Blogs from San Isidro de General, Puntarenas, Costa Rica, Central America Caribbean

I love it when I yell to taylor “don’t forget to wash your hands after touching the horse poop” and someone else will call out “did you hear your mom?” That’s life on the farm. 3 of the women decided one day that the main house where the owner lived, near the gardens, was a gun free space and that they would be the ones to tell Taylor so I didn’t have to always be the one giving him the rules. Because it takes a village. By gun I mean stick, by the way! I’ve overheard one 20-something guy a few times saying things like “it’s always a good idea to listen to your mom”. There are no other kids here, which would certainly make it more fun for taylor. But having other adults, even adults ... read more

She did request that. And I have been lazy at this blogging business, so I'm getting back into it. I hope the description pleases my mother. I'll start at the place I'm staying. I know I've described it a bit, but here I'll go into laborious detail, just for the fun of it. The main complex of cloudbridge has three buildings. The electricity comes from solar panels, the stove works on gas, and the water comes right out of a mountain stream. if we are cold at night, we can light a fire in a wood buring stove, over which we can also cook beans. (Dried beans, by the way, are very difficult to cook, and require pre-soaking for a few hours and then cooking for at least an hour. Then, they still aren't very good. ... read more

Leaving San Jose made me a bit nervous as I was still not feeling wonderful and seemed to be developing a rash, on top of everything else. We had decided to take it slowly to see how I got on so we only had a 3 hour bus journey to the largest (!) town in the south of Costa Rica - San Isidro del General. This is really a small town that has quite a few facilities because it is on the Panamericana but is not very exciting in itself. It is surrounded by hills (the road to it from San Jose goes over 3,000m) and we were hoping to get out to see some of the surrounding area the following day but searching through the town produced no real clues as to how to visit ... read more

The sub-subtitle--or the overarching title, not sure which--would be: An Account An Three Parts of the Best Week of My Life. Really, I couldn't call it anything else. Katie graciously forfeited her spring break to come and spend with me one amazing week in Costa Rica! I literally had the best time of my whole life, and am very grateful for all the experiences we had. Katie and I traveled from the Airport to San José, to San Isidro de General, where we were picked up by our amazing hostel owner, John, in his 4X4 to take us up the slightly treacherous road to San Gerardo de Rivas, an incredibly remote and beautiful mountain village where we spent the majority of our week. This is the initial of three entries, which includes our initial adventures up ... read more