Dahlia Nahome lives in Santa Teresa, Costa Rica, with her husband and two children. As well as running her rental business, Costa Rican Vacation and Internet radio station Pura Sonica, she enjoys writing about and raising the profile of the Nicoya Peninsula and has had work published on various travel blogs.

Nearly two years ago, my husband and I decided to travel with our then 10-month-old daughter and 3-year-old son. We’d both done extensive travelling pre-kids and knew that we had a window of about 4 or 5 years before the kids needed to be settled in a school somewhere. We mapped out a route around the world, managed to get sabbaticals from our jobs and sold everything we owned.

Our first stop was Costa Rica – and that’s as far as we got, having fallen in love with a little place called Santa Teresa on the Nicoya Peninsula, where we have since settled. When people ask me what it was like moving here, my first response is often about how easy it all was – how exhausted and unfit we felt when we arrived but how quickly we started to feel relaxed and inspired by the beauty of this place. I started running for the first time in about six years and my husband Jeremy started surfing. Within three months of being here, our son Leon was swimming like a fish and had become pretty impressive on a surfboard too.

Leon and Delilah have a ball here, living life in a very free and spirited way, surrounded by nature. They know what high and low tide mean, they watch the moon and they love the sunsets. I, on the other hand, have had to deal with my fears of creepy crawlies, come to terms with living a quite isolated life and learn Spanish from scratch – all of which I am happy to say, I have done.

Looking back, there were a few things we did that have really made our move easy and some things that I would have done differently. In future, I’d pack much more lightly; sometimes there are no trolleys to help you in airports and you have to carry everything – including two sleeping children. In fact, you can buy pretty much all the things you need when you get here. On the other hand, two musts for me were a LittleLife travel cot and a lightweight buggy for airports.

I do advise pre-booking stopovers – and investing in comfy ones! When we first arrived in San José, it was late, we’d been traveling for about 20 hours and we were all exhausted. We checked into the Hampton Inn Hotel, which has a free shuttle to the airport, a swimming pool, a nice buffet breakfast, and big beds.

The other observation I have about the change we have made to our lives is that wherever you live, you’ll still have the same parental worries and anxieties that parents have the world over: Are my kids getting a good education? Are they safe? Will they get sick? Some things will never change, no matter how far you travel.