Fying instead of Driving and Shipping our stuff to Costa Rica

This is an update on our trip. We were planning to drive to Costa Rica this week but have decided to fly instead. There are several factors that went in to this decision, some I consider to be “everything happens for a reason” reasons.

The Reasons

If you are not aware there is a craigslist page for Costa Rica. I would check it before we visited each time to see if there were free or cheap building supplies, bus tickets available, etc. I had not checked it or even thought about it for a long time. For some reason in Taos, New Mexico, I decided to give it a gander since we were only a week away from entering Mexico. We would be driving through CR, top to bottom, so we could pick anything that we wanted up along the way. Posted that day under general sales was an ad that offered a small amount of space on a shipping container that was leaving Jacksonville FLA on November 30th with no extra taxes. I read the ad out loud to Barry to see his reaction. A lot of people had been sending us body count in Mexico e-mails and we had considered the content but never changed our plans to drive. So when I saw the shipping container ad I thought we should at least discuss it. We decided to call to see what the price was for the contents of the back of our truck.

Before our trip started we had looked into shipping our stuff but it could run from 3-5 thousand and you still would not know what your taxes would be when you went to pick up your stuff from customs in CR. We would also miss out on the adventure of driving through beach towns and taking a break from real life before starting the biggest gamble of our lives. Brandon from Pacific Coast Storage said that there was just about ¼ of a shipping container left and that it was approximately $75 a box. We figured in the cost of Mexican car insurance ($300) plus hotel stays, gas, food and the fact that the Inter-American highway is currently closed in two places, one place in Guatemala and a bridge is out in North CR and we decided it would better to fly. After making that decision and looking at the calendar, we noticed that if we drove like bats out of hell we could make it from Arizona to Florida to get one last good ol’ American Thanksgiving in with the Hovland’s before we left. So today I am sitting in Florida with a left-over turkey sandwich and a confirmation number from Spirit airlines for December 7th.
Many of you haven’t seen this video of our property yet so here is one of the first.