“Aquí fue donde la chancha torcío el rabo” is a Costa Rican expression which literally translates to, “this is where the pig tail twisted”; however, the equivalent expression in English would be, “here is where the crap hit the fan”. In general, our experience has been positive but the last week has had some real rough spots.
It hasn’t been a complete breeze with the kids at school because we still take a deep breath each morning and hope that all will go well with our 2 younger ones. This morning went smoothly but we are realistic that we have to take each day at a time. No doubt there will be good days and bad days.
After we believed that our car situation was behind us last week, we started planning a road trip for the weekend and even thought to leave right after school/work on Friday. One important thing about a road trip: the car needs to actually start. Sadly for us, our new-used car decided not to start on Friday morning, or Friday night, or even Saturday morning. I had to call roadside assistance for a tow truck and it was very difficult just to explain our whereabouts when the person on the other end of the phone only spoke Spanish. When the tow truck finally found me 2 hours later, it was a bizarre experience (to say the least) coordinating a compression-start of the car with someone who didn’t speak a word of English.
When we finally got the issues with our car resolved midday Saturday, we headed an hour west of us to Playa Hermosa to see the ISA World Surfing Games which can be described as the “Olympics of 
surfing”. We hadn’t made a reservation at a hotel and we regretted it when it took us a few hours to find somewhere to stay. The kids were amazingly patient in the car as we stopped at literally every single hotel to ask if they had a room. We did finally find a place before it got dark and made sure that it at least had a pool to reward the kids. The accommodation was way more than we had hoped to spend but we didn’t really have a choice – we weren’t exactly going to sleep 5 of us in our old truck.
Everything was starting to seem much brighter this morning. We had just come back from a great overnight stay on the coast where we saw some world class surfing, and our 3 kids were happy when we dropped them off at school this morning. Both Mélanie and I were feeling pretty positive… until we got a message from our real estate agent that we have to be out of the house that we are staying 
in at the beginning of September. This is the same guy who has been telling us that it won’t be a problem for us to stay as long as we want. So now we are stuck with the possibility of not having a place to stay in 5 weeks. We wouldn’t be so stressed about it if there were many other options in this area but unfortunately, the rental market is so dry here right now. It was such a struggle finding our current place before we left on our trip (actually, we only confirmed it a week before we left) and now we are back to square one.
