From the States
to the Gold Coast

Start with where I am, because it explains the rest. I live in Playas del Coco, on the Pacific northwest coast of Costa Rica, in the stretch of Guanacaste somebody once decided to call the Gold Coast. The name stuck, and having watched a few hundred sunsets from here, I would say it earns it.

I am a US citizen and a Costa Rican resident. I live here with my husband Steve and two chihuahua mixes, Stella and Ozy, who between them run this household and have never been given cause to think otherwise.

Before all this: Massachusetts, just south of Boston. That is where I am from, and you can still hear it on certain words no matter how long I have been gone. My adult life in the States was split between Orlando and Washington DC, which is a sentence that covers a lot of ground, several winters, and an unreasonable number of hours in traffic.

I did the corporate thing for years, then did what a lot of people do once the corporate thing stops fitting, and became a business owner myself. That solved a set of problems and handed me a fresh set in exchange, most of which arrived by email at eleven at night.

So Steve and I left. Not for a season, not to try it out. We relocated to Costa Rica full time to get out from under the stress of life in the States and reset the whole thing, and the honest report is that it worked. It just took a lot more unlearning than either of us expected.

Because that is the part nobody warns you about. Moving countries is logistics, and logistics can be solved. What takes longer is unlearning the habits the old life installed in you. That being busy is the same as being useful. That a thing arriving late is a personal insult rather than a Tuesday. That you should be reachable at all hours, own the upgraded version, and have an answer ready when somebody asks what you do. Costa Rica does not argue with any of that. It simply declines to participate, and eventually you stop too.

These days I run a real estate and property management company here in Coco, which is Expat Properties | CR and my actual day job. It means I spend most of my week talking to people standing exactly where we stood: excited, slightly overwhelmed, and drowning in contradictory advice from strangers on the internet who have never been here.

Expat In Paradise is where I write the honest version down. What things actually cost, which town suits which kind of person, what the paperwork really involves, and what daily life feels like once the vacation glow wears off and you are just someone who lives here. It is the site I went looking for before we moved and could not find.