Five-minute Vacation Broccoli Stir Fry

One final dinner on the beach, grateful for the paradise at home.

Maybe it’s my fault for not doing any research before the flight took off, but the first morning I stepped out of our San Jose airport hotel, I was convinced we were by the ocean.

“Is the beach around here?” I asked my husband, the logistics king, who had booked the flights and picked the location and planned a trip on behalf of the whole family, bless him. He laughed — ”About sixty miles that way!” he said. But the air felt different. I could have sworn it was the sea. Maybe that’s just the vibe in Costa Rica.

We had traveled plenty of times with our first baby, tacking my sweet teacher husband’s paternity leave onto school vacations and taking ambitiously long flights. With a 2-year-old and 3-month-old in tow, we knew we’d have to be a little more constrained. So with spring break coming up, he found us a home swap at the top of the mountain in Costa Rica. A free place to stay and a direct flight from Los Angeles — it couldn’t get any better than that. I agreed with the logistics king’s reasoning, and, soon enough, we were off.

The Road Trip From Hell

Now, there was a catch. Of course there was. The universe doesn’t like us to get complacent. In our case it was this: Our idyllic mountain treehouse was a three-hour drive from the place where our airplane would land. Four hours, we found out after we booked — our host told us they were doing some construction on a bridge. Traffic was a little slow. That turned out to be the understatement of the century (travel-wise).

We decided to break the drive into two pieces: two hours one day, two hours the next. We’d make plenty of stops so the kids didn’t get overwhelmed, and we marked off the map with a tropical fruit stand and a few little parks, plus a bridge where we could see crocodiles basking in the river. At first, things seemed to be going fine. The mountain roads were winding, but we made good progress as far as the stand, where we stopped for a picnic of mysterious, unnamed tropical fruits. That’s when the trouble started.

We rounded the next corner, and suddenly traffic was at a standstill. I don’t mean slow, I mean completely parked. The baby, who had been sweetly sleeping, woke up immediately and started screaming — the car had stopped, that meant it was time for her to be picked up and cuddled, why wasn’t that happening? The toddler, faced with a Phill Spectre wall of screaming baby sound, began to complain.

There was no streaming service available. The same downloaded toddler songs looped over and over until the sound of Pete Seeger cheerfully singing about sweet potatoes became a hellish dirge. What was meant to be a two-hour drive ended up taking almost eight hours, door to door. It was not an auspicious beginning.

Mountain Paradise

But then, at long last, we arrived. We had made it to our temporary Costa Rican home, a small guest house on the property of Alex, a Columbian woman, and Oren, her Israeli husband, who had both come on various trips or work assignments to the country 20 years before, met, fell in love, had children, and set up their mountain compound. Alex’s sister lived there, too, with her husband, a Brit, who had come to Costa Rica on vacation, met Caro, and never left. They had four children between them (teenagers now, with three of the four away at school), seven dogs, about 15 assorted exotic chickens, over 200 tropical fruit trees (Oren is in permaculture), and one waterfall-fed swimming hole. To put it simply: magic.

Living and having children in America, you get used to a certain amount of atomization. The nuclear family is standard, and that usually means two working parents, 2.5 stressed children, and little space for the village. Oren and Alex had arranged their lives differently. As he gave me and the kids a walking tour, he told me about the way they marked their year with gatherings, a regular Monday night jam with musicians from around the neighborhood, a rainy season chai open house with spices harvested from his own trees. I’m a city mouse through and through, but there was something inspiring about this vision of a slower and more connected way to build community.

What I Learned on my Spring Vacation

Everything always looks different on vacation. We come back from Sweden promising ourselves to institute a daily fika — a coffee break — at the office, go to Taiwan and consider starting a tai chi meetup group in our neighborhood park. Everybody does it, and I’m no exception. But the lessons I learned from Oren and Alex feel different.

As a working mother, sometimes it’s easy to get caught up in the endless search for perfection, the idea that I should be doing more, producing more, making more, being more all the time. Sometimes simplicity gets lost in all that doing, the happiness of simply being forgotten. So as I write this story with a squirming baby on my chest, I remember it all goes by so fast. There is always space for a little more slowness, connection, community. Time to make something simple for dinner instead of worrying about hitting all five food groups, and, before flying home, have one final dinner on the beach, feeling grateful for the paradise I have waiting back at home.

Emily Beyda’s writing has appeared in the Los Angeles Times, Built, Refinery29, Smartmouth, Fodors, the Thrillist, the Austin Chronicle, and more. Her novel, “The Body Double,” was published in 2021.

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