My parents decided on a whim to come visit Costa Rica. What a great excuse for Mike and I to continue our travels of the country and show my folks around a bit. We had planned on taking them to La Paz Waterfall, Arenal Volcano, Manuel Antonio and ending their visit here in Sámara. It wasn’t until halfway into their trip that I realized we simply wouldn’t have time to do everything and decided to cut Manuel Antonio out of our plans. When we arrived at La Paz Waterfall Gardens Resort, we were completely amazed at the beauty of the rooms. [View Full Entry]

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Sámara is located on the western Pacific coast between the beaches of Nosara and Montezuma. It is said to be one of the safest and most beautiful beaches in Costa Rica. Wildlife here abounds and not a day goes by without us seeing monkeys, lizards and birds from the deck of our condo. We’ve also spotted in our back yard a crocodile who has become quite famous around town for his survival skills. The “lot” next door to our condos apparently has only recently come into existence. To the dismay of locals, what used to be an estuary was destroyed in [View Full Entry]

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Manuel Antonio was really an amazing park. I would definitely recommend heading there in the rainy season, considering it felt like we had the park all to ourselves with the exception of only a few other hikers. We have heard that the place gets a bit overrun in the dry season with tour buses lining up on the street outside. Our seven dollar entry fee was well spent as we saw an abundance of wildlife, interesting flora and beautiful beaches. The hiking was cool due to the trails being shaded by the tree canopy. However, I would also recommend hiking in [View Full Entry]

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After spending the past few weeks heading down the coast, enjoying small beach towns along the way, Mike and I have come to realize that what had appeared to be insect and spider bites is now a serious case of poison ivy. I can’t tell you how many people have said they didn’t even think Costa Rica had poison ivy. Let me assure everyone that this lovely little plant is alive and thriving here…grrrr… I have to say though that dealing with the pharmacies directly (as is custom here instead of going to the doctors) has been decent. I have [View Full Entry]

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I have officially lost my first battle with nature. After spending the last week and a half in San Carlos and trekking through multiple rainforests on more than 20 farms, the heat, mosquito bites, spider bites and poisonous plants have finally gotten the better of us. My 30+ insect bites have now turned into 89 welts that are driving me bonkers and Mike’s quick brush with fire ants have encouraged us to take a break from the woods. Don’t get me wrong. San Carlos is an awesome area. We’ve met some really great people and seen some beautiful sites, however San [View Full Entry]

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Mike and I arrived in San Carlos on Thursday of last week and it seems like every day we’re in this area, the more we feel at home. San Carlos is quite a large area. It’s more like a county containing many small towns such as Ciudad Quesada, Muelle, La Fortuna and Santa Rosa. It’s northwest of San Jose in case anyone is looking at a map. On the way to San Carlos, Mike decided we would diverge from the route we knew and see some towns we hadn’t yet visited. Maps of Costa Rica, however, tend to be a bit [View Full Entry]

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Mike, Gerardo and I have just gotten back from a few days in San Carlos. What a great place! This is the third time we have ventured around the area and seem to enjoy the town more and more. We decided to head back up there for the day and check out a farm we had looked at last week. Funny part was that we didn’t expect to spend the night so we had no change of clothes, no toothbrushes, no hair brush, etc. What fun! Toothbrushes were easy enough to obtain but forget about a hairbrush (it took me [View Full Entry]

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Last week Mike and I decided it would be a good idea to check out the Serpentarium so that we would be better equipped to identify different types of snakes here in Costa Rica. Costa Rica has 135 species of snakes with 17 being venomous. The two main venomous families are coral snakes and pit vipers. Neither of which I care to run into. I had asked Mike before we left if he knew the way. He said he was pretty sure as he had gotten the address and we had a map. Off we went… Excusion #1….. A normal drive [View Full Entry]

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Mike’s been spending a lot of time with Jorge, our mechanic, working on the truck to get her ready for our adventure. The other day, Jorge’s friend Carlos stopped over and invited everyone to have lunch at his father’s house up the mountain. When he said “up” the mountain, that’s seriously what he meant. Carlos’ father, José Luis, works for the government-run telephone service. The company owns a piece of land on the very top of a mountain called Cerro Chompipe, where it has a telephone tower. José Luis’ job is basically to maintain the tower [View Full Entry]

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We’ve bought a truck! All the time spent weeding through trucks that weren’t exactly right for us, has finally paid off. Narrowing our search down helped as well as we had done additional research on the 4Runners, Landcruisers and Pathfinders. We found that the Landcruisers, while great to look at, had very bad gas mileage and had extremely poor emissions. Pathfinders faired better however their long term reliability wasn’t as good as the Toyotas. 4Runners however seemed to be exactly what we were looking for as they had decent gas mileage in the 4 cylinder, had excellent lon [View Full Entry]

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