Costa Rica, here we come!

It's decided. We're going to Costa Rica!

We are road trippers. We try to get out and explore our state, returning to favorite locations and driving farther and farther to discover new places. As a one income family with four children, we have been limited to places we could reasonably reach by car. We are fortunate to live in a beautiful state, full of parks and rivers and beaches and interesting cities, and we have tried to explore them all.

However, this year marks our 25th wedding anniversary. We wanted to celebrate big. I understand there are people to whom a trip to Europe is an annual event, and hopping on an airplane is an irritating inconvenience. We are not those people. This may be our trip of a lifetime. We're making it happen. 

When we originally discussed how to mark the occasion, we talked about sun and fun in Hawaii. We talked about Fiji. The hubby pulled up picture after picture of beautiful atolls on his phone. (What? He doesn't swim!) One day, however, he came home from work asking, "What about Costa Rica?" An acquaintance had recently traveled there and had regaled my husband with photos and stories of this pura vida paradise. 

We looked into a trip, and it looked like it was going to be cost prohibitive. I mean, the airfare alone was over $700 each! So we started looking again at Hawaii, although I could tell hubby's heart wasn't really in it. Then we got slammed with some medical bills and stopped looking altogether. 

What changed our mind? 

I think we remembered that we only walk this path once, and the climb becomes steeper as we go along. 

My sister and her husband are celebrating their 25th this year also, and when she asked me what we were planning. I realized that I sadly did not have an answer, so we began searching again. (Thank God for the internet and Tripadvisor!) We looked at Costa Rica and drooled over the placid forest scenes and the beautiful beaches. We got excited over volcanoes and rappelling canyons and zip-lining. We agonized over locations. North or south? Which beach? What were people saying about various locations? We saw a cute little B&B with a five star rating and only one night available within our time frame. We looked at each other, and took the bait. 

From there it's been sheer planning madness. It was a week of perusing locations and filling in reservations, watching airfare rise, then breathing a sigh of relief when it fell to previous levels. All the tough stuff is done, and now it's a matter of filling in the middle.

This may take a huge bite out of our budget, but so have many other things. Home repairs. College. Cancer. Through everything, there is one truth that remains. You can't put a price on memories.

Costa Rica, here we come!

Reach for the Stars

When my son was about 5 years old, I sent him to Grandma's for a week and painted the planets on his ceiling against a painted black void. Everything but the sun was to scale, with tiny Pluto tucked into a corner. I filled in gaps with pinprick stars and comets, and I painted above the door "Reach for the Stars!"

Reach for the stars.

In my hopeful young mother's heart, I wished for my son to dream, and dream big. I hoped for him to work hard to achieve whatever was possible for him to achieve. I tried to teach him to explore, both his world and his options. He looked under rocks and examined bird feathers. He peered down into tidepools and up into the sky. He listened for the music of his soul and expressed it brashly through his screaming trumpet riffs and quietly in the strumming of a guitar on a moonlight night. He looked and reached, but the stars eluded him. Like an untethered soul floating in the universe, he was without direction. Until he saw Saturn's rings through a high powered telescope.

He is now 21 and in his fourth year of college. We had a conversation a few weeks ago. Although I love his young, idealistic view of the world, his father and I were getting worried about the practical side of life, including college graduation. I tried, in my best motherly, non-hovering way, to try to help him find direction. What could he do with the credits he had now? What kind of job could he see himself in? Gently pushing him to finish what he started. He reminded me of our talks about the defining moments in life and how one of his was seeing Saturn's rings. His eyes lit up. He became animated talking about how his experience. He told me of his dream to own an observatory. At that point I thought, what can I say to that?

I've always said my son was born under a lucky star. Things just seem to fall in front of him. He recently moved to Flagstaff, Arizona to work at Lowell Observatory. While he was orienting himself to the place, he hooked up with a VIP tour and got to see behind the scenes, places other employees have never seen. He's excited and alive. I don't know where this job will take him, but he's moving in an interesting direction, and that's good enough for me. He's reaching for his dreams by quite literally reaching for the stars.