Author: Charlie

Retired American nature-lover, living in Costa Rica, photographing birds and other jewels of nature. This site simply reports on my joys of being RETIRED IN COSTA RICA!
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New Terrace Table & Chairs

I asked my landlord if I could have new cushions or cushion covers for the 4 large, clunky chairs with the large glass-topped table where I eat most meals. He agreed that they were very worn, dirty and some with broken zipper and Velcro tabs. So he said he would get one of his workers to find a seamstress to make new ones! (That’s the Tico way!) I go on the healthcare tour for 3 days and return to find a brand new table and chairs! I suspect it was cheaper to get this smaller, lighter-weight set than get new cushions if even available. So I have something brand new and fresh for my guest coming a week from Tuesday! And I like it! Even the smaller size!

There are a lot of advantages to renting! New furniture is one!  🙂
It makes the terrace look larger!
And looks good from inside too! I like it better than the old one!
Fresh and airy! New and clean!
I’m ready for Reagan now!
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San Ramon, Costa Rica

This is the second post for today, Saturday, about the town separate from the healthcare tour.

San Ramon is higher in the mountains than Atenas, meaning
it gets much colder and rains more. It rained this morning & in 50’s.

San Ramon’s beautiful Catholic Church facing the Central Park,
like every town in Costa Rica.

They also have a boyero or oxcart driver monument like Atenas.
I like our Atenas metal one better. This one is on church grounds.
Like every town’s Central Park, you will find children playing, old people talking,
teens texting, talking or smooching, and a generally happy, tranquil place.
There is a band-shell for musical programs.

San Ramon is quite a bit larger than Atenas with more businesses and traffic, something in-between Atenas and Alajuela. I do not like it as well as Atenas because of the weather (colder and wetter) and the more crowded conditions. They do have a University campus which is a plus and a couple of museums we don’t have, but I think I will stick with my more walkable small town. Both are very “Costa Rica” in nature with wonderfully friendly people. They have a few hundred expats living there where we have over a thousand in and around Atenas.

The other post today about healthcare tour has more photos of San Ramon and yesterday’s short post has photo of tour group in front of Mural on La Posada Hotel where I stayed.

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Friday of Healthcare Tour

Old Man Tree in Breakfast Room

A stop by CPI Spanish Immersion School in Heredia for one short lesson.

Visited the smaller public hospital in San Ramon.
Public hospitals aren’t as fancy and pretty as private,
but very clean and functional inside.

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Paul & Gloria’s view with a Poro Tree blooming. Now is time for Poro.
Lunch at home of Paul & Gloria Yeatman with guest speakers.

Visiting the San Ramon Feria or Farmers’ Market Friday afternoon.
Paul & Gloria emphasize this as a part of healthcare!

We also visited a small neighborhood clinic, farmacia, bank, community center, Red Cross which does all the emergency ambulances, a museum, and talked about insurance, the CAJA government healthcare, homecare provided by CAJA, and even a presentation by a volunteer organization encouraging us to volunteer. Whew! A full day! But very helpful. They were showing us what it is really like for medical care in a local community, in this case San Ramon. I will do a separate post on San Ramon and give my comparison to Atenas. This ended the Healthcare Tour at dinner time in San Ramon. I spent the night there and tried to post these photos but the little La Posada Hotel had very slow internet, so I saved them for today, Saturday and will purposefully do two posts. The next one with a few shots of San Ramon sans-healthcare!

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Our Healthcare Tour Group

Our group of 8 who have traveled together for two full days visiting many hospitals & similar facilities.
I’m the smiling guy behind the two ladies on the right, in white cap and blue sunglasses, under the toucan.
Thanks to Victor, our van driver, for making the photo!
Paul Yeatman, tour leader, is in blue cap and from Maryland.
Others from Canada, South Africa, Columbia, Minnesota, Florida, Oklahoma & me from Tennessee.
Paul and I are the only ones already living here. Others are preparing to move here.


The internet connection is very slow at my little La Posada Hotel in San Ramon, taking a long time to upload the one photo above. So I will save the several other photos I want to share for after I get home tomorrow, telling what we did. It was another good day with a lot seen and done. Tune in tomorrow for a report! And I have now seen San Ramon for the first time. Opinions tomorrow.

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San Jose Hospitals Today

Entering Hospital Mexico, the largest in Costa Rica
and a public hospital
MRI at Public Hospital Mexico

Hospital room at small boutique private hospital, Clinica Unibe.
We saw another similar one called Hospital Metropolintano.

In and out of the van at about 5 hospitals

Clinica Biblica, one of the two largest private hospitals along with CIMA.
We also visited Hospital Catolica, just a little smaller.

An absolutely wonderful Senior Adult Apartments with all levels of care,
great views, and near the second largest mall in Costa Rica.
Verdeza Apartamentos
I would love for this to be my final home before death! Great program!

More tomorrow as we head for San Ramon, a town a little larger than Atenas to visit more of the local healthcare facilities and hear more from Paul and Gloria Yeatman and eat lunch at their house.

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Healthcare Tour of Costa Rica

Wednesday & Thursday nights at Adventure Inn in San Jose
A small family-owned, non-chain hotel with good prices!
Adventure Inn San Jose

Because the tour starts at 7:30 in the morning from this hotel, I came the night before like probably most of the participants. Walter’s Tours and Taxis in Atenas takes me for visa renewals usually and so I used his services to get to this hotel today. Door to door friendly and efficient service at a reasonable price and I did not have to fight the San Jose traffic! Saturday morning they will pick me up in San Ramon where the tour finishes. To save money I may use the public bus in future but it seemed more of a hassle with a suitcase and changing buses in San Jose. Kind of nice to be chauffeured!

The tour that starts in the morning (I’m writing Wednesday night) is sponsored by Paul & Gloria Yeatman who do the blog/website/newsletter titled Retire for Less in Costa Rica. One of their posts tells about Healthcare in Costa Rica and this tour description.

Tomorrow night I will report on the first day of the tour, all in San Jose. So keep reading. I expect most of the participants to be people from the States and Canada who are considering retirement here. The Yeatman’s do this in conjunction with another guy who does a relocation tour of Costa Rica, different from the one I took. More about it later too. Tonight I rest, eat in hotel restaurant, do some computer work and play and read. It is fun to be away from home even when you live in a paradise! 🙂

A quote from the founder of my former clinic in Nashville
where caring people still struggle with the
broken American system.
It is good to now live in a country where healthcare and education are
more important than wealth and military. It makes a difference!
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Black-cowled Oriole

Black-cowled Oriole
Inside my house on a screen
Black-cowled Oriole
Inside my house as seen from outside before I opened the screen.
He flew away, probably fearful of houses now.

During the day when at home I leave the garden door without a screen open and the sliding glass doors and screens to the terrace open, thus easy for wildlife to sometimes explore inside.  🙂

When this happens I open all the other screens and then try to open the one he is on. As is often the case, when I started sliding this one (from the outside) he flew the other way out another window and up into a tree! I leave nothing fully open at night. Had a bat once and trying to avoid that if I can. 
From Charlie! Retired in Costa Rica!

See my Costa Rica Birds Photo Gallery with 156 species I’ve photographed in Costa Rica so far! And with about 900 species of birds here, I have a ways to go!   🙂

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Why “No Me Gusta San Jose Driving”

Why I don’t like driving in San Jose? It is a big, busy, congested traffic city! Especially on Friday afternoon when I had my last doctor appointment and these photos were shot through bus window on Route 1. Downtown was actually more bumper to bumper but I didn’t think to snap a shot there. It took an hour and a half to get to Atenas at 4:30 where during the day it is sometimes just 45 minutes to drive the 38 miles. 🙂   In addition to people leaving work early on Friday, many in the city go to the beach for the whole weekend making it nearly bumper to bumper all the way to Jaco. To facilitate this, the main highway/freeway, Ruta 27, has all lanes going west for a couple of hours Friday afternoon and all lanes going east for a couple of hours Sunday afternoon as they return. Interesting!

Just one more reason I do not have the high expense of a car and get around by bus, taxi or walking: healthier, cheaper, and less stress! And I can get the occasional rent car for a trip or when I have guests.

AND Costa Rica is STILL One of the Best Places in the World to Retire as now reported by U.S. News & World Report with above link to a Live in Costa Rica Blog article. Or go directly to the U.S. News & World Report Ranking of Costa Rica for Retirement. 

¡Ciudad, Pueblo, Bosque, Montana o Playa
Costa Rica es Pura Vida!
¡Me Gusta Mucho!
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My Biggest Job Nearly Finished – TO SIMPLIFY!

Because of the better sunlight, I photograph most of the album pages
outside on my terrace, one page at a time, soooo slow it seems.
So far it is 7,880 photos taking up 10 GB of space on my computer!
And it is all scrapbook pages from before my birth to 2008, soon to 2014.
It is an incredible personal and family history, but I cannot keep them all!
And 30 boxes of albums is too much for someone to deal with when I die.
I do not have children or anyone who could deal with that many books.

Here is my office/guest room today with just 5 more books to photograph.
Compare this with the photos below a few months ago.
And the new couch makes into a full-size bed for guests.
The old one below was a too-short single bed for little Ticos.
All these boxes have been emptied and contents destroyed
as have all the ones in the next photo by the door of this same room.
All of these are also gone now!
The space is free, the house open and
uncluttered! True joy in removing stuff!

The high quality binders used have been donated to schools, libraries and others. And then I have some genealogy stuff and a stamp collection to deal with and I am truly finished! And remember I got rid of a lot more stuff in Nashville including all my furniture! Plus a lot of art earlier here. I have made real progress! Anytime I want to change rent house, it will be a simple move!

I’m applying the lessons learned in many books read: The Life-changing Magic of Tidying Up by Marie Kondo  (I read a review copy summary), Celebrating Time Alone by Lionel Fisher, Simplify by Joshua Becker, Freedom of Simplicity by Richard J. Foster, Always We Begin Again, The Benedictine Way of Living by John McQuiston II, Living the Simple Life, by Elaine St. James, Seeking Paradise by Thomas Merton, Walden by Henry David Thoreau and in many ways the Bible. Eliminating “stuff” is so freeing! Now I’m almost ready to die, but think I have a lot of real living to do first! 🙂

I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.
~Henry David Thoreau 

Charlie Doggett
Retired in Costa Rica (My “Woods”)
Pura Vida!