Our Vacation to Costa Rica!

Sometimes the journeys filled with mishaps, lead to the best destinations. This was most definitely the case with our latest journey to Costa Rica. It all started with our flights. I have to say, I was not satisfied with the customer service from American Airlines. Why on earth would they let you pick your seats ahead of time online, if they didn’t plan to honor those seat? On our confirmation emails, our assigned seats were next to each other on all three flights. But alas, when our boarding passes were printed, we weren’t even close to one another! I know, big deal. Just saying it was annoying. Then on the flight, I had a question for the flight attendant. I pushed the call button and patiently waited more than 10 minutes for a response. Finally, the flight attendant shows up, turns the button off and keeps walking without a word to me! Seriously? Did that just happen?

We arrived in Costa Rica without any further incident. We were planning to meet my parents and Emily once we got there, but their 5-hour layover in Denver had turned into an 8-hour layover due to a delayed flight. It was after midnight, before they got in. Luckily, we had planned to stay in a hotel near the airport that night before driving down to the beach. It was a long day of travel for all of us and we were looking forward to a relaxing day at our beach house the next day. We decided to take a little detour on the way to see one of the volcanoes.  This is what we were supposed to see

I’d say the picture was a bit misleading as this is what we actually saw:

We really just paid 10 bucks to look at the fog

 Anyway, still cool to say we’ve been to a volcano I guess.  From the volcano, it was supposed to be between 1.5 – 2 hours to drive to our finally destination of Esterillos Este. We had rented a car and gotten a GPS, and I was confident we would be able to find our way easily. Once you got on the main freeway, you just stayed on it. We found our way to the freeway entrance, only to find it was closed. There was a construction man sitting there so we asked where we should go. Of course, he didn’t speak English and we didn’t speak Spanish so that was not an enlightening conversation. We drove around for a long time looking for another entrance, and every one we found was blocked off. We finally found a lady who spoke English who told us the road was only open for one-way traffic today. Apparently, everyone’s break was ending and they were all going back to school that day, so they opened both sides of the freeway for one direction. Who does that? She gave us some directions and we were able to follow some windy, mountain, back roads and find our way to our destination 5 hours later! Whew! Another long day of travel behind us. Luckily, we were greeted that night by a nest of sea turtles hatching right in the front yard! Some of them got a little confused and ended up in the pool rather than the ocean. It was pretty neat to see them! We found a whole group of them the next day as well and were able to watch them crawl to the sea. 

The next day, we did not venture away from our beach house at all. Can you blame us when this was our view?

This house was perfect! It was away from the tourists and we literally had the beach to ourselves.

 

We spent the day surfing and body boarding, lounging at the pool, and getting sunburned. The only mishap of the day was my dad breaking his nose on a surf board. 

 
We spent the rest of the week doing fun things like snorkeling, hiking, and exploring the area in general. 

We saw monkeys in the trees, crocodiles in the river, and raccoons stealing ladies’ purses! 

We also had the opportunity to go to the temple and do a session in Spanish (with the little headphones to translate, of course.) That was really interesting and gave me a different perspective.

Other than the fiascos in the beginning, we had a really relaxing time just having lazy days at the beach. We absolutely loved our trip and would recommend Costa Rica to anyone for a vacation.