramie could check it out too (although I did bring him back take-out last time) but hadn’t made it back yet. Tonight would be the night, and it was as delicious as last time. What a fantastic birthday!!

Ramie got a burrito

I ordered a taco plate

Of course a margarita each

By the way, apparently Ramie didn’t think that his plan was as fabulous as I did and downplayed it a lot… but when I told the girls at work the next day what the surprise was, they thought it was just as fantastic and amazing of a plan as I thought it was! It truly was a great birthday gift! Just a note to any of you guys who might try to copy his idea, the only additional instruction I wish he would have given me was to shave my legs. I felt really bad that I was so prickly when she was giving me the massage. 😉  

I had this book on tape (or maybe it was even a record) when I was a kid, and it's been stuck in my head all week!!  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=65xybW3wTNw

Separately, I couldn't let this happen without mentioning it here, if only for my own memories when I'm old and reminiscing about our adventure here in Costa Rica.  Today I noticed Skye hanging out in several places that Breeze used to spend a lot of time.  Breeze was known to just lay down and look out over her kingdom (our yard), and today I saw Skye doing the same.  Sometimes the the things Skye does makes me feel like Breeze is guiding her, or maybe she's a little re-incarnation of our Breeze.  I don't know, but I feel like Breeze was here today wishing me a happy birthday too!  In case you can't tell, we really miss her.💖

Skye waiting in the carport (of course with her tongue out) for dad

Skye sitting in the front door overlooking her kindgdom

Breeze waiting in the carport for dad

Wednesday 8/9- Nothing real exciting happened today. Ramie had a turtle walk and had another successful day. He was left to take care of a nest while David finished the last part of the beach so he took the opportunity to capture some pictures while he waited.

A set of tracks from one of the turtles

Skye also had her bestie Izzy coming over to play this morning. They are really starting to become good friends.

After the turtle walk, Ramie had to go repair a screen on a house for Loren. He has fixed it once before, but it seems that Airbnb guests like to walk through them. One of the best things about this house is the view. 

Where the heck did these cows come from and what are they doing heading straight toward our patio and pool?!? I was stunned and worried that Skye would go chase after them, obviously I wasn’t thinking clearly because Skye is kind of a chicken, and she was terrified and hiding under my chair. Ramie got up and started waving his arms , clapping, and yelling at them to get them to stop from coming any farther into the yard. Once I got Skye into the house and the doors closed I had to get my camera out because without photo evidence, no one is ever going to believe this!!!

Ramie was able to get them to head back to the lower property

How the heck is this possible?! How did they get into our yard!?! Our yard is fully fenced except for the border along the creek, and the banks of the creek are way too steep for a cow to climb up!! We were finally able to herd them back down to the lower property where there was one more just eating away at our plants down there, for a total of 4 cows currently in our yard.

Once all 4 cows were back down in the lower yard and our patio and house were no longer in danger, we watched them happily eating the fresh grass and other plants while we figured out just what the heck we were going to do about this. I didn't want them to destroy our plants and two of them were trying to come up the hill by the carport, getting very close to stepping on our pineapple plants and the tiny cinnamon tree that was finally starting to grow after nearly a year of just barely surviving. These cows need to go away NOW! Ramie and I managed to get them to turn around and start walking away by continuing to clap and yell at them when we noticed that one of the cows started heading toward the corner of our property where there is a small opening between the creek and where our fence connects with Nick the neighbor’s fence. The way this end of our property is set up is that there is nothing separating our property from Nick’s property but some brush, but our 2 combined fences fully enclose both of our yards, except for the creek. This is where the cows went and ended up in Nick's yard.

The whitish cow at the top of the picture is heading towards the small opening that is not fenced between the creek and our yard

We had to figure out where these cow’s belong to get them back to their home, and Ramie knew of one farm that was nearby on the other side of the creek that had cows, but he had no idea how to actually get to it or how to contact the owner. Ramie was just opening up our gate to leave when Alex, Nick's worker, showed up to do some work today. Ramie thought it was a good idea to warn Alex that there were some cows in the back yard so that he did not startle the cows or vice versa when he went in the gate. 

Alex is Tico but speaks English so when Ramie told Alex that there were 4 cows in the yard, he gave Ramie a really confused look like he thought something was lost in translation. So Ramie then told him in Spanish “hay cuatro vacas en el patio”. Now Alex understood that there hadn’t been anything lost in translation and was even more confused so Ramie slowly opened the gate to show Alex that there were in fact 4 giant cows in the backyard of Nick’s property. He couldn't believe it and he thought it was funny as well so he got his camera out to take pictures because, like I said, without photo evidence, absolutely no one was going to believe this--- even here in Costa Rica where you sometimes wonder if you are living in the land of the strange! 

Ramie asked him if he knew where they may have come from and he said that there is a farm right on the other side of the creek. They walked behind the house to look across, and sure enough there was a broken fence. Since the two of them were back there and the cows were kind of in the right area, they clapped and waved their arms at the cows. It didn’t take long and they trotted back across the creek and into the field where they belonged.

As Ramie and Alex started back toward the front of the house they heard an odd noise of water splashing. As they came around the corner they saw a 5th cow in the pool at Nick's other house (he has 2 separate houses with separate pools side by side across the street from our house). Ramie & Alex quickly went over to check out the situation and realized that the cow was treading water and unable to get out of the pool. 

While the horns might have made this cow more dangerous, I’m glad it had the horns. Some of the ones that were in our yard didn’t have horns and then I don’t know how we would have attached the tow strap! There was no way this cow was going to get out of the pool from the deep end where it couldn’t push itself off the bottom, so the first step would be to turn the cow around and get it to the shallow end. We managed to get the cover out from around the cow but it was reluctant to move since it had managed to get its front legs on the edge of the pool and it was treading water that was about 8 feet deep.  There was just no way for it to get out from where it was at so Ramie pushed the cow back into the pool and then had to put his foot on its head to get it to turn around and face the right direction. Once it was facing the right way they started pulling toward the shallow end, hoping that the cow would put its front hooves up onto the seat and use it as a step to get out, but they could only pull so hard, and weren’t able to coax it up onto the seat.

They could only pull it so far, the cow was to exhausted and the steep angle of the pool floor didnt help.

One of the big problems we were encountering was that this small plunge pool was designed to go from shallow to deep in a very short distance so the slope on the bottom of the pool was very steep and the cow could not get its footing. As they pulled, they could tell it was only resting on its front knees and would not try to stand. We don't know how long the cow had been in the pool either, but you could tell it was exhausted. The three of us tried to pull and coax the cow further but we were no match for a 1800+ lb cow! At this point Ramie determined that the only option would be to go get Dusti and use her to pull the cow out of the pool. Fortunately there is an empty lot right next door and Ramie would be able to bring Dusti very near the backyard, line her up with the pool and pull the cow straight toward and up onto the step. It’s very fortunate it was set up this way because if there hadn’t been a vacant lot here or if the pool was situated differently, there would not have been enough room to get Dusti back there and have room to hook up to and pull the cow out. 

Ramie ran home to get Dusti and a side cutter to cut the barbed wire fence that ran along the vacant lot at the road. While he was gone for that short time, Alex and I were keeping an eye on the cow. This poor animal was so exhausted and probably just giving up and would drop its head so its nose was underwater. We could not let this cow drown, I mean, we’d really never be able to pull a dead 1800+ lb cow out of the pool, we needed it to help itself out!! Alex was still holding on to the tow strap and would pull up on the strap to get it to raise its nostrils above the water to breathe, and then once she took a breath, let it back down to let her relax. He had to do this a couple of times before Ramie arrived back with Dusti.

Ramie pulled Dusti tight to the barbed wire fence between Nick’s lot and the vacant lot and used the winch hook to connect to the tow strap. There is a bamboo hedge here along the fence line as well, but fortunately it was not too thick and we were able to see through it and get the tow strap through. Unfortunately though, the hedge was thick enough and Ramie was far enough away that he wouldn’t be able to see the cow as he was pulling, so he would have to rely on Alex to tell him what was happening as he was pulling. Ramie started backing up slowly and sort of dragged the cow up the incline, he was able to get the cow up to the edge of the pool where the seat was and where it could finally stand up, but the problem was that its hind legs were still on the incline and slipping backwards. He pulled a little more to give her some leverage and all of a sudden the cow was out.

No, the pool isn't usually that color, Nick can thank the cow for that!

That part happened so fast that I don’t really even know how it happened. Now the problem was that the nervous, scared, exhausted cow, still attached to the tow strap which was still attached to Dusti, was in a small enclosed area with a pool behind it, a barbed wire fence in front of it, a house to it’s right and a pool pump room to it’s left, with only a few corridors that it could find it’s way safely out of this back yard. The cow tried to continue to go “forward” and started pushing on the fence between the pool and Ramie. You could see the cement fence posts being forced out of the ground, this cow was strong!! Ramie was talking to it trying to calm it down and Alex was trying to prevent it from walking backwards into the pool, since there was only about 8’ of room here. Ramie realized that if this cow decides to make a run for it, that it is still tied to Dusti and that may end very badly for the cow or Dusti. Ramie quickly unhooked the strap from the tow hook on Dusti and the nervous cow started to turn around and head towards the creek, which would bring it back to the fence that it originally broke out of, of course, with the strap still around its horns. I laughed and said to Alex, who then told Ramie we may have lost his tow strap, but at the end of the day, if that was the only thing that happened, he was ok with that. Ramie brought Dusti back home at this point and left Alex & me to keep this cow from falling back in or causing damage to anything else in Nick’s yard. Fortunately the cow didn’t run, and as it walked around the back side of the pump house, Alex wedged himself around one corner as the cow was going around the other corner and was able to get enough leverage to stop the cow, get close enough to it, and unhook the strap from around it’s horns. After the strap had been removed, the cow turned around and headed right back to where it belonged. When Ramie returned, he was surprised to see Alex holding his strap which was no longer attached to a cow. When Ramie asked how he managed to get it unhooked, Alex told him and Ramie was impressed at Alex’s quick thinking, especially since he had originally been pretty nervous around the cow.

Back in their own area

Now that we saved the cow from the pool, someone had to find the farmer to inform him they broke the fence. Ramie decided to go for a ride since he knew roughly where that farm was on the other side of the creek. He was gone for about 45 minutes and when he returned he told me all about his encounter on the other side of the creek. He didn’t have too much trouble finding the farm that he thought these cows belonged to, but when he got there, there was no one around and no houses, it was just fenced fields. He saw a couple of guys in a pasture further away working on a building, so he drove out there to ask if they were the farmer or his workers, and unfortunately they were neither. As he was talking to these guys, they happened to notice that some people did walk into the farm field, so Ramie headed back to see if they were the people he needed to talk to. Fortunately it was the farmer that he needed, but the slight hiccup was that he only speaks Spanish. Ramie spoke to him as well as he could in Spanish and told him that his cows broke the fence, he showed them the broken fence, and then told him that one of the cows went swimming in the pool. The farmer looked confused until Ramie showed him the picture (photo proof! It’s a must!!) The farmer felt terrible about what happened and tried to give Ramie some money, but he simply told him that is our neighbor’s yard, and that he was just happy to help save the cow. Now, hopefully the farmer reinforces this corner of the fence because I surely do NOT want to find cows in my backyard again! I’m just glad that we were home and able to scare the cows away before they caused any additional problems, and we are glad that Alex just happened to show up today, because if Ramie hadn’t had to go show Alex that there were cows in the yard, there’s a big possibility that the cow in the pool would have been undiscovered for several days, and the outcome would have been very different. 

Now, tell me… if we didn't have pictures to prove this, would any one of you believe this story?! Only in Costa Rica, right?!

Saturday 7/29- We all look forward to a day that we get to sleep in, right? But, when you have puppies (or kids) sometimes that doesn’t really happen anymore. Skye is like a little alarm clock and you better believe we are trying to break her of that habit! Even though we were up late last night, she was awake bright and early and we could hear her whimpering at about 4am. We let her outside to go potty, and then figured we’d try our luck to see if she’d go back to bed for a little while, so we put her back in the kennel. Fortunately she must have still been tired because we got another hour of sleep after that!

A little bit later in the morning Ramie and I had to leave the house for a little while to go see Benny the chiropractor. Skye hasn’t been doing great in her kennel during her kennel time lately but we haven’t left her alone at home in a while either so this morning we would test it out. We were only gone for less than an hour, but when we got back we couldn’t hear her barking or crying before we got into the house (that’s a good sign!). When we did go to let her out of her kennel, though, we discovered that she figured out that she could chew on the wood that her little dog house cubby was made out of. That isn’t ideal, but maybe it would calm her down enough that this whole kennel thing would work out in the end. 

It has now officially been 1 month since Skye came home with us. It’s amazing how much can change with a puppy this age in only 1 month. She is getting smarter as we work with her and she’s also growing like a weed. She seems to like napping in this particular spot under the Adirondack chair, so I thought it would be easy to get “comparison” pictures to see how much bigger she is now than she was then, but as it turns out, the two pictures below were taken a month apart and you can't even tell the difference in the picture. In person, though, it's clear that she’s growing, and it probably won't be too long before she's going to outgrow this hiding place!

When we got her

1 month later

The Official Casa Costa Breeze end of July rainfall total was 13.4 inches

Work was continuing to be quite stressful for me this entire week, and when I was done for the day all I wanted to do was enjoy some cuddle time with the pup. While I was tied to my computer, Ramie was overseeing the construction of our new wall. Since none of you really want to hear about my stressful work week, I’ll let Ramie tell you about the events of his week.

Monday 7/31- When I was working with the owner of this crew last week, getting things scheduled and organized, he told me that they wanted to start work at 6am, which is fairly typical around here. This morning the crew was waiting at our gate at about 5:50. Let me tell you, that is not typical at all! There is a reason they use the phrase “Tico Time” here, and yes, it's just like Island time for those of you who have heard that expression about the islands in the Caribbean.

Basically it means schedules are just rough guidelines, things will happen when they happen, and there’s typically no big rush on most things. I guess this crew works on Gringo time!!

Once I let them in, the crew wasted no time and their first step was to remove our old “fence” which consisted of green saran (fabric) stretched between metal fence posts that stood about 6 feet high.

The fence to be removed

That didn’t take very long and once it was down they pulled a string from one corner post of our property to the other so they had a visual of where the property line is exactly. Since I already had an issue with having plants on the neighbor’s property, I wanted to make sure that the wall was directly on the property line (which is legal and actually quite normal here in Costa Rica). Once the string was up they found that our cunetta (drainage ditch) along the back of the property was not installed straight and actually crossed over the property line as well. It turns out that they would have to remove the whole thing and will reinstall it after the wall is built. Once all of those sections were dug out, it was time to get started on the actual wall itself. 

Izzy was here visiting today and was inspecting the work

We are installing a Prefab wall which consists of grooved posts and cement panels that slide into those groves, the whole setup is similar to tongue and groove flooring. We decided on this type of construction because it's quicker to build and less expensive than some of the other options. They got a good start on installing the posts and some of the panels today but unfortunately, got rained out at about 1pm.

Tuesday 8/1- The crew was waiting at the gate before 6am once again, and I’ll say that I'm super impressed by that! Today they continued setting the rest of the posts and installing the remaining panels. After seeing how quickly they finished up with that part today, I think they would have been really close to having the wall completely in place yesterday if it weren't for the rain. They had the complete wall up and in place by about noon. I spent some time watching how this whole thing came together once the posts and panels were set up and saw that they really had a good system in place to work efficiently.

OSHA would not approve of the ladders here but they never seem to get hurt

Applying the smooth finish layer

Skye was very interested in what they were doing but was too scared to get close

When the boss showed up at the end of the day to look at the progress he called me over and to tell me that he didn't like the way that the finish layer turned out, it's too rough and will end up taking too much paint to cover. He told me that he would bring a different material tomorrow and have the guys go over what they already did to make it look the way it should. He made sure to let me know that it wouldn’t cost us any more to fix it and that it shouldn’t delay the progress or the anticipated finish date. 

The wall at the end of day 2

The lower section before the finish layer

I was doubtful at first when he told me that they could build our wall in 4 days, but with the progress they made in the past two days it certainly looks like it will be done on time!

Wednesday 8/2- Today was my regularly scheduled Wednesday turtle walk so I was up at 4:30 this morning to head to the beach. Today my friend Ray will be joining us, it will be his first walk and with the luck we’ve been having recently there is a good chance that we will find some more nests today. Once we got going it didn't take long and we spotted our first turtle track and he was pretty excited about it! Since it was his first time, I assisted Ray with the process of finding and digging the nest, gathering the eggs and recording the data. 

Ready for paint

It is beautiful, but has one heck of a painful sting!

All I could do was walk it off and wait for the pain to subside. About 15 minutes later the two workers were right on time I was still walking funny while getting them the supplies. I would say the pain lasted about an hour and a half, it probably would have been less time but I was stubborn and didn't move my foot right away. Oh well lesson learned. Or was it?  Will I wear shoes in the yard from now on? Probably not. 

Anyway, the guys got going on the painting right away.

A while later the boss showed up just as they were starting to paint the wall and the first comment to come out of his mouth was “WOW!” Yeah, I guess that is kind of a bright green! Dana and I had seen the color as they started putting it on but before the boss got there, we had already made the decision that since we had the paint we might as well just continue with the color. With time it’ll fade, right? When the boss saw the color he called me over to make sure it was ok and I told him that we had already talked about it and that they should go ahead and continue. He had a look on his face like he didn’t quite believe we were going to have him keep going and then talked with his guys, presumably telling them to keep painting. They had the same look as the boss, but in the end of course it was our decision. Yeah, it was that bright that we had three guys giving us a “look”! I just told him we can always paint over it if we really end up hating it after a while. As it dried it did get darker, but this color might take a little bit of getting used to. Dana thinks it goes nicely with our bright blue wall… jungle & sky!

Another Thursday spent at home meant that Dana had some time to take care of projects, and I had a project for her. The old backpack that I use to carry my supplies and eggs for my turtle walks ended up with a broken zipper this week. Since Dana has become a pro at sewing, I asked her if she would be able to replace the zipper since we had plenty of leftovers from when we made our cushions and dog bed last year. Of course, she agreed to fix it since she didn’t want me using one of our good travel backpacks to go to the beach and get full of sand. This ended up being a more difficult process than either one of us expected and it became a team effort! Even though Dana knows how to sew on zippers, it becomes much more of a challenge when you are trying to put it onto an object that is already sewn together and bulky and oddly shaped. Dana “drove” the sewing machine and I helped hold and move the backpack as she was trying to keep everything in place and the needle going where it needed to go. It took a while, but we managed to get it finished, not as perfectly as it was when it was new, but enough to function. We were also able to reinforce a few other areas that looked like they could give out any day now. I have another walk tomorrow morning, so I’ll get to test it out and see how her work holds up. 

Dana’s rating for this DIY project: ZERO stars, do not recommend!! ☆☆☆☆☆

They ended up finishing the wall around 3:00 today, fortunately they didn’t get rained out! It was a hot afternoon so when they finished I decided to bring them a beer for their hard work. The younger guy looked at the older one with a questioning look like “is this ok?” and the older guy took the offered beer indicating that it wouldn’t be a problem. They enjoyed the beer for all of what seemed like 30 seconds before they got back to work cleaning everything up and then took off. Job complete!! It is kind of amazing to me that the wall was finished in 4 days just like I was originally told, even with the extra work of having to remove & reinstall the cunetta. I like this team, I’d hire them again! 

The jungle and sky can be seen on the far left of this picture.

All done!

Now that the work is done we can already tell that the traffic noise from the highway is less. We can still hear the super annoying semis that love to use their jake-brakes for what seems like 10 minutes on a completely flat highway and some of the more annoying motorcycles that go by, but overall I do think it’s better than it was before. Even though we always said that we didn't want to live behind a concrete wall, this might not have been such a bad idea. Plus, this taller concrete wall may provide a little bit more “security” for us right now since our thorny hedges hadn’t had a chance to fully grow before we were told we had to remove it.

Friday 8/5- Today was another early morning for me, I was up at 3:30 to head to the beach for a walk at 4:00. I guess this time of morning isn’t so terrible, sometimes it’s really hard to get up at midnight to do one of those walks, at least these morning ones will be partially in the daylight. We had another successful day and found a couple of nests, however unfortunately the newly repaired backpack failed again. 

The tracks of one of the nests

Yes, the zipper broke, but it had nothing to do with Dana’s sewing. This time, the teeth of the zipper actually broke apart, I guess the zipper just wasn’t strong enough for the weight of the eggs and sand that I had to carry. Back to the drawing board if we want to save this backpack!

Today was a typical workday for Dana so after I got home from the turtle walk I spent the day working with Skye on her commands and tried doing some kennel time again. We didn't put her in her kennel this past week while the crew was working here because there was just too much noise and too much going on that would have distracted her and she really wouldn’t have done well or stopped crying. I wouldn’t say that kennel time today was successful, but every little bit keeps working toward the end goal.

Saturday 8/5- Dana has returned to finish off this blog post. 

A day off for me can mean lots of different things… Today it meant that I'm going to try to repair Ramie’s turtle walk backpack again. You’re probably wondering why we just don't go buy another one instead of screwing around with such a pain in the butt project. Unfortunately, here it's just not that simple! It’s weird, but backpacks (at least good quality ones that will hold up to the sand, salt air, and weight of the turtle nests) are hard to find and crazy expensive when you can find one. Besides, it doesn’t make sense to go buy a brand-new backpack that will just get abused anyway. That seems like a complete waste! Ramie has been trying to come up with another idea on how to make this backpack work for his purpose and came up with something that just might work! We have one of those seat protectors that you put in your vehicle for dogs to sit on so they don’t wreck your seats and don’t fall on the floor when you’re driving that was torn and we have just been using it as a protective mat in the cargo area of the truck. This thing has those big plastic clips on it that held it on to the headrests, but using it as we were, we didn’t need those clips anymore, so Ramie thought he might be able to use those clips to help solve his backpack problem. He cut them off, removed the zipper that we just sewed into the backpack, and then called me over to help figure out how we’d make this work.

Since he doesn't really need the backpack to close all the way like it does with a zipper, he really only needs the front flap to stay up to hold the bag or bucket of eggs from falling out, which will be at the bottom of the pack anyways, the gaps in the top won’t cause a problem. The flap just needs to stay up enough that the eggs (and his other supplies) won’t spill out. We played around with trial and error, pinning these clips on to different places to see what placement would work best, and after we figured out what seemed to work, I sewed them on. 

Skye not so sure of our sewing projects, she has her doubts

This was MUCH easier than sewing on that zipper a few days ago, why didn’t we come up with this first?! It doesn't look too pretty but he assured me it will work for his needs. They have been on a hot streak of finding nests lately, and I guess August is the peak of turtle mating season, so there will be many more nests to come that he’ll have to carry, he definitely needs this pack to work.

After we finished up with this very important task, Ramie got to work in the yard, and I did some chores around the house and caught up on all the things you seem to neglect when you are just overly busy with everything else. I couldn’t let one of my precious days off end without making some time to relax and enjoy some pool time, so I was sure to fit that in before I had to make dinner too. 

 Pura Vida! 

Saturday 7/22- Oh how I always look forward to my days off. I didn’t have much of a to-do list today, so I was looking forward to a relaxing day. I spent the morning doing a few chores around the house and working on the blog, but by afternoon it was time to truly relax, spend some time in the pool, and get some puppy time. These kinds of days are the best kind of days (and don’t happen nearly often enough)! 

Skye's favorite place to lay

Monday 7/24- Since we have learned that Skye doesn’t particularly like being in her kennel when it’s not bedtime, we have begun to implement “kennel time” for her. We are going to start working with her and training her that being in her kennel is not scary or bad and that it’s just a little home to keep her contained while we aren’t watching her. We’ve started putting her in her kennel for about 10 minutes at a time a few times a day, but she definitely doesn’t like it! We have given her treats, her favorite toys, rawhide bones, CBD oil, and even tried background music but nothing has worked. She works herself up, cries, barks, and whimpers until it’s time to come out. She gets so worked up that she drools and slobbers all over the place and exhausts herself in the process. I guess this is all part of training a puppy. We’ll just keep working with her and hopefully she’ll eventually get used to being in the kennel & take a nap instead.

Tuesday 7/25- Today we had the idea to cover the kennel with a sheet so that Skye can't see out. Remarkably, it seemed to work! To test whether it’s a fluke or if it really does work, we tried it again later and it worked again. Ramie would sneak to the doorway and listen and peek in a little bit. He could tell that she didn't lay down but she also didn't bark or cry, just let out a small whimper every now and then. Well, this has been the best result yet but the downside is that if this is all that works, keeping it covered would probably cause it to get pretty hot inside if she is in there for a while because there won’t be any airflow, we will have to figure out a way to keep it coolish in there for her. We will try it again tomorrow and hopefully have good results.

Wednesday 7/26- Ramie had an early morning turtle walk today and got home around 6am. He informed me he spotted a nest and got to retrieve the eggs, but one of the volunteers took the eggs to the nursery. He grabbed his coffee and began to enjoy his break, but the break didn't last long When he received a message about a problem at the rental house across the street it was time to get up and “start working”. The guests had a problem with the kitchen sink, I guess it was backing up and not draining. Fortunately with all of Ramie’s maintenance skills he managed to get the problem under control.

He was home just about the time that our contractors who would be building our new wall in the backyard showed up to drop off the materials they would need to start working the wall next Monday. All of the decisions about the building of the wall had been made, the materials had been purchased and delivered, now the only thing we had left to decide on was what color we were going to have them paint it and to buy the paint. We would have about a week to make this decision.

When Ramie knew he’d have a break in the action and be home for a little while without interruption he decided that he’d do kennel time for Skye again. Since he had luck yesterday when he covered the kennel with the sheet, he tried that trick again. He covered her up, left the room, and Silence!! … Well, for about 2 minutes anyway. Then came the barking, crying and whimpering again. Well, I guess that covering the kennel idea stopped working. We’ve noticed that when we try something new that seems to work, it really only works a few times before she gets used to it and it doesn’t work again after that. The 2nd round of kennel time today was even worse!

We have noticed that Skye likes to be under things. When she’s sitting with us watching TV in the evenings she loves to cuddle up under the “fort” that is made by the sheet we have draped over the couch (when Izzy is here she ends up on the furniture quite often and she sheds a LOT so we keep the furniture covered!). 

When we’re in the shower Skye likes to crawl into the lower shelf cubby of our vanity and hide out there until we’re done. Maybe there’s something to this, if she feels like her kennel is too big, maybe she would be more comfortable in a smaller space? This gave Ramie an idea…. 

I like it here Mom!

He would build a little enclosure inside of her kennel to make it feel like the small cubby or a little dog house. Heck, it would give Ramie something to do and it couldn’t really hurt anything, right!?

Thursday 7/27- I had some work to do this morning for my other jobs, and while I was working hard at that, Ramie got started on his idea for Skye’s little home. Since options are limited here, he decided that he’d make this little hut out of plywood. He wouldn’t need a lot, and he knew that some of our friends here in town might actually have a spare partial piece that they didn’t need. He made some calls and found that Randal had a ½ piece of plywood that he was willing to give up. Ramie went to visit Randall to get the wood, then made a stop at Geoff’s to borrow his skill saw (since Ramie got rid of all of his woodworking tools before we came to Costa Rica) to cut it down to the sizes he needed. After he had the 4 pieces of plywood cut to size he came back home and asked me to help assemble the new piece of doggy furniture. He was all about keeping this simple, so we assembled it by zip-tieing the pieces together and to the wire of the kennel. It worked well enough for what we needed and we hoped that Skye would like her little cubby and would feel more secure and relaxed in it when she had to be in her kennel by herself. 

It's not pretty but it'll do the job.

 

Unfortunately, even with her new little “dog house”, both rounds of kennel time today were no different than prior ones. When Ramie checked on her (he can still peek in from the door, she hasn't figured out yet that he can see her) he saw that she would sniff it and was curious but wouldn’t sit near it. The whole time she was in there she chose to hang out as far away as she could get and bark. Dang it! I wonder what she will do with it overnight.

Friday 7/28- Skye doesn't have issues sleeping in her kennel at night and the couple times either one of us woke up we checked to see if she was sleeping in the little cubby part of her kennel. Unfortunately she was sleeping out in the open instead of under her new cubby. That's ok though because new things do spook her and maybe she just needs to get used to this object inside her space.

Ramie had a turtle walk this morning at 5am and Skye actually let us sleep until 4:30 when he had to get up, this is great since the last few days she has been waking up at 3:30 and refusing to go back to bed. If Ramie didn't have to get up that early it would have been interesting to see how long she would have stayed quiet. The walk was very productive, Ramie’s group is on a hot streak this past week and today they found 2 nests but sadly have not come across a turtle in the laying process yet.

Ac0m5f J Dnw A Laying Eggs GIFfrom Ac0m5f J Dnw A GIFs

When he got home he told me that Skye was awake and was sitting up in the kennel looking around when his alarm went off, but was in no hurry to get out of her kennel and wasn't making any noise. That is good progress for her. It would be perfect if she felt comfortable just hanging out in there while we continued sleep even if she is awake! 

This is a walking stick that Ramie found by the pool this morning.

Since I had a quite – intense – work week, we planned an evening get-together with Geoff and Tracy for dinner and a couple of drinks. We picked up food from the chicken truck (fried chicken KFC style with the best fried rice we’ve found down here), grabbed the bottle of something similar to Bailey’s (not the homemade stuff from the coffee plantation, this was from the store) and a couple of other beverages and headed up to their house for a few hours. We brought Skye with us so we wouldn’t have to worry about her going crazy at home by herself, plus Geoff & Tracy like seeing her too! 

Where we going?

Wait don't tell me, I'll just sit back and enjoy the ride

Skye did remarkably well being in a new place, she wandered around and checked things out but didn’t go too far. She was super curious about Geoff & Tracy’s pets but none of them were interested in playing with her. She hung out with us, and as the evening got later and later her batteries wore out. This was the latest that she’s been up at night since she’s been with us and she fell asleep cuddling in Ramie’s arms. Since she was up late with us tonight, hopefully she’ll sleep in later tomorrow morning!

Cuddle time!

Home and waiting for a bed time treat!

Let’s end again on a positive puppy note! Skye is getting better with learning her commands. After an additional week of training she is showing improvement.

• Sit (Was 10 still 10), She was naturally good at this and continues to sit on command, but we are still constantly reinforcing it
• Lay Down (Was 3 now 5), We have to touch the ground with our hand but she lays down almost immediately
• Stay (Was 2 still 2), Same rating, she doesn't understand and is too excited so wants to follow you if you step away. Definitely doesn’t work at all with “Lay Down”!
• Up [to stand on her hind legs] (Was 4 now 8), She can now stand on her hind legs for a longer time and has pretty good balance.
• Shake (Was 5 now 7), This seems to be one of her favorites because if you’re holding a treat, she will automatically want to shake without even being given a command. She will also alternate paws when you tell her “other paw”.
• Ring the Bell [to let us know she has to go outside] (Was 6 still 6), She knows to ring it but I think she is not sure why she’s supposed to ring it.
• Come (Was 5 still 5), It really depends on what else she is doing and how interested she is in that thing she’s focused on, she is 50/50 on listening.
• Off [off the furniture] (Was 2 now 4), It takes a couple times but she will get down.
• Follow (3, this is new), We’ve added this one to teach her to walk directly next to us when we command, essentially “heel” but we didn’t like that word. She sometimes runs in circles or wanders away.

She’s still always excited to do everything, but sometimes getting her to focus on anything is difficult. 

Saturday 7/15- Every day is an adventure with a puppy, changes as they grow, working on training, and all of the new experiences that they have and their reactions to them. Last week we mentioned how much she has grown, and it really is quite amazing how much bigger she is getting and how quickly it’s happening. The other thing that we’ve noticed is that some of her mom’s grayish coloring is starting to come out. Initially, Skye was completely black and brown with the rottweiler coloring. We started noticing a couple of grayish spots on her tail a few days ago, and every day that goes by she is getting more and more of those spots, now we are noticing them on her head and neck. In the end she might end up looking more like her momma dog than we anticipated! 

The grey is starting to come out on both sides of her neck

The plan was to meet at 4:30 at our house and we’d drive together. As they were leaving their house Tracy sent a message that just said “get the shot glasses ready”. Oh no, what does that mean? When they walked in the door she was holding what was left of a bottle of Goldschlager that we have had shots from when we’ve hung out with them before. She grabbed those shot glasses and quickly poured everyone a round. Surprisingly that first one went down easily; we chatted some more, played with Skye, and then Tracy decided to line up another round of shots. This one went down even more easily, it must have something to do with that sweet cinnamon flavor. When it was time to go, Ramie put Skye in her kennel with her toys and a treat. This time we were curious to see what she does while we are gone so Ramie set up a camera in our bedroom to watch her. While we were enjoying the night, the camera kept alerting us to movement so we pulled up the live view of the camera and watched what Skye was doing. Sadly, she was whining and barking, she would not lie down and chew on her treat or go to sleep. At some point Ramie realized that every time movement is detected the light on the camera would turn on so he turned that option off hoping that now she wouldn’t be distracted by the light and she would just fall asleep.

We had a great dinner, lots of laughs, and fun time people-watching. I also just happened to meet one of Skye’s brothers. We noticed a woman with a dog hanging out talking one of the guys working at the Gastro Park, and this dog was about the size of Skye and looked so much like her. We knew that one of the brothers came here to Uvita, so I pulled up the photo from Red’s Facebook page of the puppy parents and had to go ask if this was her. Sure enough it was, but she didn’t speak English, so I told her in my best Spanish that I was just curious if this was the brother because we have the sister at home. I gave the pup a few pets, and then left them to their conversation. When it was time to head home we didn’t really know what to expect we’d find. When we walked in the door we didn't hear any barking so we were hopeful that Skye fell asleep. Ramie went in first to check on her.

Unfortunately she had an accident in her kennel and it was all over her. Oh the poor thing, we did let her out to go potty before we left but with all of her anxiety and excitement it must have just come out. She’s just a baby, we knew it was likely to happen at some point!

Well, there was no choice but to get this cleaned up so I took her toys and blanket and threw them in the washing machine and started scrubbing the floor while Ramie took the kennel outside to hose it off. Geoff and Tracy hung out for a little while to help distract Skye who just wanted to play. Once we had everything cleaned and disinfected it was time to give Skye a bath. Geoff and Tracy said their goodbyes and headed home and we gathered up Skye to give her the first bath at our house. The easiest place to give her a bath was in the shower so Ramie decided to go in with her to hold her and make it easier. Since she is nervous of all things (or so it seems) she didn’t look too thrilled with this process, but she put up with it and we were able to get her all fresh and clean again. Now it was bedtime! Surprisingly, Skye went right into her kennel without a fuss, laid down and went to sleep. Breaking her of this separation anxiety might be harder than we thought.

Tuesday 7/18- As we’ve mentioned before, we are in the Green Season here in Costa Rica which means that we always expect rain. It’s not that it always rains, it’s just that rain could roll in at any time, and this afternoon we got a pretty intense rainstorm. With it came some surprisingly cool air and over the course of the evening the temperature dropped significantly. It was actually rather refreshing and by the time we went to bed it was cool enough that we actually pulled up the comforter. Perfect sleeping weather! It kind of reminds me of fall weather back in MN, and with all of the windows open and hearing nature, it almost felt like sometimes when we used to go camping.

When I woke up it was still nice and cool, actually almost chilly. I opened up all of the doors and windows in the house to let the cool air in and then had to go check the temperature because I swear it felt like it was in the mid to low 60’s. Since I was up so early, there was no way it had started warming up for the day yet, so I’m sure it was still at the “overnight low” and the thermometer read 74*… What!? That's it!? I was actually a bit chilly last night and Ramie even snuggled up to me, which doesn't happen very often because it's just too dang warm to do that! I guess we’ve turned into freeze babies now. I will say, though, that this was the coolest that I’ve seen it here on the coast and I usually try to check the thermometer any time it feels cool-ish. By 8am you could already tell that it was warming up quickly and the rest of the day would be back to “normal”. 

We were finally able to get her a name tag- and she finds a way to grab it and chew on it.  Day 1 and it already has bite marks.

Izzy is still coming over just about every day and they seem to be getting along well. Izzy is even becoming more playful and will start the interaction instead of waiting for Skye to start the playing. It's fun to watch them become friends. I guess Izzy is not fond of large dogs and Ray and Wesley hope that since they are becoming friends while Skye is small that Izzy will stay comfortable with her even after Skye gets bigger, still play, and maybe help Izzy get more comfortable around other bigger dogs. 

After Izzy was picked up today we had some errands to run and we couldn't take Skye with us so she had to stay at home by herself. We only had to run out for a couple of hours max so we were hoping it wouldn’t go as poorly as it did on Saturday. When we got home and pulled into the carport we could already hear her barking and crying, we had only been gone for about an hour. Ramie went in first again to calm her down and let her out. She was all wet and there was liquid all over her kennel. It turns out that it wasn’t pee or puke, but more than likely it was just slobber (or Ramie thinks maybe tears) from being so worked up by herself. We are going to have to get her used to spending time by herself so after brainstorming we decided that tonight we would try something different for bed time. We moved her kennel from our bedroom into the living room. She never whines or barks initially when we put her in her crate at bedtime so this just might work, at least I hope it goes ok, but I don’t have a great feeling about it.

As it turns out, it didn't work at all! The minute the lights were out and we were out of sight she started crying and barking. Ramie went back into the living room to sit with her and get her to lie down which worked for a minute, but as soon as he stood up she did too and started crying again. Next he tried standing with his hand in the kennel and she laid down, after a few minutes took his hand out and slowly walked away. She started to whimper but since he was still there he was able to get her to lie down and stop by just talking to her. I think he sat in the chair in the living room for about 10 more minutes before he quietly returned to the bedroom. Ramie was in bed for just a couple minutes before Skye noticed he was gone and started the barking and crying once again. Ok, I guess this is not going to work at all, and since Ramie had to get up for a turtle walk at 1:30am we had to move the kennel back into the bedroom so we could both get some sleep. As soon as we did that, she didn't have any more issues and went right to sleep. This really doesn’t make any sense since before we brought her home she didn't live in a house with people at all, so it's not like she is used to people being around! Is it because she always had her brothers and sisters with her and now she gets lonely? We are going to have to figure this out!!

Friday 7/21- When Ramie got home around 3:30 this morning from his turtle walk he was greeted at the front door by a cute little puppy, wiggling with excitement that he was home. Yep, she was awake and so was I. I could tell he was tired and he told me that had a bucket of eggs in the car, but they would be fine for a few hours since they are packed in dirt. He was going to go back to bed for a couple of hours and he would bring the eggs down to the nursery later this morning after the sun comes up. I'm glad that he found a nest, he is two for two this week, and I hope that it’s rewarding given his sacrifice of sleep.

Ramie woke up again around 5:30, still looking very tired. He didn't waste any time and headed to the turtle nursery right away to bury the nest and fill out the forms. 

Here is a turtle that was seen by some other walkers one morning.

The view from the turtle nursery- the tide was very high and I've never seen waves come up the river like this. It was very peaceful

It didn’t take him long and he was home again by 6:30. Now it was time to grab some coffee and his computer to do some research about dog separation anxiety. He found that website after website all gave pretty much the same suggestions and he planned to start trying some of them today.

One of the suggestions was to put her in her kennel for a short period of time to start getting her used to it, then increase the time gradually as you progress. She is not afraid of her kennel and goes into it on her own during the day to just sit or get a toy she left in there. At bedtime she goes in without any problems and waits for us to come with her treat and toys. She is not frightened of her kennel at all, we really believe that she just thinks she needs to be with her people all the time. I get it, who wouldn't, we are totally awesome to be around!

One of the recommendations was to give her some type of treat that they can chew on for a while, so Ramie went to the pet food store in town to see what he could find. He came back with a couple different kinds and he let her sniff, chew, and play with one for about 5 minutes so she could figure out what it was and what to do with it. She seemed to like the treat so he told her that it was “time for bed” (the “kennel up” command that Breeze accidentally learned and then just always stuck with her, then Kota when he lived with us, and now Skye) and brought out one of the “good” treats. She stood up right away, picked up her chew treat and walked with Ramie to the kennel. She walked right in willingly, Ramie gave her the blanket and her toys, closed the door of the kennel, told her again it was time for bed time and to lie down, then he walked out closed the bedroom door behind him. He set the timer on his phone for 10 minutes to start, the first minute there were a few small whimpers but then the barks and crying started and continued for the next 9 minutes. After the 10 minutes had gone by he went back into the bedroom, let Skye know everything was ok and let her out. We did this twice today and both times had the same results. When it came time to go to bed she went right in, laid down and went to sleep without any problems, probably because she knew we were in the room with her. It’ll be interesting to see how the next few days go with kennel time. 

The sheet is back on the couch because Izzy jumps up there & sheds a lot.  That's ok, though, Skye loves to hide in her little "fort" in the corner under the sheet.

I will leave today's blog post on a positive puppy note. We have also started working with Skye on some basic commands. Over the next few weeks Ramie will rate Skye’s progress on the commands we’ve been working on with a 1-10 Scale with 1 being she doesn't get it at all and 10 being that fully understands it.

• Sit (10) We didn't even have to teach her this, she just picked up on it on her own, of course we will continue to reinforce the word.
• Playing Fetch (10) She knew this from the beginning, I don’t even think we had to train it. 
• Lay Down (3) She’s just starting to get the concept.
• Stay (2) She’s just too worried when we get too far away with the treat so she follows us even if we only take one step.
• Up, [to stand on her hind legs] (4), This was slow to start, but she’s getting better very quickly.
• Shake (5) sometimes forgets to stay seated.
• Ring the Bell [to let us know she has to go outside] (5) I think she just rings it sometimes because to make it a treat machine, knowing she gets rewarded for ringing it, or to go play outside.
• Come (5) This truly depends on what she is doing at the moment and whether she’s interested in it, she is about 50/50 on this one.
• Off [off the furniture] (2) We just started this one.

Pura Vida!

Tuesday 7/11- Today Skye would meet Fabiola, the vet that does house calls. It’s been about a month since Skye’s last round of puppy shots with Red’s vet, so she was due for her boosters, plus we just wanted Fabiola to come meet her and check her out. The first thing Fabiola does when she starts an appointment is weighs the dog. Today Skye is 5.4 kilos (or about 12 lbs). According to the paperwork kept by the prior vet, she has about doubled in size since a month ago. At this rate, how big will this girl get?

We’ve been able to tell that she’s grown since the first time we saw her but didn’t realize just how much! Fabiola said that when she comes back in a month and gets one more updated weight she should be able to calculate a fairly accurate full-grown size. Skye was a real trooper with the shots, getting her ears cleaned and getting her nails trimmed. Skye got a clean bill of health, we talked about next steps, and then it was time for Fabiola to go. I love this at home vetting, it makes things so much easier and more comfortable for the animal!

Wednesday 7/12- Ramie has been doing his turtle walks on his regular weekly schedule, walking on Wednesdays and Fridays. The times vary but lately have been between midnight and 5am and are scheduled based on the tides. They walk about 1 hour after low tide (as the tide is starting to come back in) or 1 hour after high tide (as the tide is starting to go out) which allows them actual walking space on the beach. They may still get wet, but the majority of the walk is on the sand. Turtles rarely come on land during daylight or full moons, so the walks are always in the dark or at least start off in the dark. Ramie has been having a dry streak of finding turtles or nests since they seem to be coming on the day before or after he walks. That's alright though because it keeps the excitement of finding them fresh. It just wouldn't be exciting if you found one or two every time you walked.

Thursday 7/13- It has officially been 2 weeks since we brought this itty bitty pup home with us. It’s amazing how much things with a puppy can change in this short period of time. She is still a snuggler and she still loves to be around her people, but she is coming into her personality a little bit more. She is starting to wander off a little bit, and we are noticing that the rebellious puppy behavior is starting. Now, when you call her to come she just looks at you and keeps walking the other direction. It’s only been 2 weeks and we know there is a lot of work left to get her trained, I’m not complaining, just noticing how she’s changing. She is constantly finding new interesting experiences, we got her first reaction to a cicada on video! 

Today for the first time we put her in the back seat by herself for a car ride. Remarkably she did great! She sat or laid down the whole time, didn’t try to crawl into the front by us, didn’t bark or whine, and really did a fantastic job! Today was also the first time we left her at home by herself. We had to run up to Geoff & Tracy’s for a bit and decided that since we wouldn’t be gone too long it would be a good test to see how she did at home in the kennel by herself. We ended up being gone longer than expected and she was home by herself for about an hour and a half. While we don’t know exactly what she did while we were gone, she didn’t go crazy and tear her stuff apart and we didn’t hear her cry at all on our way out the door or on our way back into the house. These are such good signs, I hope it sticks!

So far she has learned what her ball is, goes to get it when you ask her for it, and plays fetch nicely, she knows how to sit, and we’re starting to work on ringing the bell to go outside. Auntie Tracy has also let us borrow a treat puzzle game that Skye is starting to figure out. We only had to show her the concept once or twice and she was able to figure out that she had to move the “covers” to get the treats underneath. What a smart pup. 

Thanks Auntie Tracy for allowing me to borrow your toy

Friday 7/14- For the last 10 days or so we’ve been watching Ray & Wesley’s dog Izzy for about 3-4 hours most days while they are tending to some medical issues that require daily appointments, so both dogs have been getting plenty of interaction lately. This is great for both dogs because Izzy doesn’t have a lot of experience around other dogs and we want to make sure that Skye is well adapted to being around other animals. After Fabiola brought it to our attention how much Skye has grown recently, we looked at the two dogs next to each other and her growth became more apparent. Skye was smaller than Izzy at the beginning, but now they are almost the same size! 

Well will just hang out here while the silly hooman has to work

I had a scrub brush and the hose and just sat with a pile of rocks and cleaned them up. When that was done I moved them to where Harvin could pick the rock he needed and place it in the concrete. Once he had all of the rocks placed he filled in all of the “joints” between the rocks with concrete and packed it in. When this process was complete we took an early lunch break to allow the concrete to set up.

After lunch Harvin grabbed a sponge and a bucket of water and started smoothing the concrete and washing each stone until everything was smooth and clean. We were done with one side and moved to the next and repeated the entire process. We finished up around 3:30pm and I will say that it turned out fantastic. When we were finished, though we noticed that there was one small problem that could easily be fixed,the ditches have not been cleaned out since we moved in and a lot of dirt has washed into them over the last year causing a clogging point between the ditch and the culverts. Harvin offered to dig them out, and since he is here, why not!? He would shovel the mud and dirt into the wheelbarrow and I would haul it away and dump it. Excellent, now that they are clean the runoff will flow much better. We were finally done at 4pm and Harvin asked for a cup of coffee because, well, why not? While we drank our coffees together we sat on the step and practiced learning each others language.

Harvin is great to learn with since he speaks slowly and clearly for me to understand. He helps correct my pronunciation and explains which word or words to use and why. I can understand Spanish but I struggle speaking it, so it's great to have someone who wants to help teach but also wants to learn English so it's mutually beneficial to both of us. In the end it was a total of 9 hours of work and a total of 27,000 colones. I didn't have change so just gave him an even 30,000, or about $56, for his labor today.

This may seem like insignificant pay but it's average for Costa Ricans. Of course giving more is always ok but that could also put you in a situation where your workers think money isn't an issue and start trying to “Gringo” you, or charge more just because they know they can get away with it. In some cases they might even try to change the price after the work is completed. It has also happened to us when buying produce, we now know who we will and won’t buy produce from for this very reason. I personally always get a price from someone I'm hiring in writing, whether it's in a text message or email, that way you have a “legal” agreement in case they try to change the agreed upon price. You really have to watch out for yourself with certain things here because you can run into huge problems hiring workers if you're not careful. There could be a whole other blog on that topic so I won't get into all of that today. For now, I’ll continue to hire Harvin for the small odd jobs around the house that I don’t have the know-how or time to do.

We've had a few rains since it was done and I need to find a way to keep the gravel from washing into it.

This seems like the popular spot for the dogs to lay. First Breeze and now Skye.

Pura Vida!

Friday 6/30- Since we don't have a kennel for Skye, for night #1 we made do by putting together a makeshift enclosure out of storage bins and boxes at the foot of our bed, unfortunately she cried until we got out of bed and went to her. We tried just letting her cry herself to sleep like you do with a baby, but since this was just an enclosure made out of boxes she figured out that she could jump out of it (I guess it wasn’t high enough) and found Ramie’s side of the bed, then just sat there looking at him. Hmmm, what are we going to do? We decided to move & re-arrange the boxes in a way that she could sleep next to the bed and next to Ramie. Once she was in her little enclosure next to the bed and Ramie left his hand hanging down so she could touch him she quieted down (already a daddy’s girl?). As soon as she fell asleep Ramie could roll over but once she woke up and realized his hand wasn't there she would whimper again. This ended up waking us up a lot, and each time he would put his hand back down by her until she fell asleep again. This continued for the next couple of days. 

This is my stubborn, I'm not going to bed look!

The temporary kennel area

Even before we brought Skye home, we had posted on our local Facebook group asking if anyone had a used kennel that they were willing to part with for sale. Someone who spent part-time in Uvita and part time in Canada responded that they had one and only wanted $30 for it but were currently in Canada. They would get a hold of their housekeeper and coordinate a time that we could pick up the kennel. Since we didn’t know how long this would take, we continued our search for a store that might sell them new as well. The pet store here in Uvita did sell them, but they were on the insanely expensive side with a medium size kennel costing $145 and a large was $175 which is well over double what they could have cost back in the US. It was difficult to justify paying that price so we continued to hold out, hoping that we would get our hands on a used one soon.

Saturday 7/1- Fortunately today finally worked out to coordinate with the housekeeper of the Canadians! We drove up to the house and Ramie ran in while I waited in the car with Skye. We brought her along for the ride not only to get her used to being in the car but also because we didn't have anywhere to close her in at home. When Ramie came back out of the house with the kennel in hand I could tell that it looked big... maybe even bigger than the one that we had used for Breeze & Kota back in MN. After he put it in the back of the car and we were backing out of the driveway I asked him if it really was as big as it looked and his response was “HOLY CRAP, that thing is massive!” It turns out that it's an X-Large, made for huge dogs, but it’s what was available in a price range that we could feel good about so we would make do. 

At home Ramie set the kennel up in our bedroom (wow, this thing is REALLY BIG!! I could sleep in this with Skye!).

He decided to make a divider out of the lid of one of our storage containers to make it a more appropriate size for this tiny little dog. We struggled to figure out where we could put this giant kennel and eventually it was decided that since this was also a new situation for Skye that it should probably go next to the bed on his side like the makeshift enclosure had been. It fit between the bed and the patio door, but just barely! Ramie didn’t even have room on his side to get into bed, he’d have to crawl in from the bottom! Honestly, this thing is so massive that even full-grown Skye will not make use of all of the space in this thing. That's ok though, it’ll get us by for now until we can find one that is a more appropriate size. That’s the whole motto of life here in Costa Rica anyway- make do with what is available! 

The New Puppy Kingdom

Once Ramie was done outfitting the kennel with the makeshift divider, he moved on to the kitchen to chop up some celery and a small piece ended up falling on the floor (what a messy cook!). We don't typically feed our animals people food but as far as we know, Skye has never had people food before, so we wanted to see what she’d do with this. Hmm, I think she’s not really sure if it’s food or a toy!

Yes, they are very basic but will serve the purpose.

This is by far her favorite toy. The new toys have some tuff competition

It has been interesting having a puppy back in our house, but we knew it would be a lot of work again and we had been mentally preparing ourselves for it since we decided that we’d be bringing one home. I must say, though, that just in these first handful of days with her, we’ve seen that Skye is a very intelligent dog, she listens well, stays close to us, comes when we call her and has already figured out a few rules of what she can and can't do. She also hasn’t had any accidents in the house yet, including overnight (she whimpers loud enough and gives us enough time to get her outside)! She still always wants to snuggle, and I think that maybe even once she’s a big dog she’ll continue to try to climb onto our laps for cuddles. 

The only furniture she is allowed to sit on and she loves it!

First trimming of her nails and this is how she chose to lay

In less than a week she has met Geoff & Tracy, Loren, Nancy & their son Tim, and Geiner and so far she loves all people and she doesn’t bark at noises or people coming into our yard, but honestly that is one thing we kind of hope she does pick up on- we want her to be a little bit of a guard dog/alert system for us. One of the comments that we’ve been getting from people when they meet her is that she looks so much tinier in person than she does on the pictures that we’ve posted. I’ve been trying, but it’s hard to get a picture that shows how truly itty bitty she is. 

I fit anywhere, this is great!

Dad, I cant see where we are going!

Introducing Skye to Breeze

This ball is almost as big as me, I love it

Saturday 7/8- Hello happy readers, Ramie here!  I’ve encountered a little bit of a problem recently and I'm here to tell you about it. Way back when we built our house we opted for a live hedge fence along the back of our property instead of a concrete wall. Our builder planted Limoncillo which is a very thorny, strong plant that provides a beautiful hedge but also security. I’ve had a row of it growing for over a year now and just recently planted a second row. The problem arose when the owner of the lot behind our house (the same owner that we purchased our lot from, this neighborhood was originally a large plot that she subdivided into lots) saw the newly planted trees and investigated. The lot is for sale and I was hoping that nothing would come of my planting this and I would end up having this discussion with the future owner, which may be years yet, but it happened now instead. Yes, technically the hedge is on her property by about 8 inches but she decided that she didn't want it there and came to talk to me about it. Thankfully, she gave me the option to remove it instead of just digging it up herself and throwing it out.

I was given one week to remove it. Ok, lets get some perspective here, there are over 300 plants back there. Digging up the new plants will be easy but the ones that have been in for over a year are rooted in and we will have to get as much root as possible if we want to transplant them somewhere else & have them survive. I think I'm going to need help with this so I put out the word to Geoff. He has a local guy who has been doing projects for him and he said he will bring him over to look at the job.

Geoff brought Harvin over to look at the job last week. We walked the property, discussed what needed to be done and where we would move them to, which was a very good question since I pretty much have my entire perimeter planted with these already, but I guess I’ll be really packing them in now. That’s actually ok though because it creates a thicker more secure hedge. Harvin thought it over and gave me a price of 30,000 colones (about $55). I didn't hesitate and told him that would work for me. He had a busy upcoming week so today, one week after the conversation, we would be relocating them.

Harvin showed up at 6am today with his wife who would also be helping. Harvin speaks very little English and his wife doesn't speak any. It will be interesting working directly with them but it would give me a good chance to really practice my Spanish.

We went through introductions, gathered our tools, had a cup of coffee, and started digging. Once we had a couple wheelbarrows full of trees we moved them to the new area we’d plant them and Harvin started digging the holes. I took the bag of compost, added a handful to each of the holes, put the trees in, and covered them up. It was a good system. Eventually we ran out of trees and had to go to the back for more. Harvin's wife had them all dug out of the ground and nicely stacked up. We loaded as many as we could and continued until they were all planted. Surprisingly we were done planting them all by 10:30. It went so much quicker than I expected; I thought we were going to be doing this all day! I ended up paying them 40,000 colones for both of their time. That's about $75 and well worth the extra I gave them! Sadly, moving my hedge along the back of our property has now created a new problem. We no longer have a secure “fence” in the backyard. What we have left is basically just some erosion fabric strung up on wires held up between fence posts. I already had Geiner (our builder) out when we were told we needed to remove the plants to discuss what options we have and what we should do. Now we just have to decide make a decision. Ok back to Dana’s story time.

(Yeah, I got out of all of the hard physical labor this morning, someone had to make sure Skye didn’t run off!!)

After being with us for a little over a week I think we’re all settling into a rhythm. Skye is doing so well, she only chews on her toys (and our fingers & toes but we’re working on that), and she hasn’t destroyed anything. She seems to have picked up potty training, and she discovered that she loves to shred dead leaves that she finds in the yard. She’s still nervous about new things sometimes but she is slowly picking up how to walk on a leash and she still stays very close to us when we’re sitting around outside. We’ve moved her kennel from the side of the bed where Ramie can reach down and pet her to the foot of the bed where we want her to be, and it seems to be working. She isn’t making it all the way through the night yet, but that’s to be expected at this point. At least she doesn’t cry when she is “by herself” at bedtime. Every day she proves that she’s a smart girl with some of the things that she’s picking up on and today she learned how to give me a heart attack.

While Ramie was out working in the yard relocating the plants, I was keeping an eye on Skye. Since she doesn’t usually wander too far away from where the people are and spends most of the day sitting by us, when you notice that she isn’t in sight you check the normal places, call her name, and she’ll show up. Today started out that same way, but mid-way through the morning we went through this little routine and she didn’t show up. I was looking everywhere, Ramie heard me calling for her so he was looking around the yard for her as well. At this point she was probably gone for several minutes (which is long for her) and then she wandered out of the house looking for us, probably wondering what all of the yelling was about. A little while later she wandered off again, I looked around for her, didn’t find her, and called again. This time I saw her come out of our bedroom. Well, that was strange- I looked in the bedroom before I called her name and didn’t see her! The 3rd time she wandered off I checked the bedroom first. I looked around, called her name, and right before my eyes she came crawling out from underneath our bed! 

Well- I sure didn’t expect her to go hang out under there!! I guess she found a new hideout, hang out spot. I guess I don’t blame her, our bedroom doesn’t get any direct sunlight so it’s probably the coolest room in the house, and the tile under the bed was nice and cool! Today we humans learned her new hiding spot, so it will be the first place we look now when we can’t find her out and about. 

Sorry, I can't help myself. You might see comparisons like this once in a while 💘

Pura Vida!

Saturday 6/24- We’ve mentioned our friend Red in past blogs, she was one of the first people (other than Loren) that we connected with when we were getting ready to move to Costa Rica. She is from the UK and moved here about a year before we did and helped answer many of our questions before we moved down and when we first got here. She lives near San Isidro so she was also a huge help when it came to trying to find things in the area. We’ve been Facebook friends with her since way back when and she posts a lot about nature, animals, and all of the pets she has on her small finca (farm). 

She has become known in her little town as a lady who loves animals and will help out suffering animals when needed, and about a month ago a momma dog and her litter of 8 puppies were abandoned in town and at risk of being killed by coyotes. 

Momma and babies scared and looking for help

 

Babies all loaded up

Momma nervous but appears comfortable and ready to go to their new home

Babies ready to move to their new safe place

Momma checking things out- gotta keep the babies safe!

This all started shortly before we went back to MN and I’ve been following along on her posts. The momma, which they have named Bonita, has transformed so much from a scared and malnourished but very trusting bundle of bones to a beautiful, gentle and loyal dog. Having watched her transformation, I felt that she was so happy to have been rescued and would be the type of dog that recognized that she and her pups were saved by humans and would be a fantastic pet.

Happy Dog!

Nom Nom Nom

Hey move over!

Is there going to be enough food for all of us? We are growing so fast

Puppy Butts!

Red had recently posted that a couple of the pups had been adopted out and momma Bonita was scheduled to go to her new forever home yesterday, but unfortunately that ended up falling through. When I saw that, I told Ramie that I felt a strong urge to go visit Bonita and her pups to see if they were a fit for us. After Breeze passed away we knew we wanted to get another dog, but were waiting until after our trip to MN to even start looking. I didn’t think the timing of this was all by chance, and it just felt like the right dogs to go meet, plus Red has been telling us for 2 years that we need to get together and come see her place, so we’d get to go do that now too. Ramie got a hold of her, scheduled a time to get together, and we set off to go see the doggos.

We were going to meet the momma dog Bonita & the 2 remaining baby girls Betsy & Belle (yes, mommma and all 8 pups currently have “B” names). When we got to Red’s house we were immediately greeted by Bonita and Red’s two dogs Luna and Purdy. We spent the first half hour or so getting to know Bonita while chatting with Red and David. We learned the details of the story of Bonita and her litter of pups, they described Bonita’s personality that they have gotten to know, and of course, we chatted about non dog related things too. The vet figured that Bonita was about 2 years old or less and that this was her first litter of pups. They have given her all of her shots and spayed her, and the vet has given her the all-clear health-wise. She is smart, well behaved, gentle, happy, and very loving! She doesn’t run off and they have never heard her bark, even when the other dogs start barking at something.

Purdy, Bonita, Luna

Then, after a while, it was time to bring the 2 pups up from the pen that they are living in. There are just too many of them to all stay in the house, and the pups would run off if left out to do their own thing, so they stay in a pen down the hill from the house. Ramie got Betsy and I got Belle, we brought them back up to the house where we were sitting before, and continued chatting with Red & David playing with the 3 full grown dogs and now the 2 pups.

Belle and Dana hanging out!

Ramie and Betsy spending quality time together photo bombed by Purdy.

The first thing that I noticed was that Belle snuggled right into my neck and was content, no fussing or trying to escape, just cuddling. Ramie was having a heck of a time holding onto Betsy in a way that she wouldn’t escape. Of course, they loved the attention, but Belle was definitely the calmer of the two. Once Ramie was ready to switch and let me handle the rambunctious Betsy, we traded. The pups demeanors didn’t change. Belle snuggled right into Ramie and Betsy continued trying to escape. We played this game for a while and both of us were getting a little bit tired of trying to hold onto Betsy while we all continued to chat, so David took Betsy to keep her entertained. Ramie & I continued to play with Belle the snuggler and momma Bonita. 

Belle & Momma Bonita

Overall, we probably spent about 2 hours with the dogs, Red & David, and left with a whole lot of things to consider. All 3 of these girls were beautiful, I think all would make great family members, but are we ready for another dog? Are any of these girls right for us? And of course, if we are ready, which ONE is the right one for us, Bonita, Belle or Betsy?? (yes, for a brief moment we considered maybe bringing 2 of them home, but that choice was quickly crossed off after some consideration).

It's so sad, but abandoned dogs in need of rescue and new homes are so common here. We follow several of the local dog and cat rescue/shelters and are always seeing so many new ones come through. We’ve been keeping our eyes open but don’t want to just jump into any ol’ dog and are waiting for one that really calls to us. There are many single dogs that have been given up or abandoned and many momma dogs with litters just like Bonita and hers. If you’re looking for a dog down here, it is definitely not hard to find one that needs a home.

In fact, there are so many homeless dogs here that there are rescue groups in Costa Rica that partner with groups back in the US, Canada, and Europe and bring puppies from down here up to the US/CA/EU. Once in a while we see these groups post that they are looking for “flight angels”, people who are flying back to specific places, to bring the pups with them. All these flight angels have to do is pick up the pup at the airport, chaperone the pup to the destination, and drop them off with the person on the other end who meets you right at the airport to pick up the pup and bring them to their new forever home. They have a great system worked out! A day or 2 after we were back in MN we saw a post looking for a flight angel to MN… it’s too bad that we hadn’t known earlier otherwise we might have been able to bring a pup back on the plane with us. As far as I know, they only do this with tiny dogs that fit under the seat of the plane, no big dogs to go through all of that trauma like Breeze did.

Monday 6/26- Ramie started out his morning today with his routine at Alturas and then had his appointment to get his crown re-installed.

He explained to the dentist that his old crown was installed when he was about 18 years old and he had never had a problem with it no matter what he ate, why did this one come off after only a month? I guess the new crowns and adhesives are made of different materials that don't bond as well as the old ones, plus, the old tooth had been ground down so much that he didn't have a lot of area left for the adhesive to bond to. She told him that he is going to have to be careful when he eats and use other teeth to crunch hard things or chewy things because he could end up having more problems going forward. I sure hope this isn't going to be a recurring problem! The plus side is that his tooth is covered under a 1 year warranty so there was no charge for this visit today, but if this keeps happening forever--- well, we might have to consider other options!

Wednesday 6/28- Work has been not quite so busy lately so I used the opportunity to take a day off and actually have 2 days off in a row this week (with having Thursday & Saturday as my days off each week, I rarely get 2 days in a row, it’s kind of nice to have that for a change!) Unfortunately, even with the day off I didn’t get to sleep in. Ramie had a turtle walk at 4am and since I wasn’t working, I got up early to go with him. It turns out that was a good thing because it only ended up being the 2 of us because the other person he thought was supposed to be walking with him didn’t show up. 

Turtle walks require at least 2 people but 3 is better. This is for safety reasons in case you run into a poacher or someone else who has bad intentions. They are less likely to make threats if you in a larger group even though volunteers are directed to not engage with poachers for obvious reasons. The sun starts making its appearance around 5am, so the first hour of our walk today would be in the dark, and there was no moon this morning so it was super extra dark. It’s a good thing we had a flashlight with us, hopefully the battery doesn’t die (why we only brought one, I'm not 100% sure!?) !! Also, hopefully we don’t run into a crocodile because chances are it would see us before we saw it! Thankfully theirs eyes reflect light!

The sand was very fluffy this morning and the beach was at a pretty steep angle so it made it a somewhat difficult walk, plus we were walking at a pretty quick pace. Turtle egg hunting mornings are definitely different from our nice and easy beach stroll that we take on a relaxing morning at the beach. We made it the 2.5 miles to the turn-around point in about 45 minutes, and at that point it just started getting light enough to see without the flashlight (whew, it didn't die!). The walk back was slightly easier because it was light out, but it was still a fast walk in the fluffy sand. We made it back to the car at about 5:30 and unfortunately hadn’t found any turtle nests. We were back home, showered, and had coffee in hand by about 6am and were ready to start our day with 11,000 steps already under our belt. With a morning like that we didn’t feel bad about not doing much else productive the rest of the day.

Thursday 6/29- It turns out there was a mix-up with the scheduling and Ramie wasn’t supposed to do the walk yesterday, there was a different group that was going later in the morning. He was actually scheduled to do one at 4am today. Typically he wouldn’t do two walks two mornings in a row, but due to the mix-up, he was on the hook for today’s walk. That person that we thought didn’t show up for yesterday’s shift actually called in and said they wouldn’t be able to make it to today’s either and I had already told Ramie that there was no way I was going to do this 2 days in a row, so he found another volunteer to walk with him instead. They decided to go a little bit later (5am) in order to let the sun come up a bit and they wouldn’t have to walk in the pitch dark. Once again, no turtles or nests, so Ramie was home at about 7am.

He didn’t get to sit around today, though, because we had decided that today we were going to San Isidro. He quickly showered, refreshed his coffee and we were back on the road around 7:30.

We have a busy day ahead of us. As you loyal readers already know Thursday is feria day and that is going to be the first stop. We haven't had fresh veggies in the house since we’ve been home and I was really craving some. It didn't take us long at the feria and we were on to our next stops. We've made a decision and we were on a mission to look for dog stuff today.

We were looking for the standard things like collars, leashes, toys, food and toys, but also a wire kennel. We have the travel kennel that we brought Breeze down in but that is completely closed in plastic and there simply would not be enough air flow through it with the heat down here, not to mention it is quite large. We stopped at all the various pet stores that we knew about and other ones that had been recommended to us to see what we could find. Some of these stores were more like feed stores catering to large farm animals, but had small selections of cat and dog items, but there was nothing like a PetSmart in the area. We found the standard stuff, but in store after store we were just striking out on the kennel. Eventually we ended up at Walmart and did our regular shopping. They have a very limited pet section and all we found there were some treats. Unfortunately we completely struck out on kennels today, I guess they just aren’t readily available down here.

It was around noon when we were done shopping and we sent Red a message that we were heading her way, today we’d be bringing a new family member home with us! When we arrived at Red’s house she was so excited for us. We talked for a little bit before walking down to the puppy pen to pick up our new little girl. There were 6 puppies left and all 6 of the little cuties came running to the edge of the fence, all fighting for our attention. Red walked into the pen as we waited outside of it playing with the puppies through the fence. She was looking for the little girl with a green collar. It was hard to pick her out of the crowd since they were all so excited, jumping, running and playing. Eventually she picked her up and handed her over the fence, we were holding our baby Belle, the new cuddly addition to our family.

We decided on Belle because of her loving nature and all of those snuggles she was just so content on giving and getting. We know that this demeanor may not last but there was something about her that called to both Ramie and me. I really think that she picked us more than we picked her. We made it back up to Red’s house where Bonita (momma) got to say her goodbyes to Belle. She licked and nuzzled her like she knew she was leaving home. 

Goodbye little one

Rawr! Mom, your so embarrassing!

Sorry its hard to see but Belle is snuggled into Dana's shoulder.

We snapped some pictures and walked down the hill to our truck. We put Belle down to go to the bathroom and let her run around a little with momma, Luna and Purdy (Red’s dogs) before the long car ride home. Having seen Red’s Facebook posts when the 2 prior pups had gone to their forever home, we knew that she would post us with our new pup as well. We let her know that she can update all of her Facebook followers that Belle had been adopted and what her new forever name would be. We loaded up in the car, took our obligatory "heading out" picture (Taryn, Steven and Taylor will understand) and let our new family member settle into my lap.

Wink! I already have them wrapped around my little toe

Where are we going?

The pup spent the hour long drive home snuggled in on my lap and she did fantastic, she was completely content, not even a single whimper or peep came from her. She just seemed so happy. When we got home we let her sniff around and go potty, but had to get a picture of her in her furever home. 

Everyone, please say hello to Skye! 

Hello everyone! I've heard a lot about my big sister that is no longer here but I want to be just like her!

I know we've never met Skye, but you will be a perfect fit for your new family. Tell them I miss them, because I know they miss me!

We originally had a list of 5 names, but in the end decided on the Skye. The other options were Echo, Mocha, Rayne, & Zayda.

According to Google, Skye means: Island of clouds; winged; nature-inspired and prone to puns.
Origin: Scottish, Skye is a gender-neutral name that exudes a light, breezy nature. (The fact that this description included the word “breezy” is what did it for me, it’s like it was meant to be).

At least we didn’t have quite as difficult of a time coming up with a puppy name as we did with Dusti!!  

Get ready to be bombarded with cute puppy photos in future blogs.  Here she is as a little pip squeak💗(Photos stolen from Red's Facebook page)  

P.S.  As of 8/5 Betsy was the last pup remaining and went to her forever home today!! 

Only momma Bonita is still looking for her forever home. 

We are noticing a trend with her, see if you pick up on it as we post lots and lots of future puppy pictures!

The Official Casa Costa Breeze end of June rainfall total was 15.25 inches

Pura Vida!

The answer will be at the end of the blog

Checking out the river to see what fish or animals he can spot in the mangroves on the other side

The tide is low so the river bed is free to explore for fun treasures

It was close to the size of your pointer finger

It’s kind of amazing that once you get into these higher elevations it feels like you’re on a whole different planet. With the different climate there are different trees, flowers, and plants from what there is at sea level, some of which we had never seen before and looked to me like something out of the movie Avatar.

The lower pool has water again

This was advertised as an internet cafe. Its out in the middle of nowhere and you rent the entire place. I'm kind of confused about what the true intent was.

As we continued our journey we could see a big waterfall off in the distance and we thought we knew about where we were at, so we pulled up the map and plotted a course past Nauyaca Waterfall, which is one of the public waterfalls that has tours, and then back towards Uvita.

Way off in the distance you can just make out the white vertical line. Those are the waterfalls, which were actually much closer than what appears in this picture.

The road was just wide enough for Dusti

Photo courtesy of https://en.wikipedia.org

Friday 6/2- (Alarm Sound) BEEP BEEP BEEP!!! It’s 3am again UGH!

I am flying back to MN this morning and I have a 3:30am pickup to head to the airport for my 6am flight. Why do I always end up with such early flights!? The only redeeming factor to this one, though, is that I’ll be landing in MN at 6:45 due to the beauty of flying west through a time zone. Ramie had an early morning too since his hotel was on the other side of the cities, about a 45 minute drive, and he would be the one picking me up.

Back home in MN the first stop (after getting coffee) was back at Taryn & Steven’s house to do the re-pack the suitcase routine: unload the dirty laundry and pick up some clean clothes. Well, actually it was more like load up the car full of as much as we could fit in it because today we’d be heading up to mom & dad’s house and we’d be moving some of our storage stuff from Taryn & Steven’s house to my old bedroom. We packed as many bins and boxes of our stuff as we could into Taylor’s little car and then made our way to my parent’s house to unload and spend the long weekend. Today was a combination of a little bit of work and a little bit of socialization with mom and dad. While the intent was to spend the next few days here spending time with the family, Ramie & I also want to clean out my old bedroom of the things that were left behind from my teenage life and be able to move in the things that we want to keep but don’t want to keep in Costa Rica. We did a little bit of each of those things for the next few hours, and then around dinner time it was time to meet up with my uncle Jason, aunt Vicki & cousin Cole for dinner and some drinks at their favorite local hangout. After our very busy trip so far, plus the traveling out to NJ & my early flight back, I was still exhausted and we didn’t plan to stay very long. Well, the plans didn’t work out that way and we ended up having such a good time that we stayed out way later than we had originally intended! It was a great night, though, and I am really glad we got to hang out with them for the evening. 

I even got to sign the Veteran's wall.

Tuesday 6/6 & Wednesday 6/7- With our time in MN winding down to our last few days, we were back to making sure that all of the work was done, our stuff was cleaned up, and our luggage was packed with all of our must-have things that were coming back to Costa Rica with us. The problem we were running into was that we had more stuff than we were able to bring back down with us. We were able to bring back a total (between the 2 of us) of 4 checked suitcases at 50 lbs each, 2 carry on overhead bin items, and 2 under the seat personal items. I think we’re truly becoming pros at this suitcase packing thing, though, because we got each of those 4 checked bags at 49.5 lbs, plus maxed out all of the available carry-on space that we could.

There were some items that were originally on the list to bring down with us that ultimately got left behind, but there’s always next time. Our last trip back to MN had us bringing down a lot of stuff for the house & build, this time we were bringing back all sorts of accessories for the ATV, our house, some clothes and some other random things that we had a tough time finding in CR. Unfortunately I didn’t get to bring back a few of the food items that I was really hoping to (sugar free peanut butter & lentil pasta to name 2 of them) but we did make sure to save room for some spices that I haven’t been able to find down there, and Ramie brought back enough candy to last him a little while.

While we’re on the topic, and as a side note, if anyone wants to come visit us in CR, can we go online shopping and ask you to bring a suitcase full of stuff for us? Well, truthfully, it would probably only be a few items, but we could probably fill a whole suitcase if you were truly willing 😉

After the suitcases were packed to their maximums and everything was protected as well as we could, it was time to pack away everything else. All of the winter clothes we’ve been wearing, all of the items that were being left behind because there was no more room in the suitcases, and the last few bins of stuff that Taryn & Steven would continue to store for us, had to be put away in anticipation of them finishing their basement. We did a pretty good job of cleaning out our corner, but we filled up a couple of their other closets in the house instead (at Taryn’s request).

Not bad, not bad at all!

Wednesday evening after everything was put away and there was no more work to do Taryn, Steven, Ramie & I were sitting around relaxing, bonding, and having a couple of drinks, and the conversation ended up on the topic of our currently nameless ATV. I feel like I’m kind of getting desperate for help on coming up with a name because Ramie & I just can’t get on the same wavelength when it comes to this.

We started throwing things out there and getting on google to find alternatives. Since it’s a Wolverine we googled what are some nicknames for a wolverine and found that they are sometimes called Nasty Cat or Skunk Bear and these 2 names ended up in the running. We also searched for alternate names for Wolverine the superhero, names of different Transformers, and just throwing out random things that could be ATV related, scout, mudder, muddy, crawler, noo, none of these will do…. At some point someone threw out the word dusty and that ended up being the one that stuck for both Ramie and me. Now we just had to decide on the spelling for it. Apparently another important decision is whether it is a boy or a girl. All of Ramie’s past vehicles have been boy names and this one could really go either way. Ramie thought about it for a while and decided that it's a girl (and honestly it really didn't matter to me).

Our ATV was officially named, she will now be known as Dusti.

Thursday 6/8- Today is our last full day in the USA for quite a while. For most of our trip we had been talking about how best to get Taylor's car back to her and how we are going to get to the airport. As it turns out, Taylor was having a garage sale this weekend during the city-wide garage sale and we decided that we’d hang out with her at the sale for the day (plus we had a few items that we wanted her to try to sell for us), and then when Dylan got off work, we would all go out for dinner, and he & Taylor would drop us off at the hotel we’d be staying at tonight. 

The weather was finally to our temperature standards, and it ended up being a beautiful day to sit outside and enjoy it. Unfortunately, there weren’t a lot of customers out and about today, but we sure enjoyed our day together regardless. 

Who'd have thought- I actually got some sun in MN while sitting out at the garage sale!

When Dylan got home from work we moved all of our suitcases from Taylor’s car into his truck and made our way to the other end of the cities to near the airport. The first stop was our hotel where they waited for us to go check in and drop our bags off in our room, and then it was time to head out for one more dinner in the US. We spent the next couple of hours talking and laughing, but sadly, we couldn’t hang out all night and it soon became time to say our goodbyes, as we have to be at the airport at 4am. They dropped us off back at the hotel and some tears were shed while saying goodbye. You can tell Ramie and Taylor have a special bond.

Friday 6/9- (Alarm Sound) BEEP BEEP BEEP!!! It’s 3am! UGH –that dang 3am alarm clock just never goes away, it kind of feels like Groundhog Day!

Today would be another long travel day, the first flight out of Minneapolis was at 6am, and it was actually on time (we have been really lucky this whole trip! Maybe our travel luck is changing for the better). 

Well, not so fast. We got stuck on the tarmac in Miami due to what appeared to be a different jet going the “wrong way” down a one-way taxiway. Once all of that was cleared and we got off the plane we only had a short time to get to our connection. Fortunately, we were only a few gates down from where we had to be. Just as we were walking up to the gate they started boarding. That gave me just enough time for a quick bathroom break and then hopped on the next leg of our trip.

We landed in San Jose at about 1:15. Depending on the number of other flights landing at the same time, the line to get through immigration can sometimes take quite a long time, but luckily for us, now that our residency is complete, we get to use one of our new perks! We got to go through the nationals’ line, which is very often much shorter than the one that the tourists have to go through. I’m sure there were plenty of people looking at us wondering what these 2 Gringos were doing in this line!  We were shocked at how quickly we made it through immigration.  We had our luggage, didn’t get “pulled over” at customs for anything suspicious in our bags, and met our driver by about 2:00.

With the early flight and tight turn-around time in Miami, we hadn’t eaten anything but some airplane snacks at all today, so when Ramie reached out to our driver to tell him we had landed, he had also made the request that we stop somewhere to grab some food. We truly didn’t want to make this day any longer than it had to be, so when he offered a cute restaurant that he knew, we told him we’d rather just hit the Burger King drive through across the highway from the airport and eat on the road. He was ok with that, so that’s exactly what we did. We made it back to our house in Uvita at about 5:30, thankful that this travel day was only about 15.5 hours, compared to the 22 hours it took for us to get to MN 3 weeks ago.

Back at home we didn’t have any quick or easy dinner options and didn’t particularly feel like eating out again, so we opted to just have popcorn for dinner, took out just a few things from our carry-on bags that needed to be put away, and were in bed by 7:30. Yes, our very own bed, there is nothing like it! Everything else could wait for tomorrow! We were exhausted after 3 weeks of non-stop running around, moving from house to house & living out of a suitcase while we were back in MN, but the trip to the homeland was worth it!

Until next time USA…  

Pura Vida

Friday 5/26- Welcome back for part 2 to our MN adventure. Ramie will start the blog today for you today. As a refresher, he & Taylor are currently up-north visiting his mom.

I woke up at 5am, grabbed a cup of coffee (mom must have been up earlier and started it) and sat quietly in the dark kitchen until she decided to get out of bed around 6. We chatted until about 8am when I decided that it was time to get going on the to-do list. I had about 10 things to try to get done before the rest of the family started arriving later in the afternoon or early evening. After Taylor woke up she tagged along, helping out where she could. Today also involved a couple trips to town to look for parts and pieces that I would need to finish the projects on my list. Taylor was a good co-pilot for these little trips too. One by one I was able to check the chores off the list, the chores ranged from simple things such as tightening screws, to more complicated things like opening up and cleaning the A/C unit. My day was filling up and going by very quickly!

Ok, Dana’s back. Today around mid-day it was time for Nicole & Hieu to bring me back to Taryn & Steven’s house because the plan was that once Will was done with school we could get on the road and head up North. The 5 of us adults all either had the day, or at least the afternoon, off work so we had a nice little get-together in Taryn & Steven’s front yard where they got to meet Luca for the first time. After about an hour Nicole, Hieu & Luca headed home and I had to go switch out my dirty laundry for some clean clothes, re-pack my bag, and get ready to spend a couple nights at Ramie’s mom’s house. The 5 of us headed up north and made it just in time for dinner. After dinner, Ramie’s other sister Tawnya, her husband Marty and their daughter Morgan showed up at the house. We didn't talk long since it was getting late, Tawnya & Marty headed down to their cabin and I think the rest of us went to bed shortly after they left. Tomorrow we have a busy day planned.

Saturday 5/27- We started our morning really the only way we know how- with coffee! As Ramie, his mom & I sat on the porch in the freezing cold, wrapped in blankets & wearing multiple pairs of socks or slippers, one by one everyone else woke up, and as they did, they would join us on the porch to chat and continue to catch up. Eventually Tracy (Ramie’s oldest brother) came over and asked if the guys were ready to get to work. Since everyone was here this weekend, Ramie and Steven were recruited to help Marty put in a dock at their cabin. It was only one section, but the river was very mucky and this might be a bit of a challenge for the guys. This could be very interesting to watch, but I had a work meeting this morning (I know, on a Saturday!? And while I’m in the US?! Yeah, they really needed me for an “emergency” meeting.) I guess I’ll go to the river when I'm done.

Hi everyone, Ramie here again. Last night when everyone was sitting around chatting, part of the discussion centered around how we were going to put the dock in. As mentioned, it's one section that is about 20 feet long. We decided that the easiest way to do this would be to use the tractor that had a bucket and forks. The rest of the plan would be figured out on the fly. When it was time to head to the cabin, Tracy drove the tractor, Taryn rode along with him to watch the entertainment, and I took the 4-wheeler with Morgan. When we got to the river, Marty and Ramie's other brother Troy were already there getting the dock ready, getting the legs put together and positioning them where they thought it would work best. Unfortunately for us, this was not a roll-in type dock. That would have been too easy! Once we had the dock ready to go, we decided that we would pick it up with the tractor and drive it straight in. 

Tracy on tractor duty

We would try to get the tractor as close as we could to the edge of the river without sinking the front of it. The plan actually worked! Except--- we had to take it back out and reposition a couple legs because the swamp grass just would not cooperate with us. Once the dock was set, there were some minor adjustments that had to be made and we had to add some extra supports.

At that point, Marty decided to just jump in the mucky river without waders on to do the work. Steven was another volunteer who jumped in, but he was wearing his waders. While the guys were working on the dock, Tawnya recruited Dana (whose meeting ended up getting cancelled at the very last minute) to go to town to buy a new bed & mattress for the cabin. Those 2 finally showed up to the dock-show when we were almost done. Wouldn’t you know it, the whole immediate family was there to enjoy the beautiful day by the river.

Once the dock was done the focus was turned to the bed and getting it set up in the cabin (which is more like a tiny house), but first, all of us guys deserve a beer! We put together the IKEA style bed frame and maneuvered it into the cabin. The bed didn't take too long and once done Tracy asked who wanted moonshine. He had some homemade (not made by him) root beer and peach flavored moonshine that he wanted to share. Those were passed around a few times and appeared to be a hit. We could all hear laughter coming through the woods since Morgan and Will decided to go play on the 4 Wheeler, and explore. I looked out towards the river and saw mom was sitting in a lawn chair by the rivers edge, sipping a beer, watching all of us hooligans. As far as the dock project went, Marty wanted to start building a small deck sitting area on land at the front of the dock, so a couple of us helped work on that while everyone else supervised, sat around, or jumped in the kayaks to enjoy paddling on the river.

Taryn and Will getting ready to explore the river

Morgan heading out to explore the river with Taryn

Eventually we ran out of wood for the deck, but we all sat around and talked the rest of the afternoon until about dinner time. 

Catching up with family and enjoying a beautiful MN day

I guess we can all sit here and relax!

Cousin time with Shadow

We were all pretty exhausted from the fun day we had hanging out and spending time together, eventually we went to bed around 10:30.

Sunday 5/28- There was no plan or agenda today because everyone would be saying goodbye and heading back home. We had a nice morning just hanging out until everyone started going their separate ways. It was a great couple of days spent with Ramie’s family.

We left around noon to bring Taylor back to her house. After we dropped her off but before we went back to Taryn and Stevens we decided that since we wouldn’t be too far away, we wanted to drive through our old neighborhood. We figured we’d make a quick drive through to see how much it has changed in the last 2 years and to see if anyone was out celebrating the weekend. While passing by our old house we noticed Jim and Debbie, our across the street neighbors, were out on their deck grilling. Perfect, just in time for early supper! haha We decided to surprise them so we snuck around the opposite side of their house and just walked up onto the deck. Boy were they surprised to see us!!! We spent a few hours talking and reminiscing, we answered all of their burning questions about life in Costa Rica and everything that's been happening with us, and they told us about everything that has been going on with them and the old hood. We really didn't plan on spending that long at Jim and Debbie's but we are glad that they were home and we got to catch up with them. Too bad none of the other neighbors were around this afternoon! Now that social hour(s) was over it was time to head back to Taryn and Steven’s for the night. 

Sorry, not sorry, we interrupted your dinner!

At some point today we also realized that today marks 2 years since we left MN to move to Costa Rica. What a coincidence to pick today to go back to the old home! Happy two years to us!

Monday 5/29- Happy Memorial Day

While it was great having a paid day off work without having to use vacation time, we did keep the day pretty low key. We started at Taryn & Steven’s house, Ramie helped them with a couple more small projects in the morning, and then it was back to Nicole & Hieu’s for the afternoon and overnight. Tomorrow morning I have a doctor’s appointment at the VA and their house is closer, so it only made sense that we started from here. Boy, this moving houses every couple of days is getting exhausting, not to mention, living out of a suitcase is kind of a pain in the butt! In the end, though, it’s all worth it to get to spend time with the families!

Tuesday 5/30- Another bright and early morning, on the road before 7am to get to the VA by 8. In order to keep me active in the system, my doctor told me several months ago that she wanted me to come in for a routine exam. She knows that I live in Costa Rica and asked me to make sure I got an appointment whenever I was back visiting in MN, so that’s what today was about. Of course, any of you who know how the VA works knows that things don’t move fast, so I had to be there at 8 to do the blood draw for my labs, then I met with the doctor at 9, and when that was all done, I had to stop at the onsite pharmacy to pick up my prescription refills. By the time all was said and done it was after 10:00. 

We had a couple of hours to kill and we had some more things for the house that we had to buy, so that was next on our agenda. As it got close to lunch time we headed back to the college where Ramie used to work so he could say hi to his old co-workers. It seemed like everyone we ran into was thrilled to see him. Since school was out for the summer there were very few people around other than employees, and as we were walking down the hallway it seemed like everyone we saw was excited to say hi and chat with Ramie. We spent about an hour chit chatting with the guys in Ramie’s old department (some of whom I knew) and reminisced and listened to stories about when they worked together and heard updates of how things were going now.

Ramie and Carl (Ramie’s best friend who just happened to take over his job when we left) organized a late lunch get together with some of their other close friends and former co-workers who could make it. We went to a little bar that they used to go to for lunch where Ramie could fulfill a promise that he’d have Bloody Mary’s with the old colleagues when he was back in MN. We spent the next few hours together laughing, telling stories, and I learned a whole lot more about everything that happened at work that Ramie never told me about (it was probably a good thing that he had a friend in HR, who just happened to be out with us today!! hahahaha) When it was time to leave you could tell that everyone had had a great time but they were all sad that their time together was coming to an end. There was lots of talk about some of them coming down to visit us, and we assured them that our doors are open whenever they make the venture this far south!

Afterwards, it was back to Nicole & Hieu’s because tomorrow morning we had to drive back into the cities.

Wednesday 5/31- Several months ago when we decided on the dates we’d be visiting MN and booked our flights home, I let my work know that I’d be back in MN for a few weeks. They quickly decided that while I was back in the US they would plan an in-person team building day for our whole team and fly me out to NJ to be part of it and meet everyone in person. They were very accommodating with my schedule and when all was said and done, it turned out that I’d fly to NJ on Wednesday afternoon, we’d have the event on Thursday, and I’d fly back to MN on Friday morning. A very quick trip indeed, but many of my coworkers were thrilled that they’d finally get to meet me in person, even if just for 1 day.

My flight wasn’t until about 1:30, but Ramie had plans today that he wanted to get started on, so he dropped me off at the airport around 10:30. Since I was there so early, I connected to the hot spot on my phone and actually got a little bit of work done while I was waiting in the airport! The flight went very smoothly and I made it to NJ with no problems at all. (P.S. Domestic travel is SOOO much quicker and easier than international travel, no customs and immigration, no extra long lines to wait in, just off the plane and out the door!)

Instead of staying in a hotel the 2 nights that I’d be here, my coworker who quickly became a friend despite only ever meeting each other online, Nikki offered (no, pretty much insisted or demanded) that I stay at her house while I was in NJ. Another co-worker/friend, Ali, who lived a few hours away and too far to drive in for just the day of the meeting, would be staying at Nikki’s house as well and this would give us extra time to bond together. Nikki also insisted that she would pick me up from the airport today. As soon as the plane touched down and I was able to turn airplane mode “off” I had a text message from Nikki saying that she was there and waiting in the cellphone lot. I let her know when we were deplaning and that I’d meet her by the baggage claim doors soon. She had given me a description of her car, and when I got out the door I spotted it without any problems. I may have inadvertently snuck up from behind because I think I startled her when I opened the door, she screamed a little bit and woke up her 4 year old daughter who was sleeping in the back seat. Here we were, meeting in person for the first time. After a hug (and a poke from Nikki because she needed to confirm I was “real”) we were on the way to her house. I got the highway tour from the Philadelphia airport to her house where I met her husband and other less than 1 year old daughter. We hung out at the house for the evening, had a couple of very strong margaritas made by her husband, and then Ali arrived at around 9:00. We spent about another hour or 2 hanging out some more before we were off to bed because tomorrow we had our team event.

(Ramie) Hi all, well since Dana had work stuff to do, I had a couple of free days to spend one-on-one with Taylor and she had already decided how she wanted to spend that time together. A few months ago, Taylor and Dylan bought an old school bus that they want to convert into a RV; she asked me to help with some of the harder/technical stuff that neither of them were comfortable or knew how to do.

The happy couple's new ride

When I showed up today she was so excited to show me the bus and talk about their plans. She started by walking me around and through everything that the both of them have done already and explained what she wanted us to work on next. I was pretty impressed that Taylor and Dylan had already pretty much gutted the entire inside of the bus themselves. 

Step 1: Remove the seats

Then: Remove the floor

Since I was staying in Stillwater, where I used to live and spend much of my time, I knew exactly what I was getting for dinner and I was super excited for it! Pizza Man for pizza (my favorite pizza place ever) and Lift Bridge Brewery (our favorite brewery and my 2nd favorite place in Stillwater) to get a beer! I got my beer & pizza to-go and went back to the hotel room turned on the TV, found a movie and stuffed myself until I couldn't eat anymore. It was totally worth every bite and I finished the whole pizza! 

I also have to re-hydrate for my busy day tomorrow

Thursday 6/1- Day #2 of the bus project. The plan for this morning was to meet at Perkins for breakfast at 10am to fuel ourselves for the work we’d do today. Since I got the entire ceiling removed yesterday, the first project today was to remove the three small under-seat heaters. First, I had to determine how the coolant lines were ran through the bus and how to eliminate them, after I figured out the best approach, one by one the heaters came out, along with all the long hoses that went along with them. I secured and properly routed the sections of the hoses that had to remain in the engine bay and then that project was checked off the list. The next project on Taylor’s list was to eliminate all the electrical and wiring that would no longer be needed, things like door buzzers, the handicap lift, and the stop sign (which is illegal to use if you aren’t actually working as a bus). The first step was to go through all of the switches and figure out which switches went to what component. After that part was figured out we were able to start removing all of that unnecessary wire.

Separating the wires to remove the ones no longer needed.

Almost completely gutted and ready to design the layout.

Yesterday she told me that I was invited for dinner at their house so I knew what my plans were for tonight. I went back to the hotel, quickly showered, and then drove to her house. She lives with her boyfriend Dylan and his family and they all take turns cooking meals, that’s why tonight was Taylor’s turn. The menu is fried rice and wontons. 

As she was busy cooking, I talked with Dylan and his parents and played with Kota (Taylors dog who used to live with us and I’ve really missed). 

Kota was so excited to see me again!

We all enjoyed a delicious meal together and I discovered that Taylor is really a fantastic cook, although I’m not sure who taught her to cook (I know for sure it wasn’t me)!

We spent the next couple of hours all chatting some more but it was getting late and it was time to say my goodbyes and head back to the hotel, I had to get up pretty early tomorrow to pick up Dana from the airport.

Team Building Day:

You know that nervous feeling that you get when you’re the new kid in the class? Well I only had that a little bit. While it was my first time meeting the other 24 people in my team in-person, I have known many of these people for about a year and have had many video chats with them throughout that time. Plus, the other thing that made it not so bad was that I’m not the only one who has never met anyone else in-person, there are actually a few of us!! They had a built-in social hour/breakfast for the first hour of the meeting, before the official “presentation” part started, so I made sure to make my way around the room to say hi to everyone. It turns out, that wasn’t hard, because everyone made it a point to come say hi to me (and I think I’ll mention here that apparently this group of people are all a bunch of huggers! I’m not the type of person to initiate a hug, but ok, I’ll humor them—I’ve never hugged so many people I’m only meeting for the first time on the same day!). We had our social hour, spent the next 7 or so hours with one of those trained team building coaches, including a break for an on-site lunch.

When the official part of the day was done, many of us made our way to a nearby restaurant where the bosses had planned a happy hour gathering, ate together and imbibed in a few beverages together if you were into that sort of thing. After another couple of hours here, we were all invited back to the boss’ house for coffee and dessert. At this point many of the people bowed out, but a group of 5 of us “girls” went and spent about an hour with the boss and his wife, shared some more stories, and had a good time together. I had a very early morning tomorrow that would sneak up on me too quickly, so we didn’t stay late, but I do feel that I definitely made the most that I could out of this short trip to meet everyone in-person, as it may be a while before I make my way back to NJ to see them again. 

Nikki (who insisted I stay at her house) & me

The crew

The Official Casa Costa Breeze end of May rainfall total was 23.55 inches.

(In case you’re wondering, our lovely house watchers kept track of the rain for us, since some heavy rains started right after we left).

Pura Vida!

Thursday 5/18- (Alarm Sound) BEEP BEEP BEEP!!! It's 3am! UGH, that was a short sleep and not a very restful one either. Neither of us ever sleep well when we know we have to get up at a certain time so we were both tossing and turning, checking the clock all night long. We didn’t want to oversleep and I always worry about sleeping through my alarm (which has NEVER happened to me) and now we are going to be exhausted all day long. We rolled out of bed and made sure to pull the covers all the way up. We gotta keep the bugs out while we are gone! Although, really, we know that if the bugs want to get into the bed, making it this morning will not keep them out. We brushed our teeth, closed and locked all the windows, and made sure we had everything ready & waiting by the door, then sat and waited until our ride showed up. 

When he showed up he looked just as sleepy as us. Geoff pulled in the driveway a few minutes before 4am and helped us load our 2 suitcases (filled like Russian dolls with all of our other suitcases) into the truck and we pulled out of our gate at 4am.

He was kind enough to be our first driver of the day and his job was to bring us to Quepos where we were meeting our shuttle driver at 5:30am. For this trip we hired a company who will drive us the rest of the way from Quepos to the airport in San Jose. 

You may be wondering why we hired a shuttle this time instead of driving ourselves. We will be in the US for 3 weeks, and although we could have driven ourselves and parked, the cost of parking at the airport is $35/day and the mall long term parking is $11/day. Don’t forget to add in the $100 tank of gas to get us up there and back and the tolls that add up to about $15-20. After you do the math, its a no-brainer to hire the $300 round trip shuttle where they drop off and pick up at the airport and you don’t have the headache of driving yourself. Sit back, relax, enjoy the ride (well, I always do this, but now Ramie can too!) Easy peasy! 

We made good time on the drive between Uvita and Quepos and arrived earlier than expected, which gave the three of us a chance to chat as we waited for the shuttle driver. 5:30 came and the shuttle driver was right on time, we transferred our bags to his van, thanked Geoff and said see ‘ya later. The ride in the shuttle van was very quiet and I think we both may have dozed off a little bit for part of it. Just before we made it to the toll road the driver stopped for a bathroom break and stretch. It was less than 5 minutes but perked us up a little bit so we weren’t half sleeping when we arrived at the airport. We made it to the airport by about 9:30am, quickly checked in and made it through security, luckily the airport wasn’t as chaotic as it can sometimes be. Once we made it through the security checkpoint the first thing we needed to do was find a coffee shop! After we found our coffee and our gate we played the airport waiting game, you know, scrolling on your phone and people watching. 

The flight was scheduled for around 2pm (yes, we were at the airport quite early, this was at the recommendation of the shuttle company because traffic can sometimes be questionable & they want to ensure you don’t miss your flight) and was actually on time (which is a rarity for us). Time to get on for leg #1.

We landed in Miami at about 7pm (that sounds super long, but there is a 2 hour time change). Having our Global Entry pass made going through US immigration super quick, and customs went just as fast since we got to bypass the immigration lines and get to the front. We were on our next plane again at 9pm and finally landed in Minneapolis at about midnight.  Unfortunately neither of us slept well on the plane. As we were waiting for our bags, Ramie’s sister Taryn had texted us to let us know that she was waiting, a few minutes later we had our bags and headed out the doors to look for her. Ramie had forgotten what color and type of car she drove (what kind of car guy is that!?) but fortunately I had a vague recollection of a white Kia, and there weren’t too many cars waiting out there at this time of night. I saw a car that I think might have been hers and we started walking toward it. She must have been watching very closely because suddenly we heard her voice yell “WELCOME HOME”! We were all very excited to see each other since it had been nearly a year since they came to visit us in Costa Rica! We didn't talk a whole lot on the way to her house because we were exhausted and it was the middle of the night, but there will be time for all of that talking later. At this point it had been about 22 hours since that BEEP BEEP BEEP and we were finally back in bed at about 2am MN time. 

https://kids.nationalgeographic.com/geography/states/article/minnesota

Friday 5/19- Rise and shine, it’s time to make the most of the USA! We both woke up around 7am and put on the warmest clothes that we had with us before we started digging through all of our bins of stuff that we had stored here. Taryn and Steven both had today off and were already up and greeted us right away. Of course, the first thing I think they noticed was our choice of clothing and started laughing at us. I'm pretty sure they were both in shorts and a T-shirt, we were in jeans & a hoodie. The highs recently were only in the 60’s and that truly feels cold to us now. We chatted for a little while as we recharged ourselves with coffee....

but soon it was time to get started with our work. They knew we had a busy day ahead of us, so they let us do our thing. For the last couple of weeks we had been ordering stuff online that we wanted to bring back to Costa Rica so we had lots of Amazon boxes to go through and lots more things that we would need to shop for. We spent the majority of the morning in the freezing cold basement looking through all of the boxes, and boy there are a lot of them!  

Yes, that is all of our stuff in this picture. Well, some of it is Taylor's too.

After we finished looking through all of the boxes of new things (it kind of felt like Christmas), we also wanted to go through all of the bins that they have been so kind to store for us for the last 2 years. We knew there were things stored here that we no longer wanted or needed and our goal was to downsize our belongings some more. After a couple of hours of working and freezing in the basement we decided to take a break from this mess and go shopping. We needed some food and other things from Target. I really do miss shopping at Target!!

We walked into Target and the first stop was to get some coffee (a sugary, candy-like concoction, not coffee like we’re used to anymore) from Starbucks. Once we had our dessert in hand we grabbed a cart and started walking the aisles. It didn't take long before we started to feel overwhelmed. Too many things, so many choices, too much selection, so many people, just too much over stimulation from every direction! What is wrong with us, we love shopping at Target!? We are pretty sure we used to pay at least a couple of Target employee’s wages when we lived in MN because we shopped there so much. Now we feel like we can't handle this anymore! It's hard to explain, but I guess living in a place where you have a limited selection and may only have two options, “cheap” and “cheaper” (quality, not price) changes how you shop for things. Here, there are way too many things to choose from, I don't know which one to pick! We are overwhelmed & overstimulated by all of this! Ok, maybe we will skip that item for now and move to the next one on the list. Nope, that didn't really work either. One of the items that I wanted to look for was a new bathing suit- I literally walked into the section, picked up a couple of things from a rack, looked around at all of the options, put the things back, and walked away. I just couldn’t do this right now!! We spent less than an hour in Target and we left with very few items checked off of our list because we could not handle the options and didn't want to waste more time trying to figure out what we’re doing.

I guess we will go back home and continue with our stuff there. UGH this basement is so cold!

This afternoon when Will (our nephew) came home from school it was the first time he saw us since we’ve been back and was super excited (I did hear him peeking into our room this morning before he left for school, but we just weren’t ready to get out of bed yet). We decided that was enough of going through the bins in the cold basement and it was time to relax and catch up with the family. This afternoon Taylor & Dylan even came up to see us, so of course we had to put the work aside and enjoy being with people we hadn’t seen in so long! (Taylor would be letting us borrow her car while we were home, so that was part of the reason she came to see us, but of course, we really wanted to spend time together too!!) Steven smoked some meat for dinner (one of our requests while we were home was smoked food) and we enjoyed a delicious meal together and had some good laughs! Eventually Taylor and Dylan left and we all wound down for the evening. It was a busy day and we were still tired from traveling so we went to bed fairly early. 

Taylor's tribute to Grimace (the classic car we had to sell)

Saturday 5/20- Alright, day two, let's try this shopping thing again! Steven & Will had a cub scout event to go to and would be gone most the day so we didn’t feel so bad buckling down and getting some work done. Ramie & I started this morning with a trip to Walmart, this time to look for some of the things that we didn’t check off the list yesterday at Target. We were fairly successful this time with the slightly shorter list, and although we still felt overwhelmed with the selection of everything, we left with a lot of the things we needed. Walmart in the US is so very different from Walmart in CR!! We hit a couple more stores before Ramie had to get me back to the house; Taryn had booked pedicures for us today! On our way back to the house we decided that we’d make the most of the morning by picking up Taryn, then Ramie would drop the 2 of us for our appointment, and then he’d keep running errands. He needed to look for some auto parts and I didn’t particularly feel like going with him on that mission. 

Time for a Dana side-story. As Taryn and I were relaxing, chatting, and getting our feet pampered, someone who I thought looked very familiar walked in and was seated in the chair right next to me. Wouldn’t you know it, it was Aimee, a girl who was part of my 2005 study-abroad in England group. I hadn’t seen her since college!! We took the opportunity to get the cliffs-notes version of life since college and catch up just a little bit before we were finished with our pedicures. Wow, what a blast from the past!!

Ramie wasn't gone long and wasn’t able to find what he needed so he came back to the nail shop and waited until we were ready to be picked up. Once Taryn & I were finished it was time to go to Menards. We still needed to find some things to bring back for our house and Taryn had a shopping list of things she needed too, so this worked out well. Yesterday Taryn mentioned to Ramie she had a to-do list for him and one of the chores on the list was to install a screen door to the garage. Of course, we all know that Ramie likes projects so this was no problem at all, besides we try to do what we can to help them out for everything they’ve done for us.

While walking around Menards I heard a voice say “Dana?” I turned around, and wouldn’t you know it, Anna, a girl I went to high school with, was standing in the aisle we were shopping in. I haven’t seen Anna since probably graduation!! A 2nd blast from the past on the same morning! We spent a few minutes talking in the aisle before continuing on with our shopping.

With all of our finds in hand, we headed back to the house. Ramie installed the screen door while we waited for Will & Steven to get back from cub scouts. This afternoon we decided to check out one of the local breweries and a new burrito place for dinner. We sat on a patio, had a couple of adult beverages, ate some delish Mexican food, and made an evening of it. I think a good time was had by all 😊

I had to take a pic of this sign in the brewery because of an inside joke: Tracy, this is for you!

Sunday 5/21- When you’re us, the work just never seems to end! We have more stuff stored at my parent’s house and all of that had to get looked through, sorted to get rid of, bring back with us, or remain in storage, and today’s goal was to go through some of that and to at least gather up the pieces that needed to come back to CR with us. We knew this wouldn’t be a social visit, that would come later, but it was nice to see mom & dad again because it had been a very long time since we last saw them. Of course, we did spend some time socializing, but we also got some work done. By the end of it all we ended up with a full carload of things to bring back with us, some to be brought to CR with us, some to be sold on Taylor’s upcoming garage sale, and some to be gotten rid of. Boy, we still really have a lot of crap stored in MN!! That’s why we’re trying to downsize even more!

Monday 5/22- Well, it’s Monday, that means it’s back to work for me, but I have made it very clear that I will not be putting in my full hourly schedule during this time that we’re back in the US. I spent a couple of hours online right away in the morning to put out any fires, respond to anything that needed responding to, and make sure everything was under control. Once I had but in the obligatory couple of hours, it was time to head to Nicole & Hieu’s house.

So much has changed with their family since the last time we were in MN. They moved into a new home that we’d see in person for the first time, Elodie has changed so much and gotten so much bigger, and let’s not forget, this is the first time that we’ll get to meet our new nephew Luca.

When we got there, Elodie was still at school so it gave us adults time to catch up and for us to meet Luca. When it was time to pick her up, Uncle Ramie surprised her by going with Hieu, but she’d have to wait until they got home to see Auntie Dana.

We spent the next couple of days together, all of us working at our computers a little bit here and there, but getting the most out of our time together.

Decorating animals!

Practicing her shapes

Luca exploring Dana's face!

Luca is laughing because Ramie's head fell off

Oh, I guess not!

Ramie was getting some instruction about driving Hieu's toy

Away he goes! That thing is fast!

Ramie & Elodie spending quality time swinging and talking.

Thursday 5/25- Today it was time for Ramie to move on to the next stop on his whirlwind tour of MN. He and Taylor were going to go up north to visit his mom a day early, work on the to-do list that she had for him, and spend some quality one-on-one time with Taylor.  I’d spend an extra day with Nicole, Hieu
& the kids, and then ride up north with Taryn, Steven & Will on Friday afternoon to meet up with the rest of Ramie’s family.  It was kind of weird being away from Ramie overnight, I can’t even remember the last time we spent a night apart but I’m pretty sure it was pre-COVID (no, I’m not getting all mushy, it’s just an observation).

Ramie side-story time: I left to pick up Taylor bright and early (7am) at her house. Taylor isn't a morning person at all so once I had her, we stopped for coffee-to-go and hit the road. We took back roads up to my moms house and there was no lull in the conversation. We had a very enjoyable drive and so much to talk about and catch up on. I really enjoyed our drive a lot and I think Taylor did just as much! A few hours later we arrived at my moms house, but of course, she was out gallivanting around.

Right away I spotted the To-Do list on the table. I scanned it over and thought about what I wanted to tackle first, but not today. It wasn't long before mom pulled in the driveway. My mom had so many questions about "who, what, & when" for both Taylor and me and the three of us just spent the majority of the day talking. I noticed my brother who lives very close by also pulled into the driveway so I walked over there and chatted with him for awhile to catch up. He was still on the clock so I didn't talk long, we'd catch up more later. That night mom, Taylor & I chatted over dinner and for a little while longer but both Taylor and I were tired (Taylor because she got up so early and me because I'm still trying to catch up on sleep) so we decided to call it a night. Tomorrow I would need to get busy on the list of shame because I want to get as much done before the rest of the family all comes home to visit this weekend. 

Pura Vida!

Wednesday 5/10- Those that have followed our blog since the beginning may remember our house build and how they do things differently here. Our ceiling, both inside and outside, is made of PVC tongue and groove panels. It’s about the thickness of a thick cardboard corrugated box and is constructed similarly (the honeycomb type construction). Ramie has noticed that 2 different sections of our soffit are warping and about ready to fall down. He has taken a quick look from the ladder and saw that the screws holding it up have “popped” which is causing the falling down problem, but what caused the screws to pop? Ramie has a theory that it is because that section of the roof was not insulated and the current heat we’ve been having is causing a major problem. He has determined that he needs to take the PVC ceiling down to investigate more, but the tricky part is that these sections are 15-20’ long and can kink or break very easily if not handled properly. 

Ramie decided that today was a good day to take the upper section down. I'm not sure why, but it seems like we always decide to do hard projects like this when it's stupid hot out. (I feel like we often subconsciously wait for the hottest weeks to do the most physical work, we even did this back in MN. I guess we have bad timing? Who knows!). Ramie did manage to get all of the pieces from the upper section off by himself. Fortunately on the upper section of our roof the overlapped part is very close to the lower roof line and he could just let one end of the PVC rest on the lower roof as he removed the screws farther down the panel. After Ramie had the entire upper section off he confirmed what he thought and saw that there was no insulation in this part of the roof and found that it was incredibly hot between the roof panels and the soffit PVC. He determined that he would need to get some Styrofoam to fill this void to help resolve the problem. Yes, that’s right, Styrofoam. They don't typically use fiberglass insulation like you’re used to here, but instead they use 2-4" Styrofoam. Insulating in general is fairly new to most builders here, and let me tell you they don't understand how to do it or the purpose of it! 

Ramie’s next task was to find some Styrofoam. In general conversation with Loren, Ramie mentioned this project and the need to get the foam. Loren passed that message along to Randall, and Randall called Ramie to tell him he actually had sheets of it from the shipping containers that people send here. (Reminder, Randall works at the shipping company in town that we used to send our pallets of stuff from MN to Costa Rica over a year ago). Randall even offered to deliver it! Oh, and the best part is that it was all nearly free! The only thing that Randall asked for in return was a package of those “good zip-ties with the metal tabs” that he can’t find here in Costa Rica. Randall would have just broken up and thrown away the Styrofoam sheets if we didn't need them. Ramie asked Randall to bring over whatever sheets were in good shape and that he was ready to part with. Once they were delivered Ramie got to work, in the still extra hot weather, up on the hot roof. He managed to get all the Styrofoam installed in the upper section of the roof and even without having the PVC ceiling material put back on, he could already tell it made a difference. The re-installation of the PVC panels was going to have to wait though. The next part of this project would be to tackle the lower soffit portion. For this he decided to reach out to Geoff since all this work would have to be done from ladders. Geoff was on board to help so they set a day and time to do it. 

Here you can see the insulation that Ramie installed on the upper section

Friday 5/12- Geoff showed up to the house at about 9am and brought some extra ladders which would come in handy to help support the long sections of PVC that they were dealing with. They talked over the game plan, Ramie explained how it all comes apart, and then they tore into it. It didn't take long to get the sections of PVC down, remove all the screws, and cut and install the Styrofoam. Then it was time to put the PVC back up. This is where they ran into a problem, though, because there is only a very small area to screw into and most of those areas were broken out when the ceiling “popped” due to the heat. Now they had to get creative and figure out new ways to secure the PVC to the roof. What ended up having to happen is a whole lot of moving around of the brackets & braces that hold these panels up. By the sounds of the words coming out of Ramie & Geoff’s mouths, this was not easy and it wasn’t going very smoothly.

I was inside working this whole time and glad that I was not involved in this project! After what seemed like a very long time it was quiet outside so I suspected they were finished (or just said screw this all and quit), so I poked my head outside to see. Fortunately, I found that they had in fact finished and our ceiling was no longer falling down! That was great news, and we all kept our fingers crossed that this would solve the problem once and for all. I could tell that they were both exhausted, which is completely understandable after working in the heat of the day, plus the extra heat coming down from the roof, climbing up and down the ladders, and the frustration they were experiencing because things just hadn’t gone together well. Since they had finished their project, Ramie helped Geoff pack up his things to go back home. They were both relieved that neither of them had any plans for the rest of the day, they both planned to take it easy after all of the work they just did. The re-installation of the PVC on the upper soffit will wait for another day!

Saturday 5/13- Today I would help Ramie re-install the PVC on the upper portion of the roof. Since he already knew how they did it on the lower portion, I hoped that this would go slightly smoother than his & Geoff’s experience yesterday. Since it’s been so hot out we wanted to get an early start, before the sun came over the trees and really heated up the roof. I haven’t mentioned it yet, but I absolutely hate climbing ladders & being on roofs. I think the last time I voluntarily climbed a ladder onto a roof was when I was 3 or 4 years old and climbed up on the roof when my dad was building the garage. This would be a project that I would not enjoy, but knowing that Ramie needs me to help, I was willing to push myself beyond my comfort zone. I mean, this can’t be worse than that jungle hike we did at Nick’s property a couple months ago, right!?

Due to the way roofs are made here, it was very important to only step on the places that the beams run and not just anywhere in the middle of the roof panel. Ramie gave me instructions on where to step and where not to, and made sure to remind me that if I stepped in the middle of these roof panels, there is a very good possibility that I would damage the panel and we would probably have to replace it.  He didn't say it out loud, but I'm pretty sure if I step in the wrong place, I might completely fall through the roof. The first step was to climb up the ladder and get onto the roof. Ladders are fine until I’m at the point where the top of the ladder is at my chest height. After that I get shaky because I feel like I don’t have anything to hold on to. I made my way up to the very top of the ladder and then carefully crawled onto the roof, found a “safe” place on the beams, and just sat there until Ramie climbed up with the tools. Now, I had to stand up and take a few steps, each on a beam, to get to the section of the roof we’d be working on. The pitch of the roof is not very steep, so this should be like walking on a slight hill, no problem, right? WRONG!!! Since I was up on a roof I got super shaky. If you were to put the same spots that I had to step on the ground I could do it so easily, but being up on the roof makes me feel like I’ve never stood on my feet before (I really feel like Bambi at the beginning of the movie!)

With Ramie literally holding my hand as I made the big steps between the roof beams, we made it to the place where we’d be working. Fortunately other than getting to & from the ladder to the place we’d be working, I’d be doing the rest of the work from a sitting position which made me much more comfortable with the project. We worked on the first section of roof for about an hour & a half, I could scoot on my butt & do the “crab walk” or crawl to the places I had to move to. Fortunately, I didn’t have to go far and Ramie did much of the back and forth needed to attach each piece of PVC. When we were finished with this first section we decided to take a short 10 minute break to go to the bathroom & get some water. Unfortunately this meant that I would have to climb down from the roof, which also means that I have to go back up and will have to do the Bambi dance all over again a couple more times. 

First section done (left side) Now we just have to adjust the foam and install the right side

Even though we were hot and sweaty, we didn’t take a long break because we knew it was only going to get hotter and we wanted to get done with this project sooner rather than later. Ramie decided to change his shirt because the first one was so saturated that it looked like jumped in the pool with it on. When telling this story to other people they often ask why he bothered putting a shirt on anyway. Well, the truth is, because it soaks up the sweat so he isn’t dripping all over. Yes, it was that hot! 

Once we were back on the roof it was easy to tell that it wouldn’t be long before the intense heat and sun would make us feel like we were being cooked. Fortunately, there is a slight overhang that we’d be working under to keep the sun off us for a little while longer, but it wouldn’t last long as the sun continued to rise and eliminate that little bit of shade. We managed to do the second section in about an hour, apparently what I learned by doing the first section helped our ability to get the second section done a little quicker. By the time we finished and were climbing back down, the roof was so hot that you burned your skin if you touched it too long. Unfortunately, when we came back up on the roof the 2nd time I forgot my gloves on the ground which made it tough to crawl, but fortunately I found some leaves that had fallen onto the roof and used those to protect my hands from the heat. Even though it was so hot, we were smart enough to wear long pants, so I didn’t have to worry about burning my knees while I was crawling. We were completely done with this project & showered before 10:00. Now we would get to enjoy the rest of the day- probably just relaxing (and continuing to work on the blog, which, by the way, I was working on before we started the project this morning too!)

Sunday 5/14- The Beehive is a restaurant that is walking distance from our house, and on most Sundays (especially during high season) you can easily hear their live music playing from our house. Today they were having live music from 12-5pm and advertised that they would have food and drink specials. We reached out to Geoff and Tracy as well as Ray and Wesley earlier this week to see if the 4 of them wanted to join us to hang out, listen to some music, and have some food & beverages. It would give Ray and Wesley (who have only lived in Costa Rica for about 5 months) a chance to meet a new couple and I figured we all would get along great anyways so why not introduce them. They had 2 different gigs scheduled for the afternoon. We really only wanted to see the 2nd one, but when I texted the restaurant about reservations they said that it was likely to fill up fast and it was better to be their early, so we got there at noon when this whole thing started. It turns out that the first performer was a very eccentric guy that sang and played bongos to a very odd techno/rave type vibe. 

This was not really our cup of tea, but it gave us a chance to get some drinks, order some food, and socialize before the 2nd group came on. All the girls sat at one end of the table and the guys at the other, but of course we were all at one big table & were still close enough that we could all talk and laugh together. We talked, laughed a lot, ate some good BBQ & Jerk food, and drank. Ramie is pretty sure that Geoff may have peed a little from laughing so hard at the Bongo guy’s singing and dancing.

Dana, Tracy & Wesley - looks like they're having a good time

We had a great time, but to be honest, the service was terrible. Once we ordered and had our food, the waiter would take our drink orders but never bring us drinks. We would see him serving different tables or in a different section of the restaurant helping other people, but must have forgotten about us. The guys finally had enough and just went up to the bar to order drinks. It got the job done, but at the end of the evening when it was time to pay our bills, it appeared that they charged us for several of those drinks that were ordered with the waiter but never delivered. This probably won’t be a regular hang-out of ours, unless, of course, Mojo Daddy plays here again 😉

Monday 5/15- Katie and Adam (without the girls) just arrived back in Costa Rica for the week to do some work on their house. Fortunately Ramie is right next door and was available to help them with some of their projects. One of the projects they previously asked Ramie to coordinate is the painting of a mural on a large white wall behind their pool. Ramie found a guy who does great work and set it up with him to work on this mural while Katie & Adam were here. Today he would start on the project. Today Ramie’s day started out doing his Alturas gig in the morning and then spent the majority of the rest of the day over there helping with the various projects including working together to relocate some plants, install some electrical things, and take care of some other odds and ends that were on the to-do list.

Tuesday 5/16- Today is day number two of Ramie helping Katie and Adam with more house projects. They spent the morning checking off many of the remaining things on the list, while Freddie the mural painter was working on the wall. It was decided that it would be fun to go for a ride in the ATV (still no name) up to our favorite coffee plantation. They wanted to purchase small bags of coffee as gifts for the future guests that rent their house, plus they just really wanted the opportunity to go for a ride. We had a fun drive up to the plantation and once there Rita, Emilo and Deiner were excited to see us and say hello. It only took about 2 minutes and the famous question was asked… Do you want some moonshine and Baileys? None of us could pass that up and then, as a second thought, they offered a freshly brewed cup of coffee to enjoy while we waited for Deiner to package up the small bags of coffee for Katie and Adam. 

Emilo, just got the beans out of the roaster and is stirring them to cool them off. The packages of coffee are this fresh!

Wednesday 5/17- Freddie is back at Katie and Adam's house to finalize the mural painting, but it's also packing day! What? You may be wondering why we are packing! Tomorrow we head home to Minnesota to visit our family and hopefully see some of our friends we haven’t seen in a long time. It's been a year and a half since we have stepped foot in the USA and we are both pretty excited! As you can imagine, we don't have a lot to pack, mostly gifts for the family (things like coffee and local foods) and things that we originally thought we wanted here when we moved but quickly realized we didn’t want here at all. Ramie decided to bring back almost all of his cotton T-shirts except for the few he uses for work shirts. Cotton holds up better than the quick dry shirts but cotton shirts are just too hot to wear on a regular basis. Also, since they don't get worn a lot, most of them just end up smelling musty or getting moldy even when they are kept in the dry room. We took the time today to wash all of the clothes we were bringing back so we don't have to do it when we are there. I had to gather up all of my work related items including my computer and everything else that I need to keep going because I do still have to work while we're travelling. I don’t plan to work my full schedule because I want to spend time with our loved ones, but I also don’t think they would just let me take 3 weeks completely off. We also spent the day making sure the house was all tidy before we leave so we don’t have to come back to a messy house. I mean who wants to clean as soon as they get home, we might as well tidy up what we can today. We will be going to bed early tonight because tomorrow morning we have to get up at 3 am to catch a ride. Minnesota- Here We Come! 

Before we go we wanted to show you Freddie's finished mural.  (We're brainstorming ideas of what we want him to paint at our house too.  Maybe soon we'll hire Freddie to do something similar for us!)

Pura Vida!

Thursday 4/27- Yes, tax season is over, but when I agreed to work for the tax prep firm again this year, I also agreed to stay on for extensions after the regular deadline. I got up this morning and started working bright & early just like I always do. After I finished up with whatever extension work they had for me, I planned to work hard on getting some more blog posts written. I am so far behind on writing blogs!! I want to give a huge shout out to Ramie.  While I’ve been keeping rough notes, he’s been writing the bulk of the stories for the blog. For the last couple of months when I’m trying to catch up, a lot of the content is already written and I just have to do a thorough edit. I don’t have any blogs ready and on-deck like I usually did before, and having it written to this point helps immensely! We truly do make a great team and I appreciate so much how much helps me with everything, even though I may not always show it. 💖💞

Having this tax & blog work to do today worked out kind of perfectly though, because today Ramie had plans of his own. He had an appointment to finish his back tattoo and to get his newest idea inked.

Hi all ya Costa Breeze followers. Even though I really like my back piece it needed to have something more to make it look complete, I think it looked a little odd with just the wolf/scorpion in the middle of my back. I pretty much let Pip (the artist) run with whatever idea he came up with because I didn't know what to do to get that “finished” look. I showed up at the shop and Pip already had the design pulled up on his computer, asked me look at it and give him the go ahead. All he had to do was size it to fit my back. Once that was done, he carefully placed it and started working. About 1-½ hours later he was finished with it. 

Here is the finished piece

When I got home I showed Dana my finished back and my forearm and then sent a picture of my forearm to Taylor and told her she was in charge of translating it. She knew right away what the language was and in less than 8 minutes she already got back to me and told me she was crying and that she loved it. For now that is enough ink for me, I’ve taken care of the itch that’s been building for a while, but I think Dana still wants to do another one someday.

Saturday 4/29- After I finished with a couple of hours of work, we took the ATV out for a ride again. We have got a little bit of rain over the last week and Ramie was hoping to take it out mudding! Since the red clay here stains your clothes, we both made sure to wear something that either we didn’t care if it got stained or wouldn’t be noticeable if it got red clay mud on it. Black tank top & shorts for me! As we climbed the mountain it got cooler and cooler, and I realized that I need to remember to dress differently when we go for these ATV rides as it does get significantly cooler as you go up the mountain! At one point it started sprinkling and it did feel quite chilly. Note to self- no more tank tops for long mountain rides!

We did find some hills that were pretty slippery & slimy, but didn’t find much mud to really make a mess (much to Ramie’s disappointment!) Unfortunately I was too late pulling out my camera to get video of the slipperiest hill that really got us sliding around.

 The ATV is a little on the loud side when we’re driving so it makes it difficult to have much of a conversation while we’re riding around, but we did discuss that we need to come up with a name for this ATV since I’m getting tired of writing “the ATV” in all of these blog posts. Unfortunately we haven’t been able to agree on anything that we both like. The current temporary name is Willy (the Wolverine), since it’s a Yamaha Wolverine. I don’t think Willy fits- and there were some other suggestions that were even worse than Willy that made us sound like complete red-necks, and I’m not going for that!

Ramie’s favorite is currently “Ohhhhh Come on Cletus!” 😖This seriously just makes me want to puke!! We’ll have to keep brainstorming until we find something that sticks.

We took a different route this time than we had any time in the past and found ourselves a little bit lost. We ended up in a little village that we had no idea existed back there.  Fortunately they had cell service in the area and we were able to pull up maps because we did end up going around in a complete circle before realizing we weren’t on the road that we thought we were on. After we got ourselves pointed in the right direction, we made our way toward the coffee plantation (our sure sign that we know where we are and how to get home) but instead of heading home at that point, we went to the big waterfall that is nearby that we hiked with Taryn, Steven & Will last year when they visited. We didn’t hike the waterfall this time, but we did want to see what it looked like up close before the big rains started coming down. It was much slower than last time and the pool at the base was just a puddle compared to last June. Once we had our fill of the waterfall we headed back down the mountain and home for the afternoon. 

Normally this all all full of water but it's just the smallest trickle now

The falls are so small but soon enough it will be raging

We had to stop and get a picture of this fence.. I don't think its working like intended.

Just one of the beautiful views from being this high up a mountain

The Official Casa Costa Breeze end of April rainfall total was 8 inches 

These last couple of weeks it has been abnormally, unseasonably hot here!

Yes, I know, we live in the tropics, that’s what is expected, right? Well, yes and no! In a normal year February & March are the hottest months and then things tend to start “cooling off” (I put that in quotes because it’s all relative. Cooling off here means the high 70s) in preparation for green (rainy) season. This year February & March were actually quite comfortable (compared to the heat we’d normally have), but now in May we are hitting the mid to upper 90s in the afternoon- like the heat that we would have expected a couple of months ago.

The other twist on this is that we’re also starting to get a bit of rain in the evenings. Yes, that’s expected this time of year, but now that we have the abnormal heat plus the rain that also brings up the humidity! It can make it feel a bit on the uncomfortable side, and remember, we only have AC in the bedrooms. Oh, and even with that being said, our crazy selves haven’t even been turning the AC on at night, we’ve just been suffering through it! Yes, we have been spending extra time in the pool because of this heat, but here’s one more thing- currently the pool is 93 degrees too, so instead of feeling cool and refreshing, it feels like warm bathwater. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not complaining!! We have acclimated to the heat and humidity for the most part, it’s just catching us off guard right now to have to deal with both the heat & the humidity at the same time. But- as they say- Pura Vida!! And we’ll survive- it won’t be long and we’ll be heading to the much different climate in MN for 3 weeks. That might be a huge shock to our system considering the winter has been hanging on so long up there!

Monday 5/1-Wednesday 5/10- about 4 years ago Ramie got braces and they were removed just before we moved here to Costa Rica 2 years ago. His teeth are nice and straight now but he has been complaining since getting them removed that a crown that he has had since he was 18 years old has been bothering him. Since his teeth moved with the braces, he now gets food stuck in between the crown and the tooth next to it, sometimes causing his teeth to be very sore. One thing about Costa Rica is that dental and medical care are significantly cheaper than in the US. So much so that a lot of people will fly to Costa Rica just to have surgeries or dental work done. How cheap exactly?!

Back in January Ramie went with Randall to have our car inspected and after they finished the appointment Randal had to stop at his dentist in San Isidro. Since they were already there and Randall gave a good recommendation, Ramie asked the dentist about the possibility of dental work. Right there, after just walking in off the street, the dentist brought Ramie to the chair, took some x-rays, and did a little bit of looking at the issue. He quoted Ramie $250 to replace this bothersome crown. WOW! and he didn't even charge for today's visit or x-rays. Well Ramie never did go and have that work done because of our driving situation and not having a valid license at the time, not to mention it's an hour drive one way and he would have to go twice (once for the temporary and then again for the permanent) and that's 4 hours minimum of driving. Needless to say, Ramie really was not feeling up for all of that driving. We talked about it and although it was more expensive to have it replaced here in Uvita, we decided that for the sake of time, gas, and wear and tear on the truck we would pay more for the convenience of having it done close to home.

Ramie decided today (Monday 5/1) to venture to Ojochal (about a 15 minute drive South of us) to see a dentist that he saw advertise on one of our local Facebook pages. He showed up and the office, they took a look at what he had going on, and gave him a quote of $475. He asked about his retainer, and they said that they would also be able to adjust it for free. There is also a dentist about a quarter mile from our house who had previously given us a quote of $500 but they want to charge for the retainer adjustment. Ramie decided to make the appointment with the dentist in Ojochal and they could already get him in this Wednesday 5/3 with the guarantee that he could get the permanent crown before we went back to the US on 5/18.

His initial appointment went well and when he left they told him to wait for the call that his permanent crown was ready and they would get him in right away to swap the temporary for the permanent one. That call came on the following Monday 5/8 and they made an appointment for Wednesday 5/10. It only took one week from the initial appointment to get the permanent crown installed (I feel like I waited much longer back in MN when I had my crown done). That seems super fast but made Ramie feel good that there would be plenty of time to fix any issues between now and when we head back to MN. Ramie got home and said that he can already tell that the new crown fits and feels better than his old one. Ramie says that he is excited to eat steak to try this new crown out but that is going to have to wait a few days.

Pura Vida!

As I’m sure you’ve been able to gather from all of the things that we do together, Geoff & Tracy are pretty close friends of ours. They had to go back to Canada for about a week and a half and they knew that they could count on us to make sure their fur babies were taken care of while they were away. The difference with taking care of their furballs compared to what you might be thinking, is that these gals stayed at home and we went to their house to take care of them. No- we didn’t go live up at their house, their animals are pretty independent so we just had to make sure they were fed and looked after. They didn’t need a human living with them all of the time.

Bailey, the cat, is very independent and quite particular about the people that she trusts. Ramie is usually an animal whisperer and most animals like and trust him pretty quickly. Bailey took a little bit (or maybe a lot) of work, but after a few tips from her momma we were able to coax her into coming out for us and were able to give her a little bit of social interaction. Casey the little dog is a unique situation. Quite a few months ago she started hanging out at Geoff & Tracy’s house, they thought she was a stray so they took her in. She needed some medical attention for a few things including a severe ear infection that left her deaf, and they adopted her. After she was mostly healed up she would sometimes disappear for days at a time and come back still in good shape, so we figure that she might have another house somewhere else too. No one really knows what she does! She mostly lives outside and is allowed to wander around at her pleasure. She’s a very happy little dog and loves to see people so we didn’t have any trouble playing with her when we went to take care of the animals. While Geoff & Tracy were gone we were in charge of making sure the pets were fed, litter box cleaned, and making sure they knew that they hadn’t been abandoned. They survived momma & daddy’s time away with us babysitting, but I know they were so much happier once Geoff & Tracy returned. We were happy too, not because we didn’t have to take care of the animals though (because that wasn’t a bad thing at all) but because we got our co-pilots in adventure back. 😊

Saturday 4/8- With Geoff & Tracy back from Canada we had to make time to reconnect. I’m in the final hard push of tax filing with only 10 days left before the deadline and I’m not going to lie, I’ve been a little stressed recently, so Ramie, Geoff & Tracy coordinated an “Easter” dinner and all I had to do was show up. They truly left me out of the planning process, had a group chat that I wasn’t even involved in, and just told me when to be ready to shut off my computer and walk out the door. I was very thankful for this- I needed a break and time to unwind, and not having to help plan it was so helpful! (Thanks guys, you saved me!!)

While Easter is a very big deal here in Costa Rica, and is kind of celebrated as a “spring break” week, for us it is a time when we try to stay out of town and away from the beaches because all of the city people come to the coasts for their vacation (for our MN friends, think Memorial Day, 4th of July & Labor Day “up north”). For us, though, Easter last year was the first time we hung out with Geoff & Tracy. Kind of our “friend-iversery” if you will. We originally met them when we did a border run to Panama in February of 2022, and exchanged contact information. A couple of months later they invited us up to their house to hang out and get to know each other, and the evening that worked out for all of us just happened to fall on Easter. Yes, I know, Easter isn’t the same day every year, but it’s close enough and a fun way to count the time that we’ve been going on Costa Rican adventures together. Anyway- Tracy is a fantastic hostess and always puts together a great spread of food. We had a great afternoon and evening hanging out together and eating, and I got to relax away from the computer. No candy, no eggs, and no bunny, but still a very Happy Easter!

Saturday 4/15- I’m very thankful that the CPA firm that I work for is proactive and has already filed extensions for all of the returns that weren’t done by mid-day on Friday. What this means is that while I did have some work to do this morning on a few cases we wanted to get out the door “on-time”, I was done with the most stressful push to the filing deadline. I worked for a while in the morning and once the highest priority work was done, I turned off the computer and told Ramie I wanted to go for a ride. Of course, he wasn’t going to argue with this, he never needs an excuse to go on an ATV adventure!!

There are a lot of roads up the mountain and many ways to get lost back there, but Ramie has been looking at maps.

Along with a little bit of driving that we’ve done in that area and what he remembers from when he & Randall took the back roads to San Isidro when they did the car inspection, he was pretty confident that as long as we didn’t take any turns onto side roads we could make it up the mountain to a road that runs somewhat parallel to the highway here in town, and then find another straight road back down the mountain, and in the end we wouldn’t get lost. So- that’s what we set out to do! We took a road that we had driven once before while we were here on a vacation (and had turned around because it was getting too adventurous for our rental vehicle at the time). This time, we kept going, I mean, this is the type of terrain that these ATVs are made for, right!? 

As we made our way up the mountain, we realized that this road has changed quite a bit since the last time we were up this direction a few years ago. While it was still very adventurous, it had been made a little bit safer (I think) than it was before. We made it to a nice plateau high up the mountain that was overlooking the ocean. We decided to stop here & snap some fun pictures of the ATV and a few of the view as well. It looked like this space had been cleared out for the intent to someday build a house - I don’t know how I would feel living here, though, having traveled the road we just had to drive to get here!! 

Looking down on Uvita and Whales Tail from the clearing

If you go high enough eventually you will be in the clouds. This was at about 4000' looking back towards the ocean

This is the other direction looking inland. Totally clear and amazing views of this valley

I guess we will go down this road next

We weren’t all the way to the top of the mountain yet, so once we had our fill of the view, we hopped back in and kept on climbing!! Eventually we made it to the top of the mountain to that parallel road and could see down both sides of the mountain- one overlooking the ocean & Uvita, the other looking all the way to San Isidro. What amazing views, but again, not sure I could ever live up this high (plus, you’ll be in clouds for half the year during rainy season- no view & probably lots of mold on everything, even worse than when we were renting the house that was just a little way up the mountain!).

Once we were traveling on that parallel road, we quickly figured out that this road goes straight past Don Emilio’s coffee plantation that we like so much! Since it is Saturday, Deiner is selling their coffee down at the market and they aren’t open to tours today. They do sometimes have the ATV tours stop up there and the ATV guides give a mini-tour of the plantation. As we were driving by, we saw that one of the ATV groups was there, which means that Emilio & Rita were probably around too. We stopped with intention of staying for only a few minutes to just say hi and continue on our adventure. I know we’ve mentioned before just how much the Don Emilio family considers us a part of their family, and today was just more proof of that. 

When we stopped to say hi, Emilio immediately brought out the moonshine and Baileys. Coffee was an afterthought. After we each had a shot in and a cup of coffee in front of us, Rita & Emilio sat down with us to chat. Remember, Emilio speaks only a very little bit of English, and I don’t think Rita speaks any (although I think she understands a little bit). Lo and behold, our stop to say hi turned into a 2-hour Spanish lesson from them! Between the little bits of English they speak and our limited Spanish (and their extreme patience with us and a little help from the translation app) we had a nice afternoon, shared some laughs and a few jokes, and learned some very basic necessities that our DuoLingo app doesn’t teach- correct pronunciation! Think back to kindergarten when you start learning the sounds of the letters. First you learn what each letter sounds like, then you start stringing them together, saying the sounds faster, and finally getting a word. C-A-T eventually sounds like cat… you get the idea. Now, we’re learning the similar idea in Spanish. Their letters do sound different than we are used to in English!! They taught us like we were kids, and I think we learned something we otherwise wouldn’t have. Ramie's favorite word to learn was Moco, which means booger. After our lesson we headed home, and when I got back into cell-coverage range I saw that I had an email from work asking me to put in a little bit more time this afternoon to finish up a few things that just came in. I was completely ok with that and am glad that I got to go for our little adventure today before digging back into work. After all, today would be my last day working for this job before the filing deadline on the 18th. (That doesn’t mean it’s over for the season, though, they are keeping me on to work on extensions too. The work just never ends!) 

Thursday 4/20- With tax season finally and officially over, I finally have my first day completely off. You’d think I would use the day to relax, unwind, have a glass of wine or something like that, but nope… we’re going to make the trip to San Isidro for the farmers market & a grocery restocking. It has been many months since I got to stock up on all of the beautiful vegetables at the feria, and I was craving some of the things that I just won’t bring myself to buy in town, and the less expensive prices we find there!

Ray & Wesley, the couple that is currently living in the house that we rented when we first moved down here, have lived in Uvita now for a few months but have never ventured over to San Isidro. We love showing people around and bringing them to new places that we’ve discovered, so we asked them if they’d like to tag along to discover a new city & some new shopping options. They were completely on board because they were getting tired of the limited selection & high prices in Uvita too.

We got off to our early start, just like we always do. As we’ve written about before, the drive over the mountain is adventurous in and of itself with all of the winding roads up and down through the mountains, and I think Ray & Wesley were surprised by the drive but in awe of some of the views. When we made it to town our first stop was at the feria like we always do. I think they were amazed by the size and selection (and overwhelmed like most people are on their first trip through) but were glad to have discovered it now. The baby chicks below were at one of the Agri stores we stopped at for some supplies. We have thought about raising some chickens on our property but after going back and forth many times, we have decided against it.

We continued on through our regular stops for the day and pointed out the hidden gems that they will no doubt want to check out at some point. They are building a house, so we mentioned all of the different tile stores that we had discovered, the hardware stores where they would likely find things they need for their build, and even the granite countertop place that we ended up using. Even though we made a lot of stops and got all of our errands and shopping done and we made great timing. We made it back to Uvita by early afternoon and I even had a little bit of time to relax with that glass of wine.

Months and months ago when we were shopping in San Isidro we were looking for concrete stepping stones for the garden. We never found any that were a price that we were willing to pay, but we saw some really cute paw print ones that I really liked and hadn’t forgotten about. After Breeze passed away and we made her memorial garden I immediately wanted one and didn’t care that they were a little bit expensive. This is different than just placing stepping stones in the garden! This was the first time we’ve been back to San Isidro since we finished Breeze’s garden, and we were lucky to find just a few paw print stepping stones left. We bought one and put it in the garden in memory of our doggy. 

It has been so dry lately that a lot of the plants never made it. Its on our to-do list to replace them.

Saturday 4/22- Since I didn’t get to relax on my Thursday day off, I made sure that I would get a good day of “me-time” before I started working on the tax extensions that I knew were inevitably going to start soon (some days I still really wonder what I have gotten myself into with all of this!). Today I finally got my beach day!!

We invited Geoff & Tracy to go hang out at the beach with us and, like always, they were happy to hang out together. Since we are creatures of habit (and up early anyway) as soon as we were finished with our coffee we headed toward the water. We brought our beach chairs, boogie boards, some snacks & drinks, and decided that we’d make a day of it. We started out the morning like I always look forward to: a long walk on the beach. It’s been far too long since I got to do this so I enjoyed walking in the sand at the edge of the water, sun on my skin & warm ocean breeze all around us.

When we made it back to the starting point, we set up our chairs, pulled out the coolers, and hung around on shore for a while. After we were sufficiently rested from our walk and getting warm from sitting in the sun, Ramie, Geoff & I grabbed the boogie boards and headed out to the water.

The waves were very big and quite strong today (probably perfect for surfing), and typically I am not a huge fan of spending a lot of time in the water when it’s like that, but today it felt so good to be out playing in the waves. We probably spent an hour in the water fighting the waves and having a blast. We were so exhausted by the time we were done but it felt so good, and for me, was so needed! I think each of us were tumbled by the big waves at least a couple of times, but as long as I kept that board tethered to me and I knew which way was up, I was enjoying it. Once we were thoroughly exhausted we headed back up to our chairs again for some fun conversation and good times. By the time we hit early afternoon the rain started moving in, and while we probably would have put up with the rain, there was way too much lightening to trust staying at the beach, so we decided to head home for the rest of the afternoon. Despite the day being cut short, this was a great end to a busy tax season and first time back out and really able to enjoy myself since the busy season started.

Pura Vida 

Tuesday 3/28- Today we have a post completely from Ramie's perspective 

I was scrolling on Facebook this evening and saw a posting for an open seat on a fishing trip that leaves right out of Uvita. I was a little surprised because that is not something that you see posted very often. I often see tour companies offering a day of offshore fishing for a group, but to see someone saying there is an open seat is not common. I pondered on it for a while and then mentioned to Dana that I was thinking about sending a message to the person to ask for details. She told me to go for it because at least then I would have a little bit more information to base a decision from. The guy quickly replied saying that he is looking for a “crew” to go out and try to find Tuna and Mahi Mahi. We are just coming into season where they will be much easier to find, but they don’t know where they are right now and he wants to get a jump on the competition tours. There was a fee involved but it was significantly lower than what a tour price would be. I told Dana all the details and we both agreed that it was a good deal for a full day of fishing, and since I always talk about wanting to go on one of these trips, now would be a good opportunity to try it out. I quickly messaged the person back telling him that I’d like to join him aboard to help out. It turns out that the person I was talking to was the actual boat owner and also mentioned that in addition to the one I just booked, there is still one more seat open if I knew of anyone else that might be interested. After thinking about it for a few minutes I messaged Ray. You are probably wondering who is Ray? Well Ray (and his wife Wesley) are the people who are currently renting Karen's house (the place we rented when we first moved here). Since I help Karen out by managing and taking care of the house, I have gotten to know Ray a little bit so I figured why not spend a day fishing with him? I quickly got a reply back from Ray saying he was all in. Excellent!

For the readers that have been following along you may remember that we went out fishing just over a year ago when an old friend from MN was visiting Costa Rica. That boat was a large what I would call a “pro” fishing boat, with a big inboard Diesel engine, room for 8 plus the crew, and a bolted in chair to sit in when you’re reeling in a big one. Overall, that was a much nicer and way more expensive boat that measured 38-42’ long and 16-18’ widith. Something like this..

The boat we will be going out on in a few days is much much different. We will be fishing out of a Super Panga. This type of boat has an outboard engine, no fancy chair for when you’re fighting that big fish, you have to pay attention to how many people are all on one side of the boat and keep it balanced, and it’s only about 28’ long and 8’ wide. This would be a very different ride! 

Thursday 3/30- Today is the day we are headed out in search of Tuna. The plan was to meet at the National Park entrance at 6:30am and leave the beach by 7am. There are no marinas here in Uvita so the tour companies launch the boats directly from the beach. The National Park has some large tractors that will hook to the boat trailers and tow the boat down to the ocean and launch them as a large wave is coming in at the same time. Once the boat is in the water, the crew has to turn it around to face it into the waves and push it out far enough that they can start the engine. Once it is floating and the Captain starts the engine and gets the boat into position the rest of us got boarded. Eventually once we were all on board, we got organized and stowed everything so it wouldn’t fly out as we were speeding out into the ocean. We had a long ride ahead of us. 

Here we are heading away from the beach in our boat for the day

We would be speeding out to the fishing grounds which start about 35 miles offshore and it would take us about 1 hr. to get there. The ride out was somewhat uneventful but we did spot some sea turtles and sailfish fins. Once we made it to what they call the Blue water (which is the deep water where the tuna will be, and of course an amazing shade of blue) the captain and the owner set out 4 lines and the search for the fish was on.

We trolled and trolled looking for signs of where the tuna may be located. We were told to call out anything that we may see that could indicate the tuna were nearby. Some of the indicators that we were looking for were birds, schools of small bait fish on the surface of the water, Dolphins, or basically any signs of life. To be honest it was very boring the first 3 hours of just trolling. I always say, I’m just out for the boat ride and it’s a bonus if we catch some fish! We did have a Marlin come and hit the lure a couple of times, but couldn't get it to bite. Catching a Marlin is still on my bucket list but I don't think that's going to happen today. We spotted a few birds and followed them but nothing came of following those.

Around 12:30 we started seeing more birds, in fact we started seeing large groups of them. Apparently this is a good sign. The birds are there because the bait fish are there. And where there is bait fish, there are tuna. All of a sudden, about a half mile away we spotted something that took us a while to figure out what we were actually seeing. Then it finally clicked, well at least for the Captain, he told us to hang on and he sped towards whatever this was. As we got closer we were all in shock… Hundreds of Spinner Dolphins jumping and spinning out of the water chasing the bait fish. Mixed in with the Dolphins there were massive tuna also jumping along and hundreds of birds diving into the water!

The water looked like it was boiling! It was amazing to see all this wildlife in one place, someone even said that this is the stuff you only see on National Geographic! We all agreed and we were all yelling with excitement of seeing this magnificent sight. 

Now that we found the tuna, all we have to do is follow the visible birds and Dolphins, but the trick is that we have to get in front of the moving, always zig zagging Tuna in order to catch them, and in the process we have try to figure out where they may turn next. All of a sudden we had a fish on the line! I happened to be standing in the back by the fishing rods and the owner grabbed the rod and handed it to me while he brought in the other lines. I had to wait to start reeling until the other lines were clear, so I had to play the fish and keep the tension on the line so it wouldn't shake the hook. I could tell it was not a very large Tuna but it did put up a hell of a fight and had one good run with the line. Once I was given the all-clear, it only took me about 5 minutes to get it in the boat. I’ve always wanted to catch a Tuna and now I can say that I have. I just need to catch a bigger one now! Congrats and high fives went all around and the lines were all dropped again. Now we had to go catch up with the fish again. 

What is interesting about Tuna fishing is all of the other different animals that you encounter when you’re out there. The reason behind everything that is happening and why there is so much action is that Tuna travel in what they call the “tuna ball” which consists of hundreds of Tuna, big, small, and every size in between. That ball can be swimming along at anywhere from 50-100+ feet deep. This Tuna ball is chasing the school of bait fish and as the Tuna are going after them the bait fish are being pushed up to the surface. This then gets the attention of the Dolphins and they will join in on the hunt. The dolphins will go below the bait fish and blow air bubbles to make the bait fish go up higher towards the surface. When this happens it draws the attention of the birds which will dive in to catch those little fish to eat as well. Once the bait fish are that close to the surface they are thoroughly confused but still grouped together so all of these animals go on a feeding frenzy. This is why the Tuna and Dolphin are trying to fly out of the water and the birds are trying to swim. It's truly an amazing sight to witness.

For the next 3 hours we followed this group of tuna all around the ocean. At times the tuna would stop moving forward and would just be suspended so we would try jigging for them and throwing surface poppers. We were able to hook 2 other fairly large tuna, but unfortunately the line kept breaking before we could reel them in. I guess there was some rotten fishing line on this rod, so they finally stripped off a bunch and re-spooled it with fresh line. Once the Tuna went on the move again we continued trolling around with one small, lonely tuna in the boat, they joked we may be able to all get one or two Tuna fish sandwiches out of it. Like I said before, I'm just out there for a boat ride and if we happen to catch a fish well that is just a bonus. We got our bonus, albeit, a small one.

Our time was quickly coming to an end and I heard them say we had a 1.5-2 hour ride back to shore. Wait what? While we were following the Tuna farther and farther from shore we ended up at about 52 miles off shore. Wow! I would have never guessed that we ended up going that much further while chasing the fish! We kept referencing Cano Island (an Island that is about 30 miles offshore) while we were moving, and I noticed that it was getting very hard to see from where we currently were. 

We just happened to get in front of the Dolphins again and the Tuna were jumping around us. There was a guy up on the bow casting the popper lure into the fish and then he got a hit! Great, same pole that had the rotten line, what's going to happen this time? I was expecting it to break again but it didn't. He quickly passed the pole to one of the other guys in the boat who tried to bring the fish in from the bow but he was told he needed to get the rod to the back in order to catch the fish. We had to pass the rod around the posts that were holding up the sun top so very carefully to make sure the fish didn’t get any slack in the line, we handed the rod from person to person until it was at the back. When I had it and was walking it to the back, I could tell that this was a huge Tuna! Nothing like testing your grip by holding the rod in one hand and passing to your other hand over open water! This fish has some power behind it! Ray quickly moved to my other side and took the rod again and started reeling. Little by little he was gaining, but then the Tuna would run and he’d lose all of the progress he had just made. Ray would gain on it some more and then another run! After a few rounds of this game Ray was getting exhausted and could barely hold the rod up. The owner was asking if he wanted to pass it off but Ray said no fish would get the better of him, so he just kept trying. 

The tuna exhausted Ray before Ray exhausted the Tuna. The fish was probably about 100' out but Ray's muscles failed and he had to ask for help. Since I was standing next to him, I would help him bring the rod up and he would reel when we brought it back down, but he was so exhausted that he just couldn’t even reel either. He was defeated but would not give up the rod. 

Finally, the Captain said we had to get it in fast because we had a deadline, we had to make it back to shore if we wanted to get the boat pulled out of the water before the tractors quit for the day.  Ray tried, I will say he gave it his all but when he said “I think I'm going to puke my lungs out” I knew he couldn't do it anymore. He fought the tuna for a good 15-20 minutes, but eventually had to relinquish the rod to the owner of the boat. It took the owner another 5 minutes to bring it onboard. Ray wanted to hold the fish up for a photo but he couldn't even lift it off the floor! 

Ray is trying to lift it but his muscles are still fatigued

We enjoyed our beers and waited for the call saying everything was ready to be picked up. When we got to where they stored the boat, the crew was there waiting with the news of our haul. My fish was 8lbs and Ray's fish was 60lbs. Wow, Ray's fish was enough to feed all 6 of us! They gave me half of my fish and the Captain wanted the other half, we split up the big one equally. At the end everyone was happy with the amount that they got to take home with them and the owner was happy with how much we helped today. He told me that he is going to keep our phone numbers and reach out when he needs our help again. He explained that he has a core crew that he typically uses but if one or two of them can't make it then he will reach out to us as the standbys. I can't complain, I think today was worth what he was charging us and I hope to maybe be part of his more regular crew someday (Although, Dana does say that this is the most expensive tuna she’s ever eaten outside of a restaurant, I think that you have to take the experience into account as well).

Here I am taking a bite of our delicious fresh raw Tuna.

The Official Casa Costa Breeze end of March rainfall total was 8.6 inches

Pura Vida!

Tuesday 3/21- Today is the first of two final appointments that we need to be fully official residents. Today we have to travel to Rio Claro, about 1-½ hours South of Uvita and on the way to Panama. Since we are still illegal to drive, Geoff and Tracy offered to take us to our appointment so that we didn't risk being pulled over and getting in trouble with the law. As I mentioned in a prior blog post, we’re currently illegal to drive right now due to the whole passport stamp situation. Since this appointment is only about a half hour from Panama where we go shopping once in a while, the decision was made that it would be a good time for all of us to do some shopping there.

Today's appointment is for the Homogolation of our US driver’s license. Basically, what that means is that Costa Rica will review our current US license and accept it as proof that we know how to drive. We have to have 3 things ready in preparation for this appointment:

1. Our DIMEX card (resident ID)
2. A medical exam
3. An “official translation” of our valid foreign drivers license.

Fortunately we were able to pick up our physical DIMEX card just last week (I guess they got their printer fixed). For the medical exam we just made an appointment with the local doctor. The exam wasn't exactly thorough, though. They took our height, weight and checked to see if we could read a line on an eye chart. Then the doctor asked if we wanted to be an organ donor, and which was our dominant hand. There may have been one or 2 other simple questions, but that was essentially it. It didn’t take too much thought and we both easily passed. 

The translation had to be done by an official translator, the closest of which is up in San Jose. Thankfully, we only had to send a copy of the front and back of our license to a local lawyer, who in return sent the copy to the official translator. They did their thing, certified the translation with a seal, and then mailed (or sent via courier) back to the local lawyer the stamped certified piece of paper and when we went to pick it up paid the cost us $85. Yeah, that’s a bit expensive for what was actually done, but it was still way better than having to drive to San Jose to do this. At that point, we had everything that we needed for today’s appointment.

Our appointment was scheduled for 9am so Geoff and Tracy picked us up at about 6:45 to we hit the road. We left early enough just in case things got crazy on the drive down (which, down here, you just never know!) but traffic was really good and it was about 8:20 when we got to where we needed to go. No problem we had Tracy drop us off at the building where our appointment was and let them go check out the town while we wait for our turn, and we’d text them when we were finished & ready to be picked up. When we walked up to the building there were already people standing outside waiting and we had no idea how long this whole process would take.

The people outside waiting pointed us in the direction we had to go so we walked to the gate where the security guard asked if we had an appointment and at what time. We understood and could speak enough Spanish to easily have this conversation with him, and he brought us inside the gate and pointed to a row of chairs where he told us we should wait. We were still more than 30 minutes early for our appointment. It wasn't long before a person came out to take our paperwork. He asked us to wait out here while he entered the info into the system and told us that he would be back when he was ready for us. About 10 minutes later he came back out and had us follow him in and sit in a different row of chairs. After a few more minutes he called me into his office first, it almost felt like being called into the principal's office (at least according to Ramie, I have no personal experience with that). He had only a couple more questions for us to answer including my Costa Rican phone number (which I have no idea what it is, so I had to have Ramie come in and tell him), the town that we live in, and my email address. After he had that information he sent me out and called Ramie in for the same questions. Thankfully this guy spoke good English so it made this all a little bit easier for us, although I'm sure we could have handled this simple appointment in Spanish too. That was it! We didn’t get anything confirming that our information was input or that we had this appointment, we just had to hope that everything was done correctly. We were told by Laura (the person from the attorney’s office that has been helping us along the way) to make sure that before we left that the info was truly entered into the system because sometimes they don’t actually input it, but she also let us know that they don’t provide any documentation for confirmation. Ramie played dumb (well I think he was playing anyway) and asked the guy for proof that this appointment had happened so we have it for our next appointment.

The guy just told Ramie it's all entered into the system, they have it, and we’re good to go. Ok, I guess a verbal confirmation is all we’ll get. That was it for this appointment. It was by far the fastest and easiest appointment we have ever had in Costa Rica! And we were out the door and texting Tracy to come get us even before our appointment that was scheduled for 9am.

They were just waiting down the street and showed up quickly to pick us up. Alright, onward to Panama! It only took about 30 minutes and we were already at the Panama border. First stop, cheap liquor! First we had to navigate the narrow and crazy one way street. Panama is on the left and Costa Rica is on the right. Each side of the street has similar shops, but the Panama side is much cheaper and actually real brands, where the Costa Rican side are fake knock offs.

Geoff and Tracy have never bought liquor in Panama before so we wanted to show them this store and how inexpensive it truly is here. We arrived and Ramie quickly got to work picking out his liquor order. This place will run promotions where they will group several bottles together for a discounted price. Ramie always looks for the Rum promotions, today they had a 1.75L Bacardi, 1L Malibu knockoff, and 1L cheap Rum for $21. Separately they cost $27. Ramie knows the cheap rum is only $5 anyways, so it's basically buy the other 2 get the cheap bottle for free. Not a bad deal. Ramie was pretty excited about this and bought 3 of those promotions. Then he was off to find some Jamison whiskey for the next time Dylan comes to visit, and a couple 1.75L bottles of white rum. We also bought some Vodka and some Baileys. Grand total was $84. Geoff and Tracy didn't plan on buying a lot here, but once they saw the prices I think they bought more than they had planned. Alright, the liquor is done, time to go to City Mall for all of the other stuff.

We guided Tracy, our chauffeur for the day, back through the one-way streets and the crazy border crossing area and finally to a parking lot near the mall. It's called City Mall but it's not actually a mall like you’d think. It’s actually just one very large 2 story store that carries just about ever category of things you can imagine. Clothing, electronics, toys, appliances, automotive, paint, groceries, you name it they may have it. We parked the car and headed inside with each team grabbing a cart. I briefly explained the layout and where they would find particular types of things, and we went our separate ways. We would occasionally run into each other going in different directions but it looked like they were finding some things that they needed. We completed our shopping but did not want to check out because they had the keys to the truck. We just hung out and waited in an area where we could spot them when heading to the registers. Eventually we saw them going in that direction and went to check out ourselves. We finished up, loaded everything into the truck, and by then it was about noon and we were hungry. In sticking with the tradition that Loren and Nancy started, we ate at the McDonalds that is right inside this store. Once we were filled full of greasy food it was time to hit the road for the 2 hour drive home. We got home around 3pm, unloaded our haul from their truck and once again thanked them for driving us. I would say it was a productive day for all of us, and I think they enjoyed checking out the shopping at the border. 

Sunday 3/26- There isn't a whole lot to write about it, but we dog-sat for some friends while they made a a border run. It was nice to have a furball in the house again, even if it was only for a couple of days. She liked to hang out under my desk, by my feet while I worked. :)

This is Izzy

Wednesday 3/29- Today is our 2nd and final appointment to make ourselves official & legal. Today we will get our actual Costa Rica Driver’s Licenses. They certainly do not make things easy for anyone here in Costa Rica but the one nice thing is you actually walk out of this appointment with your license in hand and don’t have to wait for it to be sent to you. Our appointment last week was actually at the Costa Rican version of the DMV, but somewhere along the line, the license center lost the authorization to actually give out the physical licenses. You now have to get your license at the bank. Oh, but not just ANY bank, only certain specific banks! I know you're probably asking why and shaking your head wondering (just like we have many times before about so many different things). Seriously, why is a bank processing Drivers Licenses? No one, including the people of Costa Rica have any idea.

Once again Laura helped us out and found the only bank within a reasonable distance (ie. Less than 2 hours away) that had two appointments available at very close to the same time. Today we had to travel to Ciudad Neily which is in the same direction as last week’s appointment, about an hour and 45 minutes South of here. You might be wondering, isn’t that more or less at the Panama border? Yes sir (or ma'am)! This appointment is only about 15 minutes from the border. Today we would be making the journey to the Panama border crossing again. Today, though, Loren and Nancy offered to drive (remember, we’re still illegal to drive until after today’s appointment). They had shopping to do at the border as well and it worked out perfectly for them. The appointment today was not until 1 and 1:30 (yes we each had to have our own appointment times for this one) so we’d be doing the shopping first and then the appointments. We hit the road at 7am like last week so we had plenty of time to get all of our shopping done an not risk being late for this appointment.

We once again made good time getting to Panama and where did we go first? Well, first it was the gas station, but THEN it was the liquor store again! This time we focused on getting some better-quality wines than I can find (for a reasonable price) in Costa Rica.

Of course Ramie decided that he needed more Rum. I swear he is a pirate! We bought more than we really needed and then hit City Mall. Since we were just here last week, we didn't have much on our list, but one thing we did want was a battery backup for the TV. If you remember in a prior post we mentioned all the power “blips” we’ve been having lately and we have truly finally had enough of it and decided we wanted to splurge and get one for the TV.

Randall, the Tico that does our oil changes on our truck and has went with Ramie to take it in for inspection asked us to pick up some oil for his truck (we bought some for ours last week) since it is significantly cheaper here than back in CR. To give you an idea of how expensive motor oil in Costa Rica is, the oil Ramie uses for his truck can only be bought from the Toyota dealership. Of course, right off the bat it's already marked up because of where you are buying it from. We pay about $85 for 4 liters of oil. Last week when we were here with Geoff and Tracy, Ramie found the type that we needed and for 5.5 liters it was only $48. Of course, since we were here, we bought 2. Ramie told Randall about the price down here and asked if we could pick some up for him as well. No problem! He does a lot to help us, so we were happy to help him out. After finding the oil that Randall needed, we ended up buying more random stuff that we hadn’t really expected to, but that's ok because we know we saved money compared to buying similar items in Costa Rica. The plan, as always, was to meet Loren and Nancy at the check outs at noon, eat McDonald's, again, and then head to our appointment. McDonald's might be nice once or twice a year but I’m really not feeling it twice in one week. I guess it was that or go hungry, so we ate some more greasy food again. It was well before noon when we were all finished shopping, so we finished up eating early as well.

It is only a 15 minute drive from the border to Ciudad Neily but we were ready to hit the road. It wasn’t much after 12:15 when Loren and Nancy dropped us off at the bank where our appointment was (our appointments weren’t until 1 & 1:30) and said they were going to go drive around and explore. “No problem, we will message you when we are done and hopefully it goes just as fast as last week.”

One thing about Costa Rica is that you don’t just walk into a bank here, most tend to have locked doors with security guards who have to let you in. This bank had a guard inside the main entrance, and a front door that they kept locked. As we walked up, he opened the door to see what we needed. We checked in and he told us that the person we need to see is at lunch, and basically hang out until they are back. We chose the comfiest looking piece of concrete sidewalk (fortunately it was in the shade) and sat down. At a little bit before 1:00 the guard opened up the door, spoke some fast Spanish to all of us that were waiting outside, and started calling names and allowing people in. We walked up closer to the door and he just waved us off, I guess it’s not our turn yet. Ramie’s appointment was first but, like we do on most things here, we tried to go in together. Unfortunately that was a no-go and you can only go in one person at a time, I have to wait until my scheduled appointment time. Ramie went in at his time and I continued to wait outside. At 1:10 they called the next name, but no one got up to go in. I guess he wasn’t here?? Over the next 10 minutes the guard continued to call the name for the 1:10 person and wouldn’t let the 1:20 person in until exactly 1:20. Well, no wonder this takes so long! They truly don’t let you in until the exact minute of your appointment. Seriously, why not call the next person early and keep people moving along! If the 1:10 guy shows up, he can have the 1:20 appointment! Nope I guess they don't do that here. As much as we love Costa Rica, the customer service is horrendous here! Ramie came out at about 1:15 with his Costa Rica license in hand. He waited with me until exactly 1:30 when they finally called my name. I went in, and the 1:20 guy was still in the office finishing up getting his license. It seemed to be taking a while and then I saw the employee start messing around with the printer. She started taking things apart and I figured that maybe it was just out of ink or something. She kept messing around taking pieces out and putting pieces in. Please don’t tell me the printer broke on the guy before me!!! As I sat and watched, she pulled out a roll of tape and started taping the printer back together. Uhoh, this does NOT look good!

Fortunately, whatever she did made it start working again, she printed the guy’s license, and then called me in. I answered the few questions that she had, she figured out that I was the wife of a guy that was in a couple of people ago and didn’t even have to ask me most of the questions (she just used his same answers) and before long I got my license too and headed out the door! That's it! That is completely it! FINALLY!!! We are officially residents, with Costa Rica identification and Costa Rica Drivers Licenses. The next time we have to do anything official is in 2 years when we have to renew our “temporary residency” to “permanent residency”. 

Even though it took forever (and I’m sure Ramie was getting a little bit nervous about what was taking so long) I exited the bank with a smile on my face, we walked across the street where Loren and Nancy had been parked and waiting since about 12:50, and got back on the road headed North, (I told them all the story about the printer that was fixed with tape and they all had a good laugh at that) and we made it home around 4pm, completely exhausted from the long day but so glad that we are now fully official.

Pura Vida!

Friday 3/17- Happy St. Patricks Day to all you Irish out there. Today Ramie got a message from Deiner up at the coffee plantation that the coffee blossoms are blooming and he invited us up to see them. Ramie was cautious about asking me if I wanted to quit work early to make the trip up the mountain to see them because he knows that I'm stressed and overloaded with work right now. I could work 12 hour days 7 days a week and still not get caught up. He hears me say this all the time and knows that it stresses me out even more when anyone asks me if I want to get away from behind the computer, even if it’s only for a couple of hours. The thing with these coffee blossoms blooming is different though, this is rare to see and I do want to go, even if that means getting more behind on work! Of course we asked our CR besties if they wanted to come along and see what this was all about. They were in but they had some appointments that they had to attend to first so we couldn’t go until a little bit later in the afternoon. That was kind of ok, though, since it gave me an extra couple of hours to work.

Ramie let Deiner know that we were super excited to come up there again and would be up around 1pm, but we had another request to add. Ramie asked Deiner if Rita (mom) would cook an early dinner for us. Typically they offer this as part of a regular plantation tour, but we just wanted the dinner tonight without a full tour. We had one additional request to go along with the dinner as well, chicharones had to be on the menu! (Chicharones are a dish that is supposedly common down here but difficult to find in any restaurants, it’s made out of the same part of the pig that the bacon comes from, but it’s cut into bite-sized chunks instead of slices and then almost deepfried in it’s own oil… and it’s DELICIOIUS!) 

Deiner responded that Rita was more than happy to accommodate our request and to plan on having dinner with them. I continued to work up until about 12:30, got changed and we waited for the “come get us” message from Geoff and Tracy. Their appointments took longer than they were expecting, but eventually around 2pm we were on the road. We made quick time getting to the plantation, we said our hellos to Emilio and Rita and then Deiner asked Ramie to take him to his house to pick up his ATV. The two of them left and were gone for about 15 minutes before returning. Once they were back we all loaded up to go for an ATV tour through the plantation. We traveled down the road for a mile or two before we turned off and started traveling up another mountain road, twisting and turning through the plantation. It was breathtaking! An entire mountain side covered in Costa Rican snow!

I'm not sure what I'm doing with my head in that coffee plant.. Probably sniffing it.

Standing in fields of beautiful snow... In shorts!!

We eventually made it to the end of the road at the highest walk-able point of the plantation. We got out of the ATV and stood in awe looking over the coffee fields and the valley below, spotting, of all things, on St. Patrick's day......

no, not a leprechaun, but a rainbow which appeared to end right in this very coffee field. 

You can just barely see the rainbow in this photo, unfortunately it did not photograph well

I guess we know what's in the pot of gold in Costa Rica….COFFEE! We learned that Deiner’s decision to call Ramie today & ask if we wanted to come up and see this was because coffee plants only bloom like this for 2 days per year. The blooms just opened this morning, by tomorrow most will have turned brownish and by the end of the day almost all of them will completely fall off. As I mentioned, what we’re calling Costa Rican Snow is a rare to see and the reason is because of the short window that they bloom.

This is Ed, he also lives in Uvita and has a You Tube channel and is friends with Deiner he was filming a lot of our tour.

Geoff, having a great time seeing this for the first time

Deiner also told us that when he saw that the plants were blooming, we were the first people he thought of and were one of only 2 people that he called and invited up to see it. He always says we’re like family to them, and this only goes further to prove this. We <3 these guys!! 

Deiner with his proud coffee plants

Deiner really loves his plants

 We all hopped back in our rides drove just a short way back down the mountain before we pulled over again. 

Deiner told us more about the coffee plants and the importance of the bees pollinating the flowers while they are in bloom. If the bees don't pollinate the flowers they won't get as many coffee beans, the harvest will not be good, and they won't be able to make enough money from the sale of the coffee. 

They don’t earn a lot anyways when they sell to the big coffee companies. It's rather sad how little the farmers actually get paid and the amount of work that goes into making that delicious cup of coffee. While we were out in the fields we also checked out some of the other trees and plants that are mixed in with the coffee plants and asked why they have banana trees, citrus trees and other various types of plants mixed in. We found out that all of these taller trees help to provide shade to the coffee plants, which can be good for the plants, plus they can harvest things like the bananas and citrus fruits to supplement the coffee income during different times of the year. 

Once again, we jumped back in the ATV to head down another road to a different, smaller field that Deiner wanted to look at. 

Had to stop to admire the view of the ocean

Eventually we made it back to the plantation and of course Emilio brought out the moonshine so we had to take some shots. It's pretty much a tradition and a rule when you go to visit them. We took our seats at the table, continued the conversations and before long we were being served some delicious traditional food. 

After we finished our plate, the chicharones came out and we devoured those quickly, then more shots of moonshine and baileys. 

Chicharones

You know, everyone is Irish on St. Patricks day, especially the makers of the homemade Irish creme baileys drink!! 

We joked with them that we were renaming their farm to this

It was getting pretty late and almost dark and we decided it was time to head out before we were driving back down the mountain in complete darkness. We only then found out that Rita hadn’t yet served dessert! She was making banana marmalade for us. She looked a bit disappointed that we were leaving but she understood and was kind enough to put it in a container for us to bring home, with the request we had to return her container. No problem at all! We thanked them again, gave them hugs all and headed home. It was now dark and this was the first time we’ve driven down this mountain in the dark. It was an easy drive, especially once we got to the paved portion, but man it is so dark when you are that far back in the jungle!!

Today was a truly magical and breathtaking day and was worth every second of it. We are so thankful that Deiner thought to call us and invite us up to witness this beautiful sight.

Pura Vida!

Thursday 3/2- It's been a very uneventful week for us. Ramie’s task this week has been to find out the status of our DIMEX (resident ID card). Our initial appointment was at the end of January and we were told that it typically takes 4-6 weeks for the approval to be processed and the card sent. At that appointment we received our paperwork and a mail tracking number which becomes active only after Immigration approves your status and officially sends the card to the post office that you choose to receive it at.

Unfortunately we still have not heard if the approval has gone through. Ramie has been keeping in touch with Laura (our contact that helped us at our DIMEX appointment) over the past week to find out what the hold up might be. Laura checked with the people that she knows at immigration and found out that the hold up is because their printer was broken. It could take 8-10 weeks to get the card now! Yep, you heard that right… Costa Rica only has one printer for the DIMEX cards! What I should be saying is “Typical Government!” hahaha. The big problem here is that we are now actually illegal to drive here. Reciprocity on a foreign drivers license is tied to that Visa stamp in your passport, and since we are now technically legal residents (despite not having our card) we didn’t have to go on our border run to remain in Costa Rica legally. So, our last visa stamp expired Feb. 22, even though we’re legal to be here, our license is now “expired”. 

Dana is very excited for her Pulmerias and wanted to show you one that just started to open

When you arrive in the country as a tourist you are given a stamp in your passport with a certain number of days that it's valid for. Typically it's 90 days (max), but it's ultimately up to the immigration officer and he can give you less if he chooses to. As a tourist, to drive legally in Costa Rica you must to have a valid foreign driver's license and a valid visa stamp.

Since we have applied for residency and we have been approved, we now have a Costa Rican ID number tied to our US passports, we are in the immigration system as “approved for residency” and technically do not have to leave the country to renew our visa stamp to remain here. The problem lies only if you choose to drive. Huh? Yeah, we know, that makes absolutely no sense! So, at the end of the day, the people that have been approved for residency and don't drive, don't have to leave the country to do a border run any more. Because we choose to drive, we must have a valid visa stamp, because you know that makes total sense right? Yeah, it doesn't to us either, but that's the rule.

So, you’re probably wondering why we don’t just do another border run to get a valid stamp. Well, that would be because of Costa Rica’s OTHER rules when it comes to passport stamps….

Now that we have had our DIMEX appointment, we are in a different category in the immigration system than we were before. As we’ve probably mentioned before, it’s not uncommon here for one hand of the government to change their rules without talking to the other hands of the government. A newly passed law states that if you are a legal resident (which we are now) you will no longer receive a stamp your passports when entering the country. At this point we couldn't do a border run to be legal even if we wanted to because they won’t give us that stamp, but we also technically can’t drive since the last one that we do have is expired. So you are damned if you do, damned if you don't. If it’s not already confusing enough, there is yet another wrench thrown into this mess… Once we have our physical DIMEX card, we can then start the process to get a Costa Rica drivers license. But—we need that card and the printer is currently broken. The other catch to getting your drivers license (after you have the card in hand) is that the damn visa stamp (you know, the one causing us all of this trouble) must actually be expired by at least 1 day. Yes, you are literally forced to be illegal to drive in order to go to the appointment to get your drivers license. Are you all keeping up with this craziness? Yeah, me neither!!

If your head isn't spinning from THAT mess I think you would probably survive a move to Costa Rica!!

Anyway, back to: Where the heck is our DIMEX card at anyway? Like I said Ramie has been diligently researching all of these rules and how to find out where things are at, and while he was trying to track our status he found a number for a contact in the immigration department that you can actually reach out to after a certain number of weeks has passed. He reached out to them about a week ago and today, he finally got a message back from them: Your DIMEX has been processed! About 2 hours later Ramie received an email with our virtual DIMEX cards. We now have a virtual copy of our official Costa Rica ID cards and no longer need to use our US passports as our form of ID or carry them with us pretty much everywhere we go. This also means that we get to use the national/resident line at the airport! For me, that’s probably one of the best perks about this. Instead of being stuck in the immigration line at the airport which can take anywhere from 30 minutes to 3 hours or more (and we’ve stood in that line for more than 2 hours more than a handful of times) we get to use the “short” line that the locals use and breeze right through!

Finally, we are almost done with the residency process, only two more appointments to go!! The next step is to get an appointment for the homologation of our US drivers license. Basically, what that means is since we have a valid driver's license in another country they will honor it and we don't have to go through all of the exams like you would when getting a new license. Getting these homologation appointments is very difficult since they only offer a limited number of them. You can only go to this appointment if you already have your DIMEX card. Ramie found two open appointments in the middle of March and took the risk and booked them even though we don’t have our actual cards yet. We are still doing some research to see if the virtual cards will be sufficient or if we need the physical cards. If we discover that we need the physical cards and don’t have them in time we will just skip the appointment and look for the next available appointments.  

Here is that same flower fully open

We still have a couple of things that we have to do prior to the appointment (and in addition to the 2 steps that I just said we had left) is to have a “medical exam” to say we are fit for driving, and have our MN licenses officially translated to Spanish. It looks like Ramie has some more homework to do so we have it all ready to go for our upcoming appointment. Someday we’ll be done with all of this official paperwork stuff!!

Friday 3/3- We haven't spent any time with Loren and Nancy for quite a while, so we made plans to have dinner and catch up with them today after I was finished working. Ramie decided to make his coffee cake that he is so proud of perfecting for dessert so he spent the morning baking. We hung out for a few hours and ate a delicious meal Nancy prepared. Loren couldn't get enough of the coffee cake and went back for seconds so we gave them most of the leftovers and then called it a night.

Tuesday 3/7- Rain! It's raining! After the last rainy season I never thought I would say I'm happy to see rain again but this time of year what a nice relief it is! Today is the first real rain we’ve gotten since January and boy was it needed. We only got 1.3” (yeah, that sounds like a lot for those of you back in the US, but it’s really only a drizzle compared to what we’re used to here) but it was enough to wash the dust off of everything. It's amazing how everything including the plants look so brown with dust and you don’t really even notice that it was so dingy until it’s been cleaned off. The trees are now bright green, the grass got a good watering and isn’t so dry any more, and overall everything just looks so much better.

Saturday 3/11- Work, work work! That's all I’ve been doing 7 days a week and I think I need a break! Ramie’s coworker at the animal sanctuary told us that her husband's band Mojo Daddy is playing at different places nearby every weekend this month. Tonight is the first gig and they are playing at Whale Tail Brewery. We made plans with Geoff and Tracy to go out for an evening of live music, food and drinks. The band was scheduled to start at 6 so we decided to get there early in the hopes of getting a good table. We arrived at 5 and were asked if we had reservations. Huh? I didn't see anything on the Facebook advertisements about needing a reservation! Since we didn’t have one, they wouldn’t let us in. Well that sucks! We were really looking forward to listening to some good ole rock music covers.

Now that we’re all dressed up and out in town, where do we go? We talked about a couple other places that have been known for having music on the weekends but decided that we wanted to check out the new Uvita Gastropark that I had seen advertised. It was just a short drive down the road from the brewery and looked like it would be an interesting place. This “gastropark” was made up of 7 different establishments set in a U shape around a central courtyard/seating area. 6 of these establishments were made out of shipping containers, and the 7th is an old VW bus. 5 of the containers are each a different restaurant, 1 is a bar, and the VW is a Coffee and Smoothie shop. Each of the restaurants had a different theme, so depending on what you’re craving, you should be able to find something that peaks your interest. We also found out that they have a stage and live music tonight. I guess that worked out well for us. We found a nice picnic table and the guys went to get us some drinks. It didn't take us long to discuss what we wanted to eat and decided on the Texas BBQ! The guys went and placed our orders and we enjoyed our drinks and live music while we waited. The food came out quickly and was OMG it was DELICIOUS! Good BBQ is so hard to find here and we found a good one! We enjoyed every last bite of our meal, enjoyed the music and company with good friends before calling it a night around 9:30 (which is actually late for us, hahaha!) 

Tracy and I made the FB page of a local restaurant a couple of weeks ago, today the whole group of us made it onto the Instagram for the BBQ restaurant!!

Monday 2/13- After a very long wait for our ATV, Ramie finally got the call from the dealership that it was sitting in their shop, they just had to go through it and check it out to make sure that all the fluids were full and everything was in working order before letting us take it home. First, though, they needed Ramie to come in and fill out the purchase paperwork. He was so excited that he left right away after he got the call and headed to the dealership. He was gone for about an hour and a half, which seemed like a long time for some paperwork but sometimes he gets side tracked when he's in town and who knows what else he could have found himself doing.  Finally when he came home he told me that they had given him the full walk-through of the machine and showed him how everything functioned. He could have waited a little while longer for them to finish going through everything else that they had to check over and brought it home right now, but since he had the truck there and no way to get 2 vehicles home right now he told them that he would come back later to pick it up.

Around noon Ramie left the house again but this time walked to the dealership.  Fortunately it isn’t too far away! Once Ramie was in the driver's seat they explained just a few more things about the machine, and gave him the official paperwork that says that it is his, you know, just in case he were to be pulled over by the police. You see, there were no license plates on it yet, those would be coming later, so this paperwork is our only current proof of ownership. The machine technically has to have the inspection stickers, and a license plate to be legal but since this is a brand new ATV it doesn't have any of that yet and takes months to get. After they sent him on his way with his new machine, where was the first place he went?  Well, of course it wasn't home to show it to me!! His first stop was Loren and Nancy’s! They were just as excited to see the machine as I was, but they lived just down the road from the dealership so it was a convenient stop on the way home. They oooohed and ahhed over the machine and after a little bit of chatting Ramie headed home knowing that I was expecting him with our new toy. Of course, the dealership didn't put any gas in it so he had to make one more stop at the gas station on the way home and eventually I heard him pull into our driveway.

I needed a break from work anyway, so I jumped up from my desk to head outside & check it out. Wow, this thing is bigger than I was expecting. 

Ramie backing up to head out for our first ride together... don't run into the house!

We have never driven past the waterfall because we knew the road gets rougher in that direction, but since we had our new toy that was made for off-roading we decided that now was a perfect opportunity to go see what’s back there! Ramie took over driving at this point and we followed the road for a few more miles. We know that this road connects up with other roads up the mountain but we didn't want to go too far and take too many turns since it would be very easy to get lost. Since cell service is spotty & Google Maps isn’t reliable on these types of roads anyway, we didn’t want to get lost and decided to turn around and head back to a more populated area. 

Yes, way off in the distance you can see Whales Tail.

There are a lot of River Crossings when you get back into the mountains.

Saturday 2/18- There’s been a lot of talk around town the last few months about a brand new store that was being built. When construction of this large new building started everyone wondered what it was going to be, later after everyone knew what it was going to be there as a lot more discussion about whether it would be good for the community or bad for the community, and I must say that there are a lot of differing opinions that are flying around on the local Facebook groups. Personally, we’ve been a little bit excited for the new store and awaiting it’s opening.

Woohoo Glenn Sturgis GIFfrom Woohoo GIFs

You are probably wondering, what the heck is this store that she’s talking about? Well, the store is called Maxi Pali and it is kind of like a mini-Walmart (and it is actually owned by Walmart- Mexico). This store has mostly groceries, but also carries some clothing, electronics, appliances and household items. We’ve been to Maxi Pali stores in other towns, and while they don’t have everything that we buy on our big provisioning runs at Walmart in San Isidro, it definitely has enough to choose from that might extend the time between our big shopping trips a bit further. Our hope is that it would give some competition to the other big grocery store here in town and we would see some of the prices drop. Prices here in Uvita are significantly higher than prices for the same things in San Isidro, probably either because there is no competition or because of being in the National Park area and the number of tourists that come through here.

The new Maxi Pali actually opened a few weeks ago, but because it was “new” it was always super busy and we didn’t want to deal with all of that, so we decided to wait for all the hype to die down before we went to check it out. We decided that today was finally a good day to go see what this store would be like.

We were pleasantly surprised by the selection that they have, and the prices were definitely better than comparable items at the other big grocery store in town. Some of the prices were even better than Walmart in San Isidro, at least for now! This was very good news and hopefully it stays that way and it wasn’t just because of the new store opening promotions. Unfortunately they don't carry everything that we need that we buy on our trips to San Isidro, so we will still have to continue our trips to Walmart, not to mention that we’ll still want to go to San Isidro for the big Feria and all of the vegetables that we find there. Yes, I know, I’m pretty lame for being excited about a new grocery store in town, but hey—if it makes life just a little bit easier, I’m all for that!!

Friday 2/25- Today I decided to take a much-needed day off from my main job, but I did work a few hours in the morning on the side job. Ramie reached out to Deiner (from the coffee plantation) while I was working to ask if they would be available this afternoon for us to go up there to visit and have some afternoon coffee. Of course, Deiner is always happy to see us (or at least he makes it look like it) and opened the invitation for us to visit. Ramie then reached out to Geoff & Tracy to ask if they would like to go for a ride in the new ATV for some afternoon coffee. I don’t know if they were more excited to go for a ride or to check out the coffee plantation, but they were excited to join us and completely on-board with our adventure. The plan was set, just a few more hours of work and then take the afternoon off for a fun ride. We haven't had any rain recently and everything is super dusty so we made sure that everyone had sunglasses and some sort of face covering to protect us from clouds of dust in case we got stuck behind a vehicle (no windshield here!!). We picked them up around 12:30 with the intent to be at the plantation around 1:00.

After we left Geoff & Tracy’s house the first few miles of the drive are on paved roads, but the pavement eventually ends as you head toward the plantation and it turns into a rough, dusty mountain road. The ATV made the trip very smooth and we were able to make the trip much quicker than we did in the truck. Thankfully we barely even needed our face coverings!

 

    

When we first got to the plantation we went looking for the mama sloth and her baby that Deiner posted a picture a couple days ago. Unfortunately we didn't find them, but here is the picture that Deiner took.

Do you spot the baby?

As we returned to the plantation, Deiner was just finishing up with a tour but when he saw us he quickly introduced us to the group and brought out the shot glasses. Homemade moonshine for everyone!