Where We Live

Above: A map of our neighborhood made by our GPS-wielding intern, Bob Severinghaus and his boys.

When we moved to San Jose, Costa Rica, we had an advantage of living in a pretty big city (over one million). There were lots of stores, a decent downtown, and lots of places to explore. Along with all of that came some good maps and great pictures on Google earth (some of you may remember our neighborhood map).

Well La Ceiba is a little bit smaller, too small in fact for Google Earth to take a close picture of the city. We’ve tried to get a map of our neighborhood, but it all comes out as a big blur.

So last month, our team purchased some GPS mapping software to be used by our teammate Bob, who is trained in that sort of thing. He started off with the ambitious project of mapping Armenia Bonito, which we’ll use for ministry and census purposes. Next, we asked him if he could do our neighborhood, El Sauce.

Above is the completed map, with our house as the red star. We’re guessing there are about 400 houses in our neighborhood, but as you can see, it is pretty small, size-wise, because all of these houses touch each other.

Some other things of note on the map. We don’t have a park, so Lucy and I go up to the soccer fields on the NW side to play. The shops in the NE corner include a Popeye’s, Burger King, Dunkin Donuts/Baskin Robbins, banks, and a pharmacy.

The neighborhood also has lots of little shops, a restaurant, a few catholic churches, a big private school in the back, and a butterfly museum, which we need to go to.

So far we love it.  The best part is it’s quiet and has side walks for nice walks with the girls.