This is the third post about our Adventure Days experiences during our kids’ visit in February 2023. (Can’t believe it’s been so long since posting the first part of this – sorry to keep you hanging!) If you need to catch up on the first day and morning of the second day, you can read the posts here:
Our Adventure Day tour day was Sunday, and in the morning we had done horse back riding, tubing, and then had lunch. With lunch over, we headed back across the street to the Adventure Center, where we were told to go to the Souvenir Shop next door for the Zip Lining.
Sunday was our Adventure Day tour. We ate breakfast from the buffet at the casual restaurant, and then dressed and “packed” for the day. As instructed from the previous day, we dutifully wore our swimsuits under our horseback riding clothes, put our afternoon clothes in the plastic bags, where three of us also put sunglasses. John used the croakie to secure his sunglasses and we were off to the Adventure Center.
We were very excited to have our (grown) kids, Andy and Allison, come to visit us in February. We love seeing them, and it gives us an opportunity to break out of our daily routine and do different activities. Of course, they have visited before, but we want to make sure they continue to experience new things in Costa Rica. In a previous visit, they had expressed an interest in ziplining, and we just hadn’t gotten around to that activity. With the idea of ziplining and exploring other new areas/activities, I started looking online to see what might be available within a reasonable distance from our location.
The Parque Nacional Rincón la Vieja is located a little northeast of Liberia, the city that the kids were flying into, and there are several hotels with activities located near there. With a little Internet research, I found the Hotel Hacienda Guachipelín, located near the park, that offers Adventure Tours, including zip lining. One of the tour offerings was a One-Day Adventure Pass that included a canopy zip line tour through the Rio Blanco Canyon, a tubing adventure on the Rio Negro River with class III rapids, horseback riding, and volcano-heated thermal waters, plus lunch. It sounded like a fun and exciting day, so we booked the hotel for the first two nights of the kids’ trip, with the adventure tour on their first full day. We were going to start off their trip with a bang!
Costa Rican neighbor friends, Don and Marty, had heard about a local, but large, festival in the (relatively) nearby town of Santa Cruz and asked if we would be interested in going to it with them. Admittedly when we’ve ventured out here in Costa Rica, we’ve been more focused on seeing “tourist” attractions, rather than local. After all, Costa Rica has a lot to offer in a small country, and there’s a reason why Wheel of Fortune keeps giving away trips to this country. But because of how the country was initially shut down due to COVID soon after we first moved here, and then with settling into our house, etc., we just haven’t had the opportunity to see everything we’d hoped to in Costa Rica by now.
So, we thought that it might be fun to attend the “Fiestas Típicas Nacionales Santa Cruz” and agreed to join them on opening day, Saturday, January 14th.
When we first moved to Costa Rica, we had an apartment for a year in Escazú, a suburb of the capital city, San José. Our apartment complex contained its own shopping and restaurants and was also located so close to other stores and restaurants, that we didn’t even need a car. Wanting to be nearer to what attracted us to Costa Rica in the first place, but still waiting for our house to be completed, we moved to a rental house on the Pacific side of Costa Rica for a year and a half. There we had grocery stores and restaurants within short driving distances, so it became necessary to purchase a vehicle. Every 2 or 3 weeks we drove to Liberia, about an hour away, to get to a Walmart and PriceSmart (like Costco).
Our house was finally finished in January 2022, and it is … a little more remote. We are now two hours away from Liberia, and, on a good day, at least a half hour to the nearest sizeable town of Nosara/Guiones, depending on the weather and road conditions
We knew it would be different living in a more remote location, but admittedly, it has taken some getting used to. Now “going into town” requires more time and more thought. No more running to the store to quickly pick up something that we may have forgotten in a previous trip. It’s at least an hour’s drive round trip, even without considering the actual time it takes at whatever stops you make there. And time is the least of it – what you encounter along the way makes going to town an adventure unto itself.
According to the Costa Rican Embassy website, Costa Rica accounts for only 0.03 percent of the earth’s surface, but contains nearly 6 percent of the world’s biodiversity. This is readily apparent based on the number of different bird species that we have encountered here – so different than the ordinary robins, blue jays, etc., we were accustomed to in Iowa. When we lived in Escazú, the suburb of San José, we got used to seeing grackles and parrots. When we moved to our rental house near Playa Flamingo, the number of different bird species that we often saw grew to include kiskadees, magpie-jays, motmots, and scissor-tailed flycatchers, to name just a few. Now that we are in our house, a bit more remotely located, we have experienced even more birds! It was all so interesting and amazing … until the anis swooped in bringing their reign of terror!
The road that we took to get from Liberia in Costa Rica to the border crossing of Peñas Blancas into Nicaragua was Highway 1. Highway 1 is the Pan-American Highway that stretches from Alaska in the US at its northern tip, all the way to Chile or Argentina, depending on whose country you wish to consider the end point. (You can’t technically drive straight through – there is a notable gap between Panama and Columbia.)
This is the second of three posts about our first trip to Nicaragua in September 2021.
Despite applying over two years ago, Costa Rica has yet to process our application for residency. As we have discussed ad nauseam, to be able to drive in this country, we must leave and return every 90 days until we get our residency. In September 2021, when we were living near Playa Flamingo, it was time once again for our required 90-day trip out of the country so we could continue driving. This time we thought we would try something different and less expensive than purchasing plane tickets to the US. Many people in our situation make “border runs” to a neighboring country, driving to either Nicaragua or Panama, crossing the border, and returning the same day. (For a while, this was not an option, as the land borders were closed due to COVID, but the land borders are now reopened.)
Our friends Randi and Bill, who had accompanied us earlier in 2021 on our trip to Miami to meet the 90-day requirement, had heard about a one-day tour to Nicaragua, where we would cross the border, do some sight-seeing, and then return in the evening. Randi found that the tour company would agree to a private tour for the four of us. This trip would allow us to meet the 90-day requirement, cross the border with a guide, with the added bonus of seeing a country we’d never been to before – we were in!
This is the first post about our first trip to Nicaragua.
It’s a Saturday afternoon in October here in Costa Rica. We had a beautiful sunny morning, but now the sky has turned overcast, the thunder is rumbling, and the rain has started falling. October is the rainiest month of the rainy season, when we get almost daily afternoon rain showers. The rains make the vegetation beautifully green and lush. This weather is not typical of our Octobers back in Iowa, where you could often just feel the crispness of Fall in the air, the leaves would be turning, and neighbors would adorn their porches with pumpkins.
Here in Costa Rica, we subscribe to a TV service that allows us to watch US TV stations with US commercials. Now that it is October, we are seeing a lot of Halloween-themed commercials. As I have mentioned in previous posts, Costa Rica doesn’t celebrate Halloween, like the US, nor Day of the Dead, as in Mexico. But that doesn’t mean that people don’t believe in things we normally associate with Halloween, like witches.
The first year we lived in Costa Rica, we lived in Escazú, a suburb of the capital that proudly proclaims itself as “The City of the Witches” and has a stereotypical broomstick flying witch on it’s city emblem. Our Spanish teacher, who lives in Escazú, told us that he believed in witches based on his experience trying to rent a house that turned out to be haunted, from a woman who seemed to be a witch. Curious, John and I had attempted to and finally did find the house. We chronicled our teacher’s story and our subsequent hunt for that witch house in the posts below:
We moved to the Pacific coast of Costa Rica over a year ago, and the vibe here is much different than in Escazú. I’d totally put the witch house out of my mind, until …
Remember, it's an adventure. 