Better late than never… someone once told me. Do you ever wonder who comes up with these sayings? Wouldn’t it be cool to be THE ONE who made a saying like this fashionable and timeless? I mean come on… if the “where’s the beef” lady can live on forever with a saying like that, I’m sure one of us can think of something clever. Someone had to say it first, right? BTW: If you feel a sudden burst of inspiration, please share… I would love to say I knew the person who coined the phrase “all we are is dust in the wind, dude” or something like that. 

Why Am I Thankful? I’m sure this question was on all your minds this past week. For me, I found out something interesting as I traveled back to Atlanta, Georgia to spend Thanksgiving with family and friends.

How many of you knew these words were from a song named Big Yellow Taxi. Or, that it was originally written and performed by Joni Mitchell? Does your memory of this song have Adam Duritz from the Counting Crows singing it featuring Vanessa Carlton? Or maybe you remember the sweet voice of Amy Grant singing her version. Well… the verse that always grabbed my attention was this one. 

They took all the trees and put ‘em in a tree museum
And then they charged all the people twenty-five bucks just to see ‘em
Don’t it always seem to go
That you don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone
They paved paradise and put up a parking lot 

One of my favorite aspects of living in Nosara, Costa Rica is

Being a Buckeye (to the lay person, this means I grew up in Ohio)… I was no stranger to the four (4) seasons of the year. Winter always gave us a white blankety landscape where we could ride on lunch trays (our version of sleds) down a hill; barrel down bigger hills on skis; ice skate on ponds, build snow forts and snowmen, have outrageous snowball fights, and my favorite – drink hot cocoa with lots of marshmallows! In Spring, the days would become warmer and longer and flowers would brighten the landscape; we would hunt for Easter eggs, play tag in the rain, throw a ball around with some friends, roll down a grassy hill and then just lay there looking at the clouds trying to figure out what they look like. All this fun was Spring’s way of announcing the promise of summer which would drive excitement into every school child. Then you would hear the ring of the Ice Cream truck, and you knew Summer was here! This meant you would have ALL DAY to do nothing, if you wanted… OR, all day to do EVERYTHING:  swimming, baseball, tennis, kick the can, picnics in the park, camping, fishing, bike rides… <takes a breath>… 

As Dr. Emmett Brown said in Back to the Future, “Roads? Where we’re going, we don’t need roads.” Well… we really do have roads here in Nosara, they’re just not paved. It’s actually quite fun looking at our location using Google Maps; the “paved” roads cease to exist once you leave Nicoya and start driving towards Nosara.

And I was not kidding about seeing 4 people on one motorcycle – Dad driving, Mom and one child on the back and the youngest child riding what I would call shotgun, directly in front of Dad. It’s quite a sight to behold! While driving around Nosara, you should also keep your eyes open for iguanas, muy grande potholes, snakes (we saw a boa once), horses, cattle, cowboys, dogs, people on bikes, people walking, quads (ATVs), rivers (yes, I mean flowing water), dogs and oh yeah… other cars. Don’t get me wrong now, we don’t have traffic here… not really… just a lot of very interesting “scenerie.”

People that know me and my family – the Georgian AND Ohioan Stulaks – understand that our conversations typically revolve around and involve the use of move quotes. It’s quite fun! Well… my conversation with you today is not going to be any different. The best way for me to give you the “cliff notes” version of why we chose to move to Costa Rica is to use a quote from the movie, Holy Man, starring Eddie Murphy.

G (Eddie Murphy): “Seventy-five years. That’s how much time you get if you’re lucky. Seventy-five years. Seventy-five Winters. Seventy-five Springtimes. Seventy-five Summers. And Seventy-five Autumns. When you look at it like that, it’s not a lot of time, is it? Don’t waste them.