Travels of the Bay family and the Yoda Van

We don’t have anything major to report, just a few small updates on various subjects.

We went to the doctor with Julian and his foot is much better. They took another x-ray and the doctor says things look good. He’s not in pain and they let us take all the bandages off his foot.

My parents got a message from the Seattle Public School District. They received William’s application in its entirety. I was really happy they called since I was a little worried about it.

Tomorrow we are moving out of our apartment and headed to San Jose. Then on Monday morning we are taking a bus to the Caribbean coast of Costa Rica. We plan on staying at the beach for a couple of days and then heading into Panama. Major stops we know we want to make in Panama are Bocas, Panama City and the San Blas Islands. We are leaving the Yoda Van at the apartment we have been staying at and will pick it up on the way home. Keep your fingers crossed that we don’t run into any trouble for leaving our car in Costa Rica for a few weeks.

Matthias’ birthday was on Thursday. He was a little upset that not more of you sent him happy birthday e-mails. Even his own mother forgot his birthday. Poor Matthias! He is actually kind of a pain on his birthday because he makes us suffer. “You have to do whatever I say today because it’s my birthday.” “Can’t you please be nice to me today? After all it is my birthday.” Thank God he only has a birthday once a year.

Julian is almost fully potty trained. He goes all day without a diaper and rarely has an accident. We leave the house without a diaper and he does great. We still put a diaper on him at nights, but most mornings it is still dry. For those of you without children this is probably more information than you wanted to read in our blog. For those of you with children you know what a big deal this is to get both of your kids finally out of diapers.

All the weight we have lost over the past 5 months has been swiftly returned to our midsections. Our time in Alajuela has been mostly 3 delicious not-low-fat meals a day, lots of alcohol and a mainly sedentary life. It has also been hard to maintain our great tans sitting in a dark living room in front of the TV. Our plan for Panama is to slim back down and work on our tans again.

The Yoda Van is still running great even after the 10,000+ miles we’ve driven on this trip so far. Here in Alajuela we finally got our leaky gas tank fixed. We’ve also been having a few problems with the passenger’s side window. If the window was rolled down most or all the way and you shut the door the window comes out of its track and you can’t roll it up. You have to take the panel off the door and fiddle around with it to get it back up. Our mechanic here in Alajuela put some sort of reinforcement on the window, but after he did that it was impossible to close the window all the way. That surely wasn’t going to work for us. Matthias and my Dad worked on for quite a while together but couldn’t come up with anything. Matthias finally shoved a bunch of sponges and plastic bags into the bottom of the door, which stabilizes it enough so it doesn’t pop out anymore. If a customs official were to look down there he would certainly think we smuggling something in there.

We’ve been in Alajuela for one month now. Yesterday and today we’ve been cleaning out the apartment and putting stuff back into the Yoda Van. What was crazy is how much (useless) stuff we have accumulated in one month. Again we have had to pare down and get rid of so many things. What is also crazy is how much extremer you have to pare things down when backpacking. We’ll be traveling by backpack for probably 3 weeks, 4 at the most. If you have to schlep on your back everything you will need for the next month you start to think differently about what is really necessary. Honestly we don’t really miss most of the things we leave behind. The two most important things for us recently have been having time to spend together as a family and having a lot of sun. Luckily we’ve had a lot of both lately.

This entry was posted on Saturday, January 20th, 2007 at 2:53 pm and is filed under Costa Rica. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.