I start each day with a freshly brewed cup of local coffee...and think about how lucky I am to live where I do, the beautiful city of Alajuela, in Costa Rica's expat favorite of the Central Valley. It's always been a dream of mine to live abroad and now I can say that it's a dream come true. Back in Seattle I worked in nursing, specifically Alzheimer's care, a career I'd had since graduating high school.
I was enjoying a stroll down the beach in Tamarindo the other day—it's just a 10-minute walk from my house—when a couple, visitors from the Midwest, asked me to take their picture. We chatted, and I mentioned that I lived in town.
Fed up with the harsh Midwest winters and tired of working too much to pay for a life we didn't have time to enjoy, my husband, Junior, and I decided we weren't willing to wait for retirement to see the world and enjoy life. Just before Christmas last year, we started researching our overseas options. We sold all of our belongings after New Year and at the start of April this year, we landed in Costa Rica...without ever having been here before.
As retirement neared, Bob Beavis, 66, and his wife Linda, 59, thought they were all set. Bob’s last job was as a HR director near Dayton, Ohio, which made him eligible for a state pension. He found his job rewarding and he had a plan. He would put in his 10 years then get free healthcare in retirement, with $50 per month to cover Linda, too.
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"In the U.S., you're always going, going, going...it's so easy to lose sight of where you're headed. Life got too fast-moving for us", explains Ray Granade. "We always needed to be somewhere, quickly, then somewhere else. It seemed like we were spending an extraordinary amount of time sitting in traffic. Now the longest we wait in the car is usually for a herd of cattle to cross the road," he adds, saying he and his wife Kim, both 63, also wanted to escape the consumerism in the U.S.
As the sun set over the Pacific, the silhouettes of fishing boats lined up on the horizon came into sharp relief. Just in front of me, a dozen children clambered through tide pools searching for shells and sea creatures. The strains of reggae from the live band playing at the bar just behind me provided a great soundtrack to this late afternoon on the beach. A friend of mine standing next to me turned and said, “Not bad, huh?”
As I came over the last hill on the road from Tilaran, a small town about 10 minutes from the shore of Lake Arenal, I could see what makes Arenal so special. The stunning lake vistas opened up before me... Most of the land here is forest, pasture, or farm—split by rivers, streams, and rocky waterfalls...natural and unspoiled. And it has that small-town feel, where strangers say "Buenas tardes" as you walk through town or wave if you drive by.
The 24-hour media machine fuels this “fear of elsewhere.” Footage of revolutions in the streets and masked gunmen stalking the jungle makes for good TV. Footage of people peacefully and cheerfully going to the market, relaxing on their porch of an evening, and doing the sorts of things normal daily life brings, well, that’s not going to attract the TV news crews, is it?