Moving

Hard to tell from the photo, but these fellows were enormous

Moving.  Glorious, misty vistas.  Oil palm tree plantations.  Bad roads full of motorcycles, beat up cars, roadside restaurants, vague signs, big trucks belching diesel fumes.  A long bridge over a muddy river where egrets sat on the banks alongside fat, languorous, prehistoric-looking crocodiles.  This was our day today.

This morning we awoke in a neat, clean little hotel owned by Minor, a jovial, moustached Costa Rican who had picked us up yesterday at the bus station in San José after our bus trek from Turrialba.  We had left Ray and Heidi’s rental home yesterday morning; the landlord and his family had all come to see them off with a tearful goodbye and help us load up the taxi to the Turrialba bus station.  My son said goodbye to all the neighborhood dogs.  Ray and Heidi had packed up six months of belongings and memories the previous weekend, and Ray had taken half of them to a friend’s house in San José on Monday while Patrice, Heidi, and the kids hiked down the mountain to the local swimming waterfall and swimming hole, and I wrote the previous blog entry.

Clear, cold mountain pool

Monday and Tuesday were rainy and relaxing, and we tried to hang laundry that we knew wouldn’t dry in time.  I even spent part of Tuesday trying to iron them dry, but to no avail.  Tuesday evening we made a slow pilgrimage to their favorite local restaurant, Doña Rosa’s, stopping off at their friends’ houses along the way to visit the mini-zoo of a neighbor, drop off clothes for a school sale, and deliver gifts to school friends.  At the restaurant we enjoyed the local cuisine at its finest (chicharrones) with a gorgeous view of the valley with the dam and reservoir below.

Waiting for dinner

 

So Wednesday we traveled to the San José hotel by taxi, two-hour bus ride, and shuttle.  We settled in and took a quick taxi to an Italian restaurant in Heredia that is well known in the area.  We woke up this morning to a grand breakfast of eggs, sausage, fruit, rice and beans, and tortillas.  

Ray and Patrice went to the rent-a-car place to pick up our car for the next two weeks, and then had to buy plastic bags and ropes to tie our bags to the roof.  We scrunched in and headed to Manuel Antonio.  We met our friends Michael and Ale with Ale’s cousin Tati and their two kids Beckett and Sophia at a roadside restaurant overlooking the Pacific.  We arrived in Quepos, then climbed up the mountain to Manuel Antonio and our rental house.

Costa Rica is about the size of West Virginia, but lacks the kind of road infrastructure that makes it easy to travel.  The distance from the capital to our rental house in Manuel Antonio is around 180 km, around 110 miles, but it took us around three and a half hours to get here.  Roads are winding and congested.  Fortunately, the scenery is magnificent!