Start of Trip

Well, we’re off.  It’s been a crazy week with getting our house ready (we’re renting it) and with our final trip preparations.  Throw in Jason’s broken wrist and a nasty cold I’ve caught, and it’s made for an interesting last few days.  But as I write the first part of this we’re probably an hour or so from landing in San Jose, Costa Rica.  I just took Jason to the bathroom, and while there, he said, “Diddy, I can’t wait to see what Costa Rica looks like.”  I love it.  I told him that we were going to be in a city for the first night and it might not be much different, and he reminded me that we were going to the rainforest shortly after arriving.

At the airport, we weighed all of our bags.  Combined we have 110 pounds worth of stuff.  About 25-30 pounds are electronics, as we have one laptop, an iPad, an iPad mini, a Kindle, 2 phones, 1 DSLR camera, one waterproof point and shoot camera, and one solar power charger.  Just the various plugs and cables for all this stuff makes up a small bag. 

I am so excited for this adventure.  We are going to have to find an entirely different rhythm of life.  One in which we are together pretty much all the time.  One in which we are learning together and constantly experiencing new things, together.  There will be some amazing times, but also in the course of a year, some really challenging times made even more challenging by being thousands of miles away from home in a strange place.  Jamie and Jason, as typical of two close-in-age siblings, are simultaneously best friends and adversaries.  I’m very interested to see how their relationship evolves.  I think that over time there will generally be less getting on each other’s nerves than at home, but we’ll see.

Anyway, here we go!