We will always look back fondly on our second U.S. leg, which included New Orleans, Palm Springs, and Sedona for our long stays. Here are five lessons we learned on Leg 7: Living Somewhere You’ve Always Wanted to Live is Worth It This leg, we prioritized month-long stays in two pricier locales because they were…

Our second U.S. leg (aka, Leg 7 of our travels) was just as fun and rewarding as the first. In fact, in some ways it was more so because we were able to have more family and friends visit us than ever before and were able to visit more family and friends as part of…

At the risk of repeating myself, I’ll start this post by stating again that we had a VERY different Leg 6 than we had originally planned. We had planned to visit Bulgaria, Serbia, Turkey, Kenya, and Dubai on Leg 6. We were going to hike a ton in Bansko, live a cosmopolitan city life in…

We’ve always intended to at some point do a U.S. leg (or two), because there are so many awesome things to see here in our very own country. But we always thought we’d need to wait for our income to be a little higher to be able to really do it. COVID-19 accelerated our plans…

To say Leg 5 was educational is an understatement. We faced a global pandemic and chose to get “stuck” in a foreign country. Obviously we learned a lot. Funny enough, I wrote in my “What Did We Learn on Leg 4” post that we weren’t learning so much about travel life anymore, but more about…

Usually in our travels, we hew pretty closely to our plans. Occasionally we’ll add a spontaneous overnight trip or decide not to do something we intended, but most of the time, the plans I make are excellent and we follow them. My budgets are very well-researched so generally speaking, we end up being slightly under…

I’m starting this post with just under a week to go before our flight home, but my plan is to wait and post once we’ve arrived safely (fingers crossed). Already, the journey home has been an odyssey.  You might recall from my last two posts in my COVID chronicles (Uncertainty and Thriving) that back in…

What a difference 4 kilometers can make!  Previously, in my COVID chronicles, I was sweating all the uncertainty we were feeling about the rest of our plans for the year. We had just purchased a July flight home from Costa Rica that we weren’t sure we’d be able to take and the odds of making…

Many years ago I took a personality assessment for work and the results included this sentence that has stuck with me ever since: “Jaime likes to plan her work and work her plan.” I think one of the reasons I remember it so well is because our results were shared with our colleagues and all…

My last post was pretty bleak, so I’ll start by saying, I feel much better. We’re still here in Guanacaste, Costa Rica, but things have gotten easier, as they tend to do. We’ve gotten used to this “new normal” of home-all-time, limited-grocery-shopping, daily-Zoom-calls, takeout-once-a-week, only-go-out-for-walks during the global pandemic. Being able to get used to…