Blogs from Heredia, Costa Rica, Central America Caribbean - page 22

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 and ensure the technicians are doing their jobs. The company therefore allows him and his wife, Mirela, to live in a house right next to the tower on the top of the mountain. What an amazing view! They overlook the ... read more

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 long term reliability ratings for certain years (1992, 1994, 1995, 1996+) and had the lowest emissions for an SUV 4X4. We were sold. We immediately started to look at only 4Runners and only those who had good years for ... read more

On Saturday night we met 2 young expat couples to go to a festival/carnival in the local town. On first glance it looked like any other carnival with some dangerous looking rides, overpriced “tchotchkes” and games that are impossible to win. After a few minutes we began to notice that a lot of the stands were selling masks that some of the kids and many of the drunks were wearing. We found out that these masked “marauders” actually run through the festival during the daily parades beating onlookers with pig-bladders that they inflate with either water or air. Today we drove through town 10 minutes before the parade, and had the opportunity to witness this amazing ritual… Unfortunately Rachel was already feeling sick, and I am afraid that out her over the edge. Not only does ... read more

We never made it to the contractor, nor did we get to do any fun/touristy stuff on Sunday or any other day this week. Sunday we spent the whole day driving around Costa Rica looking for stores that we never found. It should have served as a preview for what lay in store for the rest of our week. Monday, we drove around shopping for all sorts of stuff, finding some of what we had been looking for to turn the house into a working inn. We also had our first Spanish class scheduled, but in true Tico style the teacher never showed up, and after a half hour he rescheduled for Tuesday. Tuesday I spent almost two hours at the government-run phone company working to change the phone lines over to our names. After waiting ... read more

The kids just started school again last Monday. Thank G-d. Not that we didn’t have a great vacation - we did - it’s just that now I know why camp was invented. We alternated from doing touristy stuff to hanging around the house (heading into cabin-fever land). Ari had a week off while Ellie finished school, then we were all home for a week, then to the beach for a couple days and on to Nicaragua, then back at home for a week, then a visit from Nana and Pop-pop, and, whew, back to school. For the weeks they were at home, the kids were definitely getting a little stir crazy (or maybe I was the one getting stir crazy). There aren’t any camps for them to go to aside from a couple morning workshops that ... read more