New Year, New Adventures

Happy New Year!  Bob and I wish happiness, good health, and prosperity to all of our family, friends, and blog followers.  I cannot believe it is 2016 and Bob has been retired for seven months now.  We’ve been having a great time and expect 2016 to be filled with lots of opportunity to see new places and meet new people.  Welcome to our journey!

Winter's Welcome

 

Christmas Eve morning we headed over to Seattle, but had to take the “long” way around through the Columbia River Gorge, west to greater Portland and north on I-5 to Seattle, since our normal route over Snoqualmie Pass was closed.  Going this route is about 430 miles and took us 7 ½ hours as opposed to the more direct route of 210 miles and 3 ½ hours to our daughter Amy’s house.  Snoqualmie Pass had been closed off/on for days due to massive snowfalls amounting to more than they had in all of 2014.  Avalanche danger was the biggest obstacle, and rather than wait it out we felt lucky to have an alternate route.  The drive was beautiful and most importantly it was safe.  We were very pleased to arrive at Amy’s home.

Columbia River Gorge in Winter

Mt. Adams in the distance

 We enjoyed a wonderful visit with our little family on Christmas Eve.  Shane and Alex were able to join us before joining Alex’s family for dinner and leaving Christmas Day for Mexico.  Amy & Mike’s house was nicely decorated and attending services at their church made the evening exactly what Christmas Eve should be. 

Family!

Full moon on Christmas Eve

 

Christmas Day we traveled on over to Port Townsend.  Amy & Mike, and their loveable golden retriever (Daisy) joined us for the weekend.  It was a perfectly calm day, so riding the ferry and crossing the Hood Canal floating bridge was easy.  Along the way, we paused at the former mill town of Port Gamble, which has become a popular destination noted for its General Store selling old-fashioned candy and the beautiful St. Paul’s Episcopal church, a popular wedding venue.  If this picturesque community seems familiar it may be; it was widely featured in the movie, Snow Falling on Cedars. 

View toward Gamble Bay

St. Paul's Episcopal Church

Port Gamble General Store

Floating bridge across Hood Canal

Port Townsend is our “dream.”  If you have followed our blog you know we lived in PT for several years, continue to own property there and hope to build on it someday. We did spend some time this past week meeting with a local builder, trying to get a better understanding of our options.  It was a bit disappointing because our former discussions had been with another builder who specialized in custom homes in our development; however, he decided to close up shop and retire.  Good for him but now we need to think long and hard about what we want to do.  For now we’ll be content to visit frequently and get our dose of walking the beach at Kala Point and enjoy the many charms of this NW Victorian seaport town.

Pano of Port Townsend

Kala Point deer - they are very common in the neighborhood.

Bob, Mike & Amy @ Sirens

Kala Point Lagoon - that's a heron taking a rest

For a small town (9,000 population) Port Townsend has a plethora of very good restaurants.  One of our new favorites is Pippa’s Real Tea, where we enjoyed tea with scones topped by clotted cream and raspberry jam; for a few minutes we were transported across the big pond to England!  If you visit Port Townsend, and we highly recommend it, try to take in a movie at the Rose Theatre, a treasure within the historic district.   Toward mid-week we were blessed with good weather and the views across Puget Sound of the snow-covered Cascade Range and 10,781’ Mt. Baker were absolutely spectacular.

Try the scones with your tea!

Love the Rose!

Mt. Baker

The clear skies and good driving conditions continued for our trip home on New Year’s Day.  Again, it was a beautiful ferry crossing allowing for some great photo-ops of the western Olympic Mountains, the eastern Cascades crowned by 14,417’ Mt. Rainier, and the Seattle skyline.

Ferry across Puget Sound

Mt. Rainier behind the harbor

Olympics in the background of Puget Sound

Beautiful Olympics

Seattle skyline

View approaching Snoqualmie Pass

Snoqualmie

 

So the New Year is here and it’s time to tend to some practical matters.  There are always a number of “end of year” details to take care of and this year I find myself sorting out several medical billing details.  I’ve been trying to reconcile Medicare, my supplemental insurance and the hospital bills for my November hospital stay and also a couple outstanding procedures from October.  Each party is saying the ball is in another court and all I’m trying to do is pay my bills!

We also had to make another visit to the Social Security office to discuss our Medicare premiums.  We’d received notices from MC that our premiums were based on our 2014 earnings causing the premiums to go up by about 150%.  But as it turns out, retirement is considered a “lifetime event” and there is a form to fix that . . . of course!  Here’s a bit of insight into retirement for today . . . just when you think you have all the details worked out you don’t.  So be sure to open, in a timely manner, all the mail that comes from SSA, MC or your insurance company.   And, there’s a lot of mail from them!

In retrospect, 2015 was a very good year!  We enjoyed traveling throughout 25 states and visiting many good friends and sharing family time.  Looking forward, we leave later this week for our first sojourn as “snowbirds.”  We are “going big” and traveling to Nicaragua and Costa Rica for two months.  Why?  We visited Costa Rica for three weeks back in 1996.  It stuck with us, particularly the northern part of the country.  Once in awhile over the last 19 years we have commented that maybe we should “buy a coffee farm in Costa Rica.”  I don’t think that will happen, but we are excited to visit again.

Last spring we began researching some options.  Our goals were to stay at least a week in one place before moving to the next, rely on local transport rather than renting a car, and keep our costs down.  Since our 1996 trip Costa Rica has built a new international airport in the western province of Guanacaste, near the Pacific beaches.  This seemed like a good option for flying since we thought we’d like to end our visit with a week at the beach.  That airport (LIR) is outside the town of Liberia and a quick search indicated its proximity to Lake Arenal, the other priority on our list of destinations.   We decided to consider our lodging options prior to booking airline tickets and chose to go with AirBnB (airbnb.com) and VRBO (vrbo.com) accommodations, along with a timeshare week at the beach to end the trip.  It probably sounds backwards to book the end before the beginning but for us it provided a “locked-in” parameter to work from. 

Choices!

Once the final destination was booked we were able to figure out the rest.  We figured we had budgeted enough money for two months accommodations.  Looking at the map we realized that LIR was very near (couple hours) San Juan del Sur, Nicaragua located in the very bottom of that country on the Pacific coast.   That sounded interesting so we are going!  We were able to find an apartment for a week through AirBnB, so after a couple days hotel in Liberia we will head to Nicaragua.

When we leave San Juan del Sur, we will work our way back to Costa Rica and go up to Lake Arenal for an extended stay.  Again, we are using AirBnB and found an apartment available for four weeks.  It sounds perfect!

On our 1996 Costa Rican trip we used San Jose (the nation’s capital) as our base.  We are not “big city” people but one area of the city that appeals to us is Heredia.  It is in the NE suburbs and is known as the Colonial city part of San Jose.  We found a house available for week and it will help us make a loop from Arenal and back out to the Pacific coast for the timeshare week.  If you are counting, we have scheduled seven weeks’ accommodations so we have some room in the schedule to fill as we go along.  Pretty adventurous of us!

How are we going to get where we want or need to go?  Well, that is a big unanswered question.  We’d like to rely on local transport, such as buses.  We are confident that will work well for some of the shorter journeys but everything we have read warns about taking the buses for long hours of travel, mostly because of carrying luggage.  Apparently it is not very smart to place your luggage in the cargo holds where it is out of sight.  We are traveling with medium size roller bags and each of us has a backpack.  I guess we’ll try to hold the packs and keep the bags within sight.  Some of these warnings may be overly stated but the advice is worth heeding, for now anyway.

Why not rent a car?  The first obstacle is taking a rental car across the border between Costa Rica and Nicaragua.  It’s not allowed.  The next obstacle is price; it just seems very expensive to rent a car.  We did that for a week in 1996 and turned it in because the roads were a bit challenging and we’d learned there were plenty of other options.  So we’ll go with that approach for most of the travel.  We may decide to rent a car for some short day trips but for now we are playing it by ear.

With respect to airline fare and reservations, we got incredibly lucky here and are going to travel on our airline miles.  Yes, two round-trip tickets for the amount of taxes only.  The airline has booked us on the scenic route . . . we leave home (PSC) and connect through Seattle, Phoenix, Dallas and on to Liberia.  It’s about 24 hours of travel so yes it will be exhausting.  Coming home in March we are currently booked from LIR to Miami, Los Angeles, Seattle and home.  Also exhausting.  But, it’s a great savings!

Preparing for this trip required quite a bit of planning but in an exercise to “practice spontaneity” (I think that’s an oxymoron?) we are giving ourselves the freedom to wander roads less traveled and do a bit of exploring while there.  Let the adventure begin, and we thank you for following along!