That Time we Moved to Costa Rica

Updated: Nov 20, 2023

Welcome to "go Callie go"!

Our Story - That Time we Moved to Costa Rica

What better place to start than from the beginning? Well not the beginning beginning, I won’t bore you with that, let’s just go back a few years, February 4th 2021 to be exact, smack dab in the middle of the pandemic and the day that our family loaded ourselves, 8 suitcases and two labradoodles into a rented minivan and drove 1000 miles to Los Angeles International Airport, where we handed over our one-way tickets to Costa Rica and boarded the flight that would take us on the most epic adventure!

One that would forever change our perspective on life, travel & the world.

And we were off!

8 hours of travel later, we finally landed in Costa Rica and made our way through immigration. We tracked down a luggage cart and lugged our giant pile of suitcases outside and into the beautiful Costa Rica sunshine. We only had one more leg of a pretty intense few days of travel left and luckily we had been to Costa Rica before and were excitedly greeted by the most amazing shuttle driver who made the final transition pretty easy.

A short drive later and with two very sleepy little boys, we pulled into the bustling, coastal surf town of Tamarindo.

Our driver dropped us off in front of our new building and with our very limited Spanish we managed to figure out how and where to find our new apartment. We were home and just in time too, only seconds after dropping the bags into a giant pile in the middle of the living room, my phone rang with the news that the dogs had arrived and they were ready for us to grab them from downstairs.

We had flown the dogs via a private transport service called Pet Lounge. They had flown out of LAX the night before, had been boarded in San Jose, the capital of Costa Rica, for a night and then driven to Tamarindo the day we arrived. A long few days of travel for the dogs too!

After the chaos calmed, we spent a few minutes digging through our bursting suitcases to find a change of clothes, then we ventured out to find food. The sun was just setting and in Costa Rica sunset is an event! The entire town gathers on the beach to send off the sun and celebrate another beautiful day. We walked down the beach to a beachside restaurant called Capitan Suizos and had our first dinner in Tamarindo. We toasted margaritas and pineapple (piña) smoothies as we celebrated the end of our long trek. We were home and that was forever a night we will never forget.

We spent 8 months in Costa Rica and to say it was an adventure would be a complete and total understatement. In 8 months we experienced everything from awe to fear to love to discomfort. Travel does that, it shows you everything that life has to offer and often times all at once.

Now it would take an eternity to share the entire Costa Rica adventure with you here, and in retrospect this blog should have come to life the day we started dreaming that adventure up, but it didn’t and the goal of this first post is not as much to recap that adventure but more to introduce you all to what we’ve done and show you how that adventure led us to where we are today and the launch of “go Callie go”.

So! Fast forward 8 incredible months and we made our way back to the United States. A bit beat up, but a lot lit up. Life is meant to be lived and we had no intention of settling. We did need to rebuild though.

So we bought a house, started a couple businesses and started thriving in a life that was all too familiar. It was back to the grind that at one point we were free from and it didn’t take long for us to see that it was not what we wanted.

So we’ve drawn our line in the sand and we have planted our flag. Our goal is to travel, to adventure, to see the world through brave eyes. To live bold and boldly embrace the unknown. To show our kids that life does not need to be linear and that all dreams deserve to the chased.

So here we are, welcoming you into our adventure as we document our family travels and our journey to creating a life by our own design.