All things come to an end…

On Monday and Tuesday we had our last Spanish sessions with both Profesora Maria and Profesora Ana. Jill and I were a little worried because we’d had a couple of weeks where we were either back in Austin or in the touristy parts of Costa Rica, where it’s harder to get people to speak to us in Spanish.

We needn’t have worried. We hadn’t lost any notable ground and were able to hop right back into Spanish-only conversation with both of our profesoras. Since we’d been out of of class for two weeks we burned up over an hour of class each day recounting (in Spanish) all of the events that had transpired over those two weeks to each of our teachers.

While we learned right up to the least minute with each of our fantastic teachers, both Monday and Tuesday were victory laps that were full of smiles and laughter. We brought coffee ice cream to school on Monday and introduced Profesora Maria (a self-described coffee fanatic) to it at snack time. Profesora Maria gave Jill a nuevo sombrero para la playa (new hat for the beach), will Jill’s name and a heart on it.

Profesora Ana regaled us with all of the things she has made in her new InstantPot 🙂 We wrapped up both days with hugs all around and sad feelings that our time together was coming to an end.

We started packing in earnest on Monday afternoon. We used the guest bedroom as a staging area. Jill did a great job of making the rental house feel homey with pictures and keepsakes from Austin. As soon as those things made their way into a pile on the guest bedroom bed the house started feeling more sterile and the end of our adventure started feeling very real.

Our landlord, Magda, invited us to dinner on Monday night and we had a pleasant meal with her in her restaurant at the bottom of the hill. She is one of the most industrious people I’ve ever met and it was very nice to know that she was at the bottom of the hill during our stay. Now that our stay is over AirBNB has prompted me to leave a review for her, which I will do shortly.

On Tuesday evening, we met our friend Catalina at Pizzeria La Finca for a Thank You dinner. Back in October, Catalina was the manager at the Hotel Villa Toscana, where Jill and I spent a couple of nights on the tail end of our trip. In October, as we were walking out of the hotel to find a place for lunch, we asked Catalina an off-hand question about whether there was a Spanish school in Atenas. By the time we were back from lunch Catalina had typed up a Word doc that we would use as an initial road map for planning our trip.

On Wednesday morning we were up before 5AM, because we were to meet Cesar at the airport at 6AM to drop off the car.

Jill had done a good job of getting us ready to roll in the morning so all we really had to do was pack up our toiletries and load the car. We said goodbye to the house (literally “Goodbye house!”), locked up, and headed down the hill. Magda (who gets up at 4AM) met us at the bottom of the hill and we gave her the keys and the remote for opening the gate. After hugs all around we were off for the airport.

During the drive to the airport, Jill and I reminisced about how intimidated we both were by driving on Ruta 3, the curvy road from Atenas to the airport, when we arrived in Costa Rica. By the end of our 90 days, Ruta 3 felt as familiar as my morning commute to the office in Austin.

Cesar, reliable as ever, met us at 6AM on the upper deck of the airport parking garage. We gave him the keys and a hug and headed into the airport.

Since we’d been back and forth to Austin a couple of times during our 90 day stay, going to the airport didn’t have the air of finality I thought it would have. That was true right up until we checked our bags. Previously when we’d gone back to Austin, I knew in the back of my head that we had a bunch of our stuff still in Costa Rica. Once our bags were tagged and thrown on the conveyor, that’s when it hit me that all of our belongings were now en route back to Austin.

When we leave a country, Jill and I have a ritual where I tell Jill how much local currency we have left over and Jill finds something fun at the airport to buy with that leftover currency. This is different than our standard souvenir Ritual in that Jill knows she is on the clock, whereas in the standard ritual we spend an effectively unlimited amount of time making our decision. We’d discussed for several weeks what thing would symbolize our adventure in Costa Rica to us and we were in agreement that the toucan (Por dicha!) is that something. As luck would have it, Jill found a local artist in the airport who was selling wildlife paintings and she honed in on two paintings of toucans. True to form, Jill wasn’t QUITE ready to pull the trigger and told the nice man we’d be back after I found her a cup of coffee (so in that way this ritual kind of was like the standard ritual because there was an initial visit with no purchase followed by a return visit for the actual purchase). We went off to get breakfast sandwiches and coffee, decided which of the two paintings we wanted, and returned 20 minutes later to seal the deal.

Our subsequent flights home were a little somber, but uneventful. We continued our tradition of celebrating our arrival back on US soil with margaritas and fajitas at Pappasito’s in the Houston airport.

We are home, unpacked, and starting to get settled back in.

Adventure is out there!