Don't cry because it's over. Smile because it happened.

Hindsight is 20/20

As I mention in the about page of What an Adventure!, people that we knew or people that we met, would ask us say things like, ‘Oh, how fun it must be to live at a hotel’, or ‘You are so brave’, or ‘Why/How did you choose to do this crazy adventure?’. At that time, I wasn’t always sure how to respond to these comments and questions.

We owned the Costa Rican hotel for a little more than 5 years, and it’s been about 18 months since that adventure ended. One day last year, I was out for a walk in my Chicago neighborhood enjoying the early summer-in-Chicago weather.

While I was on that walk, I kept remembering things from our time in Costa Rica, and I thought, ‘Wow, I’m a different person now than before we lived abroad’, or ‘Wow, doing this actually taught me this or that.’ There were so many lessons that when I thought of them now, I chuckled silently, and still wondered how we ‘did’ it.

In the early years, when we were in the thick of things at the hotel, I felt overwhelmed many times (as you might have already read in previous stories I’ve shared here). At that time, I only shared those in-depth details with family and few close friends. Were there times I wanted to cry? Yes, and sometimes did.

I shied away from telling our whole story. I passed it off like it was ‘no big deal’. In the beginning, I felt guilty for feeling like this because I knew that we were fortunate to be able to do this and live in this wonderful place - ‘living on vacation’. I was filled with gratitude for the experience but sometimes overwhelmed by it as well.

But I realized on that walk last summer, that it’s easier to evaluate situations when we're looking back on them in the past-when we have perfect 20/20 vision- than when we're in the present moment. Then we see things more clearly that were not clear to us at the time.

So, I decided to write these stories because as I look back on those 5 years, things look a little clearer to me now and I want to share it all. All the ups and downs are now, in hindsight, oh, so clear.

Would we do it again? No.

Was it a great experience? Absolutely, yes! And I smile because it happened!

Stayed tuned for more adventures in this crazy What an Adventure series!