UPDATE 5, last in a series!

Gotta give credit to James, the American Airlines agent who re-booked our cancelled trip to Costa Rica at no additional cost! We’re all set to fly from San Diego to San Jose on Tuesday, March 13, and get this show back on the road where it belongs.

Leslie has almost fully recovered from the ordeal that landed her in the hospital last month. Many thanks to the nurses and other staff at Sharp Urgent Care and Sharp Memorial Hospital, especially those in the Emergency Department and Acute Care 7-West. We deeply appreciate Dr. Watt, who runs a great ER; Dr. Ghafourian, the incredible hospital-based internist; and Dr. Bench, the skilled surgeon who removed Leslie’s gall bladder.

Our extended time in San Diego has been terrific because we’ve been with our daughter Stephanie for a little over a month. We’ve been to some excellent East Village restaurants and Stephanie has enjoyed quite a few home-cooked meals.

Leslie and I have also had time to talk about the rest of the journey. We plan to be tourists in Italy for a few weeks, then live in southern France for six weeks or so. But now we think there may be time to sneak in a few weeks in Portugal, which wasn’t on our initial list but sounds like it’s worth a look. The original plan was to return to the Chicago area in the summer to see family and friends, as well as several physicians, and decide where we will live from now on. That may still happen, but we’re also re-thinking Uruguay. We might just head down there in November and December to check it out, and push decision-making to January 2019. We’re nothing if not flexible!

Next post from Jacó, on Costa Rica’s Pacific coast.