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!
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| 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.
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| Columbia River Gorge in Winter |
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| 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.
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| Family! |
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| 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.
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| View toward Gamble Bay |
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| St. Paul's Episcopal Church |
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| Port Gamble General Store |
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| 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.
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| Pano of Port Townsend |
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| Kala Point deer - they are very common in the neighborhood. |
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| Bob, Mike & Amy @ Sirens |
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| 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.
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| Try the scones with your tea! |
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| Love the Rose! |
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| Mt. Baker |
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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.
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| Ferry across Puget Sound |
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| Mt. Rainier behind the harbor |
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| Olympics in the background of Puget Sound |
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| Beautiful Olympics |
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| Seattle skyline |
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| View approaching Snoqualmie Pass |
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| 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.
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| 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!
