Episode 253: How to Go Abroad for a Month

 

Hi there. Welcome back to the show. You’re listening to Live Free Creative Podcast. I am Miranda Anderson, the host of this fair show. And after a month abroad, I’m back in my recording studio in Richmond, Virginia. It feels good to be home. Today’s episode is number. For number 253, I’m going to be answering a couple questions about spending the month abroad as a family and be able to share the answers to the questions.

I put a question box up on Instagram at livefreemiranda, got a handful of questions, a lot of overlap, which is great because it seems like there were some similar questions that I can clear up and share some insights. Hopefully, the information is useful. Whether you’re thinking about taking a trip as a family for an extended period, if you’re thinking about whether that could even be possible in general, what it might look like in terms of planning and cost.

And, if you are specifically looking at Costa Rica, I am going to answer a couple questions about Before I dive into this week’s Q&A  I want to share a quick mindful moment.

Segment: Mindful Moment

I want you to get comfortable where you’re sitting or standing or walking. We’re just going to take a minute to breathe together and quiet the voices in our heads and hearts. Maybe the butterflies in our stomach. All of us have many different things. Responsibilities, relationships happening in our lives at the same time, layers and layers of emotions, experiences, ideas, possibilities, maybe challenges or obstacles or worries.
And for just a minute, I want to bring you to here and now together https: otter. ai
The last year, the last five years, I could say, of interesting, unexpected opportunities and challenges. Sometimes I just need a moment to breathe.
So, find some comfort. If you’re standing or walking, I want you to just breathe. Focus on the breath coming in and out of your nose. Big, deep breaths in through your nose. Feel the air pass through your nostrils and big, deep exhales out. You can keep your eyes open, of course, if you’re walking. If you’re seated, if you’re not driving, take a second and ground yourself into your sit bones, the bottom side of your pelvis, where you’re just you can feel the weight of your body settling in and grounding down into your seat.
Maybe you feel and focus some energy grounding through the bottoms of your feet as well. If your hands are free, just rub them back and forth along the tops of your thighs until they find stillness on your knees. If you’re seated and safe, allow your eyes to flutter closed, and let’s take a big, deep breath in together,
and out through your mouth.
We’re going to do five more deep breaths like that, just finding stillness and presence. It’s only focusing on right now, on the air coming in and out of your lungs, allowing thoughts as they come to just be noticed without judgment and dismissed.
Flutter your eyes open, give yourself a moment to just acknowledge this moment.

How to Take a Month Abroad

Wow, I love the difference that just a couple moments of stillness can make in the way that I feel. I hope that was helpful for you too. As I mentioned, today is going to be a candid episode answering a couple questions about how to take a month abroad as a family, a working family with kids and pets and a home and jobs.
There are some logistics required. There’s some flexibility necessary. And overall, I think an innovative, curious, can-do attitude is a major factor in being prepared for a trip for longer than a couple weeks at a time.

Question: What did you do about your house and pets while you were gone?

I’m going to start with the first question that I got, which was how we handled our house and our pets while we were gone. This is something that I mentioned in an episode somewhere along the way the last few months. It’s also an interesting question because we do own our home in Richmond, we have a garden and a yard, and we have ten animals. We have two dogs and two cats and six chickens who live in the coop in the backyard.
That… Going away for even a weekend feels like a, can feel like a chore in terms of finding somewhere to board the dogs, making sure that I’ve got it reserved and paid for in advance, asking our neighbor friend if she’ll come feed the cats, making sure someone’s going to feed the chickens, make sure they have water.

The chickens are by far the easiest to manage. Our cats and dogs need a little bit more care. The dogs are the highest maintenance on the hierarchy of pet care. Because we were leaving for so long, the house and pet care felt easier to me than if we were just going away for a weekend. Because I knew that I didn’t want to pay to board the dogs for an entire month.

It ends up where we board them ends up being around 100 a day, give or take, depending on the weekend and the season of the year and stuff. So that would have added over 3, 000 to the trip. And that’s just the dogs, let alone the cats and the chickens. So, I knew I needed a whole… pet solution. And this ended up working out being a house and pet solution as well.

For people who don’t have pets, I think a great option for traveling for an extended period is renting your house short term, like on Airbnb, for example. While you’re gone. My friend Preethi Harbuck, who travels extensively with her family, has a blog post all about what that looks like. And I’m going to link it in the show notes of this episode so that if that’s something you’re interested in, you can have some resources as far as where to start.

What I did was use a website called TrustedHouseSitters.com that is built for people who have pets who need home and pet care. On the other side of that, people who are looking to travel and take care of pets in exchange for free housing abroad, it ends up being a great win solution. Whether you’re looking to leave and have someone take care of your house and pets while you’re gone, or you’re looking to travel and you think, I want to stay in the same city for the whole time that I’m gone, and we don’t mind having a cat or a dog while we’re there, you could travel and have your stay be free on, if you’re using the flip side of this, we used the side where we had pet sitters come stay in our house in Richmond and take care of our animals and our home for the month.

We didn’t pay them for the care that they provided, they didn’t pay us for the use of our house for the month. It’s a great win solution. And when we came home last week, we were chatting with our house sitters about how it had gone, and it ended up being such a great… Solution for both of us.

The way trusted house sitters works is the people who are leaving town who are looking for house and pet care, create a profile about their home and their animals with the care that’s necessary and the dates they’ll be gone. And then it goes up onto a pin board, basically a virtual board where people who are traveling can search by home type they can search by country or city or by maybe even by animal.

I don’t know you can you know direct your search towards a certain area and see what’s available as far as home set. So, it works great I was able to just create my profile About our home about our animals post it up and within a weekend within four to five days of posting, I had about half a dozen applications, people who were interested in coming to provide that sit for us.

There were a couple that I quickly discarded. I said, thank you so much. This is going to be a great fit this time because they wanted to bring their pets along or they had small children. Those felt like variables that I didn’t want. to deal with. So, I ended up having Zoom phone conversations with two different people.
One was a couple who, by the time I talked to them, they had found a different month long sit during the same timeframe. And then the sitters that I ended up choosing, who was an English professor who lives in England and her college bound son. Her son is starting college at VCU this week. It was a perfect situation that they were able to come, stay, and they took really good care of our house and our animals.

And at the same time, they were able to find housing for the college kid, and get nestled into the city, and discover a few things along the way before mom goes back to school. England, really great win situation on both sides that we felt like they were doing us such a huge favor, creating this opportunity that we were able to leave with our animals in their home environment, taken care of while we were gone for the whole month, and our pet sitters expressed that same gratitude that they were able to come Live in the city, be really nearby, get settled in, find housing, get all registered and go buy all of the stuff that he needed for his first college apartment and do that at the exact moment where he, is getting settled into class this week and his mom goes home and now we all go back to the rhythms and routines of our lives.

If you have pets as part of the equation, Trusted House Sitters is amazing. If you do not have pets that you have to worry about leaving and you would like to stay for free, for an extended period, anywhere in the world, there are trusted house sitters in Australia, all over Europe, all over the United States.

This first couple that I spoke with who had booked themselves with someone else before I was able to accept them has done this full time for two years. They both work remote, and so they do about a month to two months at a time. Watching different people’s pets all over the country, seeing, the country, maybe they’ve gone outside of the country, I don’t know, but they haven’t had to pay for their own housing for over a year because they’re on this system of Doing the house sitters.

It’s just interesting if either side of that equation sounds like a good fit, you should check out trusted house sitters. This isn’t an ad. I found it because of a friend, and I thought it was like sounded like a scammy website. At first, I thought the name was really like too good to be true, and it was great.

I will again mention that I’ll post Preethi’s blog post about air being while you’re So you can, have your mortgage paid for you basically while you’re gone. I also have seen some great posts about people talking about house swapping. And I haven’t done that myself through like a formal website, but I know that option is available too.

Question: Did you work abroad?

Next, I want to talk a little bit about working abroad. This is something that came up. In a few different people’s questions, I think most listeners to the show, most of my followers on Instagram are familiar with what I have done for the last dozen years for work, which is right now, podcasting, previously writing blog posts, working with sponsors, selling online courses, and doing online coaching, as well as hosting retreats.

I know, it’s like a several arm octopus of a business. All the things that I’ve done over the last decade have been primarily online. So, I could work anywhere. I could be wherever I needed to be writing or recording or, taking pictures, whatever it has been, coaching. I did, I kept all my coaching clients over the summer and was able to do coaching calls from Costa Rica.

So, I don’t think anyone is asking really a whole lot about what my job looked like as far as working abroad. In fact, part of why we chose Costa Rica was that it gave me the opportunity to finalize some of the plans for the retreat that I’m hosting as part of my business, Novio’s Couples Retreat, that’s coming up in the fall, and so it was in very small part, like maybe I’d say 10% of our overall experience was me doing work on the ground in Costa Rica in order to be more prepared for our retreat in the fall.

That hasn’t been the case for Dave. In fact, my husband’s job has primarily been an in-office job for most of his career until the last two years. He was one of the only people that I knew who went into the office during the heaviest wave of COVID, at the very beginning, when everyone that you know was working from home.

My husband was still going into the office every day because he was working at a very confidential research and development facility. My husband is a chemical patent attorney, and he had an office in a confidential R& D facility where they felt like they could keep everyone safe because they have individual offices.

They were able to sanitize and, mask and everything. They did their meetings virtually. In the office, so he would be on his computer talking to his coworker in the next room through his computer because of confidentiality reasons around the intellectual property. They wanted them to be in the office.

I know. Isn’t that wild? It’s a little bit unusual. And because of that, and the strain, that it put on our family, I was homeschooling all the kids. Everyone we knew was working remotely. Dave realized that he probably wanted to have the option to work remote or at least hybrid, and he changed jobs mid pandemic in 2021, changed jobs where he was able to start working remote because of the pandemic, and then once they changed back to hybrid, he has been working hybrid.

This probably doesn’t sound all that different from what a lot of you have experienced, or maybe You yourself are working hybrid. You have a spouse or brothers or sisters or parents who’ve had the option to work hybrid. My sense is that even people who have gone back to work on occasion have not yet been expected to be back full time like eight to five like we so many people were before the pandemic.

Of course, I know that there are workers who must be on site. For example, if I was working right now as a nurse, unless I had, the rare like education or hybrid triage job, I would be in hospital or in a doctor’s office. I know that there’s a lot of jobs that require on the ground. In person showing up every day.

And luckily for so many of us, I think it’s great for our lifestyles to have a little bit more flexibility in what work looks like. I think it’s because of that job change that we recognized. For us to go abroad for a month as a family, that didn’t mean Dave had to earn up a month worth of paid vacation days.

It meant that we could use a combination of hybrid work and vacation days to build the month. As a full package, rather than doing two weeks here and two weeks, two weeks in the spring and two weeks in the fall, we could do it all together. And the final kicker of this for us was watching my husband’s coworker, who has the same position at his same job, do this last summer.

He and his family went on a five weeklong RV trip through the western United States, and he worked on the road. So, he did some vacation days, and then he also had hybrid workdays when he came back, he reported that it had gone well. He was able to work efficiently, even though he was on the road.

He had to make sure he had good Wi Fi on the days that he was. Plugged in and getting work done, virtually at the office and meetings and things like that, but otherwise it went well this experience that our coworker had gave us the confidence to say this is going to work for us. And now it feels like a really great time.

We planned. The whole experience last fall, we decided when we were going, we booked our Airbnb in Costa Rica, having that long of a runway also gave us the opportunity to thoughtfully consider what the rest of Dave’s vacation days would look like throughout the year 2023, because we were deciding what we wanted our family schedule to look like abroad.

And what we settled on was that he would take the first week off. That was our adventure week where we were up in the mountains. We were doing a lot of activities every day. It didn’t make sense for him to work that week. So, we called that whole week a vacation. So those were five vacation days. And then for the latter three weeks, he took Monday and Friday off each week and then worked remotely in the middle of the week.

This went well because he only used About three quarters of his vacation days for the year, even though we were gone for the whole month. And on the days, he was working, he was able to schedule all his meetings and do his work at the Airbnb. We would wake up and hang out with the kids.

I would maybe walk them out to the beach. Dave could meet us at the beach later. He could work in the evenings if he needed to. Having the hybrid work schedule. And having that be a norm and expectation at his office made it possible for us to creatively build a whole month abroad without exhausting all his vacation at once.

We used most of it, and so we don’t plan to travel for Thanksgiving or Christmas this year like we normally would. Because we don’t have the extended days. The other vacation days that he was saving for is our couple’s retreat in November. So, Costa Rica is taking the vacation for Dave this year. And I don’t think he’s sad about that at all.
We’re really pleased with the way that it worked out.

It was great because I had some days that I needed to be home at the Airbnb in Costa Rica, working, doing calls and things as well. So, we were able to piggyback some of that work and felt. Like we were on vacation, even though, some of those days we had our computers out, someone asked a question about how to prepare your employer or talk to your employer about the possibility of something like this, a hybrid work trip, and Because I don’t have a lot of employer employee relationship experience recently, I’m just going to offer some general tips and advice that I found as I was looking for what this conversation might look like online.

And there are a lot of different resources for talking about flex work and hybrid work. Especially right now because it’s becoming more normal.

So the first tip is to make sure that you’re prepared with the discussion, that you have an excellent track record with the company, that you have past positive reviews, examples of you successfully managing your time and meeting deadlines, and that you are able to function in a hybrid environment, that you’re a self-starter, that you can focus when you’re You know, alone by yourself on the computer screen.

The next one would be to show why it’s beneficial for them. And some of that might be things like being able to work different hours. For example, my husband, the company that he works for is based in Europe. So, a lot of his calls are typically early in the morning or late at night anyway. He’s taking those calls from home, whether he is at the office or not.

He’s not going to be at the office at 10 at night. So being able to explain why you can be less distracted, get more done, save the company money, without a commute, your hours can be more flexible, depending on what the needs might be. That could be beneficial for them. You can also suggest a trial.

So maybe it’s not, I’m leaving for a full month. Maybe you build up to I’m going to work, seeing if you can work from home two days a week to begin and then build up to where you’re working from home three days a week. That would be exactly what we did for the month. Dave was working hybrid three days a week and then use the other days as vacation days.

The final tip would be that maybe this isn’t like a full-time hybrid environment. Maybe You want to suggest sort of a hybrid sabbatical where you are working, you’re working remote, you’re going to do it for just the month, but when you come back, you plan on being back to the office just as normal business as usual.

Maybe some of those tips will help you think creatively and flexibly about how to continue to do a really good job at work and create some of the incredible experiences that you hope for with yourself or your family traveling for an extended period, even while you remain employed. The next question is about cost.

Question: How much did your trip cost?

And I’m glad that someone asked this because I’m always curious, like how much does that cost for you to do that? And there’s so many variables. I always think it’s fun. My friend Jansen Bradshaw talks a lot about money candidly, and I love that her. Instagram is everyday reading. One thing Janssen always mentions when she talks about money is what matters to you and your family is going to be different than what matters to me and my family.

So even if we have the same exact budget, the way that it breaks down or the way that we decide to spend it may look entirely differently. So, I’m going to share an outline of the cost of our month abroad with that. Advice that takes it with a grain of salt, a sort of an outline idea of what something like this may cost and that if you were doing it with your family, it would probably look different in one place or another just because the choices that you make or the opportunities that arise may be different than ours.

I’m going to start with the highest expense, which was the location where we stayed. We stayed in two, technically three different locations, but I’m going to call the first week our adventure week. And I talk about these the last two episodes. I have part one and part two of our Costa Rica family adventure in part one episode 251.

I talk about adventure week during adventure week. We stayed in two different lodges up in the volcano region in the north part of the country and those two lodges I’m just putting together because in both places we paid for all inclusive, an all-inclusive price where our activities and food were all part of the total cost of the stay.

That’s week one. Week two, three, and four. Was all at an Airbnb on the beach and we stayed in the same place the whole time. So, the highest expense of the whole trip was the Airbnb because it was three weeks of a three-bedroom house on the beach. That said, we got a screaming killer deal on this beach house for the area, and I went back to look to the, I was thinking maybe we should just book it again for next July and the price is already almost triple for next year. I think because the area is just growing.

I mentioned in one of the past couple episodes that there’s a lot of construction and interest in the area right now. All of that to say, the Airbnb ended up breaking down to about, about 12, 1300 a week. Which is insane, less than $200 a night for a gorgeous 3-bedroom Airbnb on the beach with a pool.

Unheard of. I was looking to book it for July next year, and it’s $17, 000 for the month for next year. The same exact house that we paid, like $6, 000 for the month this year. So, I feel like, wow, I’m so glad that we did it when we did. And I know that there is. Different levels of housing all over the world, depending on where you want to go, and you can usually find something within your budget.

For example, we probably could have been in two bedrooms and been fine, and it was just great that there were three. We probably would have been fine without a pool. We loved having one, our budget needed to Adjust in the future. It could. That was the highest expense. The next highest was our flights.

And again, we got great deals on flights, but they were about $800 each for a family of five. That was about 4$, 000. So now we’re up to just under $10, 000. Add in the first week, our adventure week. Which was all inclusive, but it ended up being about $2, 500 for lodging, food, and activities for the first week were at about $1,500.
The car rental is crazy, and I think even in the United States right now, renting cars is expensive because we’re a family of five, because we wanted a four-wheel drive to be able to You know, accommodate all the different things that we wanted to do. It was just over $100 a day. So, the car rental was around $3, 000.

It was a big expense, and we went back and forth on it. I’m going to pause for a second because one of the other questions that I got was, how is public transportation within the country?

Question: Did you need a car?

Did you have to have a car? Could we go and use buses and shuttles and things like that, Ubers? Costa Rica is unique in that It’s a beautiful second world country with some infrastructure and their roads are not one of their strong suits.

So, there are a handful of well paved, evenly graded highways, just major arteries through the country. And anything outside of that is hilly, rocky, muddy, sometimes driving through rivers. And I’m not even joking, like driving through to where you almost can’t see the tire anymore and you’re just hoping that you don’t get washed down the river.

A four-wheel drive is helpful. A rental car unless you are going just straight one place. If you’re flying in and going straight to a resort for the week, you’d be fine. If you’re flying in and you and your partner are Bringing backpacks and you have plenty of time and you can take the buses are great.

They’re reliable. They’re comfortable. They’re not air conditioned, but they’re comfortable. When I was in my twenties, I spent 10 days backpacking in Costa Rica with some friends and we Took public transportation everywhere and Uber didn’t exist back then. So, we were taking city buses and occasionally hailing like an actual city taxi.

There aren’t very many taxi taxis because we were mostly outside of the big city of San Jose, mostly in the countryside where we were taking buses. And we were just living by the Lonely Planet guide of walk from the pink barn down to the corner and you’ll turn and see it, a bus stop.

It’s totally entirely possible to take public transportation within the country. If you are willing to be incredibly inconvenienced and go at a very slow pace, if you have a full family that you want to haul around and go do interesting things all at once, you still have to have the time to drive it’s, five hours from San Jose out to the beach, but you can do it at your own pace, and you just chalk that up to one of the expenses of the trip. We went back and forth on whether we should rent a car for just the first week to get up to some of these more remote locations up in the mountains and then drop the car off once we got to the beach house and not have it for that last three weeks because we would just be walking to the beach and walking to the yoga places and walking around town.

Nosara itself is walkable. I ended up deciding to rent a car for the whole experience because the place I wanted to rent it from that had a price. It was, it felt easier. They don’t have a drop off in Nosara. I would have had to return it all the way back to the airport and then figure out how to get out to the beach anyway.

So, it just made the most sense. We used Adobe Rental Car, which is a Costa Rican local brand. They were great. The car was great. Like I said, it was about $100 a day. And we loved the experience. That was… The first time that I had rented with them, and I would do it again and I’m glad we made that decision.

We ended up using the car quite a bit during the last three weeks when there were different places that we wanted to go that weren’t right downtown and we felt like we had the freedom to do that without, we had already paid for it. So, it didn’t feel like we were racking up all these other additional transportation costs in the country.
All in all, we’re like at $15,000 right now. The last couple expenses are food. Once we got to the beach, we were just using our regular food budget for home. We generally spend about $300 a week on food as a family here in Richmond, and we went ahead and spent about that same amount. It was maybe a little bit less.

For food at the grocery store and we were making our meals eating at home, except for date night and pizza night. And those are also things that we have in our budget at home. So, once we got to the beach, like the first week was like our vacation budget. And then. Our living expenses, the day to day eating and getting a drink at the beach or whatever, like walking by the bakery and getting a soda and a croissant, that was our regular day to day budget.
And then we did have a couple activities on top of that were a little bit more of an expense. So, all in all, with four weeks of lodging, a rental car, our flights, a bunch of cool activities, some included in prices, some that we paid extra and our food. We landed around $17,000 for four weeks abroad.

I think at one point early on, like In my calculations, I thought maybe we could do this for around $10, 000 for the month and that was before we had decided we were going to rent a car and it was before I had looked into some of the all-inclusive, activity and food lodges up in the mountains and it probably would have been possible if we had dialed down some of the adventure piece and if we had just gone straight to the beach and stayed there.

But we didn’t. And, done surfing for a month, we probably could have been around $10,000 for the month, and it would have been an entirely different. There were so many things that we did during that first adventure week that we really appreciated as experiences. We loved having a car and being able to experience some of the different parts of the country.

I laugh remembering. The last time Dave and I were abroad for a month on vacation was right after I graduated from nursing school in 2008. We spent a month in Asia, in Singapore, Malaysia, and Thailand. And the entire trip, we were backpacking. The entire trip, including our flights, all our lodging, and all our food for four weeks was $3,000.

It just cracks me up that we could do that. And I remember for years, I thought, how did we do a whole month abroad for $3,000? Because we were shoe stringing, and we were eating street food and we were staying in hostels, and we were backpacking. I look at our budget for this trip and feel like it was a really great value.
And I’m so glad that We took this opportunity that we made it work. We, we’re going to be sacrificing in other areas of our lives, not going on some other trips that we may have gone on if we hadn’t taken the time and used the travel budget in this way. And it was exactly what we needed.

It was exactly what we hoped for. So, I’m incredibly grateful that we had the opportunity, that we made the space in our lives and our finances and took the time because we are… Changed and better because of the experience that we had the last couple questions.

Question: Why Costa Rica?

What are some of the quirks of the country? What are some of the someone asked a question about snakes and spiders and scorpions and creepy crawlies? My quick backup is that I fell in love with Costa Rica over 20 years ago, When I lived there as a college student and the reason that I chose Costa Rica back then, there were two main reasons.

One, it had a neutral Spanish accent, which I was going abroad specifically to learn to speak Spanish in an immersive environment. So, the Spanish accent mattered a lot to me at that point. It would have been very different going to Spain, for example, where they have a specific type of dialect or Argentina or Mexico, there are some countries with a very specific Spanish dialect, which is great.

It’s beautiful. And Costa Rica has a neutral Spanish accent, and it’s very easy to listen to. They speak very slowly. Most people, like in general, as a culture, they speak a little bit more slowly. It’s a beautiful, neutral Spanish. In addition to that, it is. A very calm people and culture in the eighties or early nineties.

They disbanded their armed forces. They No longer, maintain a regular army. As part of that, they are not constantly fighting civil wars or, local disputes with their border countries. And It’s just got a very calm, wonderful vibe. So as far as I know, I’ve had some people say they’re a little bit nervous about traveling in Central or South America.

They, it just feels a little bit like a little less safe than maybe going to Europe. That has not been my experience with Costa Rica at all. I feel incredibly safe. There’s, a tiny bit of petty crime. Maybe if you leave your wallet out on the beach, it probably won’t be there when you get back, but there’s not a lot of violent crime at all.

It’s a really. Wonderful place to travel. The most dangerous thing in Costa Rica is probably the wildlife. I love the question about snakes and spiders because I told you a story last two weeks ago about our encounter. Gratefully, it was a lucky encounter, but seeing terciopelo snake, which is one of the most, it is the most venomous snake in the Americas, and we were, feet away from it.

Every time I’ve gone to Costa Rica, I have seen or been… In not in dangerous close quarters, but I’ve encountered in the wilderness creatures that are potentially harmful on this trip. We saw a couple different kinds of snakes. We saw this close very dangerous snake. We also saw a python.

It was in Alaska. a tree and a guide pointed it out to us. So, it wasn’t something that we were close to. We didn’t see many spiders. A couple, there was a beautiful beetle looking spider that had this kind of spiky red back outside the door of our beach house and it had a beautiful web, and we mostly just observed it.

We didn’t feel threatened by it. We didn’t notice a lot of creepy crawlies inside everywhere that we stayed other than mosquitoes which are just around when you’re in the rainforest. They’re everywhere seemed to have pretty good pest control. When we went on a river cruise, we saw dozens of crocodiles, but we didn’t feel threatened at all.
We were in a boat. Had I been swimming in that river, I probably would have died. Truly they were everywhere. It was cool, though, to see them and be safe. We at the Animal Rescue Center, of course, were able to observe some cool predators’ jaguars and ocelots and things like that.

There’s a lot of coatis, which are these interesting looking, they look like a hybrid between an anteater, a raccoon, and a monkey. They’re not dangerous. They’re not aggressive. They’re peaceful, but they do travel in groups of 20 to 50. And when I was backpacking in Costa Rica.

Years ago, we were on a trail miles and miles into a national park and stumbled into a family of cooties, and it was it felt very threatening because there were so many of them all at once, and they were looking at us and, burying their teeth like a raccoon. And, a raccoon, I don’t know if a raccoon ever attacks a person, comes at a human, or if it does a lot of damage, but when you’re surrounded by 50 raccoons all looking at you like that, it can be a little unnerving.

We didn’t have that experience on this trip. We saw cooties several different times, but, and even traveling along trees in a group, but they weren’t on the ground with us. We saw many monkeys, which never feel very harmful. They’re always just cute and fun to see. We saw lots of iguanas, lots of lizards.

We saw a ton of turtles, of course, if you listened to my last episode, you heard everything about our magnificent turtle nesting experience. That’s episode 252. We also, the very last day when Dave and I were out surfing, we saw two rays jump and it was fun. I don’t know what type they were, stingrays or manta rays or if there’s a difference, but we saw it like jump out of the water and flap around a little bit and then land back in the water.

The ocean itself. Doesn’t have sharks right along where we were. So, we never had to worry about that. I didn’t. We saw dolphins. I think a couple people noted that they had seen whales from the beach, but we didn’t see any while we were there. All in all, the wildlife experience in Costa Rica is just overwhelmingly.

Wonderful. And we really appreciate the biodiversity and having that be part of our trip. We loved getting the chance to experience it and like building a trip around, taking advantage of the opportunity to see some of the spectacular nature and animals that the country offers beyond going to the beach.

The beach is cool, and you can find a cool beach in a lot of different places. What you can’t find in very many different places around the world is the amount of Nature, biodiversity, animals, and plants that you find in Costa Rica. So, I’m glad that we took the time to take advantage of that and learn about it while we were on the ground.

Question: Will you do it again?

The last question that I got that I thought was interesting was, will you go back? Will you do it again? And like I mentioned a little bit earlier in this episode, I already was thinking, okay, maybe we just do this every year. Maybe we just, book the same Airbnb for the same month and just have this be a place that we go back to.

And in fact, the last two times Dave and I have been in Nosara, we’ve Casually looked at real estate lots or, small beach houses that are being built right now because there’s something so enticing about the idea of just having this home away from home. That’s paradise. We realized on this last trip, though, that beyond maybe not wanting to, own a house in a different country that we really like the idea of going different places as a family.

So, while we Hope to go back to Costa Rica and, I’m sure that we will at some point. I don’t know that we’ll do another full month there, at least in the same exact location. Maybe we will, but I think the next time we might choose somewhere different to experience a little bit more closely like we did.

This time, and as my kids get a little bit older, they’ll probably have opinions about all of that as well. They loved it. And so maybe if we asked them, they’d say, Yeah, let’s just go back and do the same thing again. And maybe there are other places that we’d like to dig into and experience. A little bit more closely as a family as well.

That’s it for the Q& A of how to take a month abroad. Hopefully some of that information was helpful or gave you some ideas. Maybe it’s a month, maybe it’s several months, maybe it’s just a week and you haven’t taken a vacation in a while and you’re just trying to figure out how to… Put it all together. I deeply believe in the power of travel, of being new places.

I also don’t think you have to go abroad. I think that you can find new ways to experience the world around you in your very own city. One of the biggest benefits to travel is being able to relate and empathize and commune with the world, and I recognized partway through our trip that there are opportunities for me to have cultural experiences within my day-to-day life that I’m not taking advantage of.

And as I was starting in Spanish class, the second week of our trip, we all took Spanish class for a week, I introduced myself. said I, I’ve been speaking Spanish for 20 years and I don’t have a lot of opportunities to speak Spanish and I said Because I live in a city where there aren’t a lot of Spanish speaking folks And as soon as I said it, I thought that’s not right at all I happen to live in an area of a city where not a lot of my neighbors speak Spanish But I’m sure that there’s a whole community of Latino, Latina Spanish speaking folks in Richmond that I just haven’t Encountered and I started to look for opportunities to spend more time in a Spanish speaking environment and found a couple great places that I can volunteer with Spanish speaking refugees or help relocate people within the city using my Spanish language ability and comfort level and conversation to maybe help other people feel a little bit more at home here in Richmond, just like me.

So many people helped us feel at home when we were abroad. So, whether you’re looking to plan a trip or just have an experience, a culture experience where you live, hopefully this episode in the last couple episodes have given you some ideas of how to do that. One other thing that I learned while I was gone is that while I’m good at going on vacation, I’m not great at taking a break.

I’ve decided as an effort to give myself a chance to take a little bit of a breather. I’m going to take some time off from the podcast. Rather than starting the beginning of September as it normally would, Season 6 is going to begin the first week in October. So, you have five weeks off where I’m not going to air a new episode.

If you’re behind, this is a great chance to catch up. I know I’ve had some people say, I haven’t listened for a few weeks. The summer got crazy. So hopefully having a few weeks, if you’re a regular listener, will give you a chance to catch up. And if you are caught up, if you are one of my lovely listeners who tunes in every single week, take advantage of going back and listening to a couple of your favorite older episodes, encore episodes of your choice.
I’m not going to air. Oncore episodes or old episodes during the next month. I’m just going to take a real break and generate some new ideas, relax a little bit and be excited to come back with fresh perspective in October. That said, I’m not taking a break from coaching, and I have a couple open spots on my schedule right now.

So, if you’re interested in one-on-one coaching, please get in touch with me at Miranda at livefreecreative. co I am booking new coaching clients for monthly, bimonthly, or weekly coaching calls. I can help you work on a personal project, work on developing some strengths and skills in your productivity or your efficiency.

We can dive into a creative project, and I can help you figure out the next steps as you launch something new or for just a fresh perspective to help you feel a little bit less stuck in some areas of your life where you could use a little bit of help. Send me an email at Miranda at livefreecreative.co.

I can’t wait to chat with you. I’ll catch you in October. Bye bye.