Why Costa Rica?

Brandon McAlees
Nomad Things
Published in
2 min readSep 26, 2019

A question I’ve heard nearly every day for the past 3 weeks. What better place to answer it than here.

Internet

With myself working remotely at my current job and Jocelyn teaching English online, wherever we go, internet will always be our #1 priority. About 5MB down is all the speed i’ll need which opens up lots of places to travel. For reference, you’re most likely are getting at least 30–100MB down at home.

Spanish

Jocelyn studied Spanish at Nazareth College of Rochester NY and is looking to spend some time immersed in the language to become fluent. Fortunately for me you can get by in most of Costa Rica with English, although I am looking forward to picking up some Spanish!

A Central Location

Costa Rica is in a great location right in between the US and South America. A perfect place to start if we decide to go south!

The Ocean

While traveling in Bali this past Spring I definitely fell in love with surfing and have been itching to get back in the ocean. We will be staying in Jaco, which is one of Costa Rica’s best surf towns. It’s yet to be seen if I ever get sick of 83 degree waters and perfect surf!

Time Difference

I’ll be working 9–5 P.M EST so anything 3 or more hours off EST sounds pretty horrible. Costa Rica is -2 from EST until the end of DST, at which point it will only be -1.

Health Care

Surprisingly, Costa Rica has private health care comparable to that of the US. It will be reassuring that we can find quality care while we’re 1000’s of miles from home.

As of now we only have the first 4 weeks planned out. We snagged an AirBnb for $899/mo just a block from the beach. You can check it out here.

Since a good internet connection is so important, we’re only traveling to places where remote working offices are available. Thankfully, coworker.com gives us access to over 12,000 remote offices in 170+ countries. These offices will ensure we always have a place with high speed internet. You can check out the office I’ll be working from here!

Until next time.

Photo by Samuel Charron on Unsplash

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