Pura Vida para the Carters

So, before we ever got here, Laura decided she would drive. She thought Sully will freak out and demand that everyone in the car be silent so he can concentrate. She thought Sully will lose it. Where would she get an idea like that? Now that I have peeled my fingers off the dashboard I can tell you a little bit about the roads in this country. Costa Rica is about the size of West Virginia and at first glance has similar twisting, mountainous roads. After a couple days of staring out the windshield, West Virginia has nothing on these roads. When we left Alajuela in our 4wd Hyundai Santa Fe we thought, "we got this!"At first we did. The roads were paved. Although they were winding, every bridge is single lane and travel was slow we were doing okay. After a few snafus because of the complete absence of signage we got on the right road to Hotel Linda Vista. It was gravel, but not too bad. But, around every corner they seem to get progressively worse. It is unbelievable how stee...

Aunt les knitting on the palapa Our French surf instructor, Lolo, on his ATV beach dog! Dinner!

The morning view   Pool chilling! Walking back from swimming on the beach Some dogs we met in our lunch restaurants  Everyone with their sunset cocktails!

This is why the drives don't seem as long as they actually are. The scenery along the whole way is breathtaking.  Here's our grocery list, the items at the bottom were added en route This is the store where we got all of our fruit and vegetables for the week. Everything was so fresh, not to mention cheap! This is how dark it was when we got to the house, so you can imagine how amazing the view looked in the morning. 

  We found our bumper!   After we threw the bumper in the back, we went to a butterfly conservatory! Relaxing by the pool after an eventful day All in all a great day!

Today we left Lake Arenal, but not before Sully, Laura, Alden and Jenna visited the hot river. Yes, hot. The river is heated by magma - yes, magma, from the Arenal Volcano. After that we drove back to the hotel, and jumped back into the car to drive to Mal País, an estimated 6 hours away. Although the roads are bad here, the drives really don't seem as long as they do in the States. This drive ended up being a 7.5 hour drive but it barely felt like 3. We even stopped at a fruit store and supermarket for groceries before we got there. We didn't lose our bumper this time because it was jammed in the back of our car with all of our luggage, about 9 bags of groceries, and all 6 of us. When we did arrive at Casa Moana, we were not only relieved to be there, but also amazed by the house and the view. We all settled in and a couple hours later the Woody's arrived to complete our day.

Today everyone woke up late, we had more pancakes and laid around in the sun by our beautiful pool. Later we ate lunch and motivated to go to playa hermosa for surfing lessons. Sully and Jenna took lessons while the women went for mojitos and empanadas, and the kids hung out at the beach and befriended a beach dog. After surf lessons we all met up, ate the empanadas and drove back to our house on the hill. The Carter-Faulconer car bumped to Latin Pop the whole way home, and we all had a dance party (with lights) before bed.

The kids in the infinity pool at the end of the day drinks to celebrate our arrival  Lunch at la choza de doña emilce The seating situation   The driving and navigation team Eyelash curling in Miami, priorities people!

Bam! We woke up early this morning to find the Pacific Ocean laid out in front of us. This house is awesome. After a leisurely breakfast of a double batch of bisquik pancakes for everyone and a dip in the pool we motivated and descended down the hill to the beach. The beach is pretty rocky below the house, but we walked up the way to Playa Carmen. It was kind of rocky/sandy. We got a little bodysurfing in and then ate at a restaurant called Caracolas, which means snails, on the edge of the beach. We are finally feeling like we are at the beach and chilling. Pictures are coming.

Today we started the day very early - we are two hours later here and were the first ones to breakfast! We had beautiful breakfasts with a beautiful view of the lake, and left afterwards. Aunt Les was able to somehow pre-download a map on her phone and we had a much better time navigating, but that didn’t mean that the roads were easy to drive on. We were doing fine until we got to a steep incline riddled with deep, gaping potholes, but we gritted our teeth and bumped past them, thanks to our driver extraordinaire. We took the boys to the lake to fish, and the girls went on our way to the butterfly sanctuary. We stopped at another one way bridge to take a picture of the river, only to return to our car and realize that our bumper was missing! We immediately turned around to retrace our steps and were all leaning out of the car looking for our bumper. We joked that we weren’t going to get to learn scientific names for butterflies, instead we would be looking for the rare bumpericus late...

Okay blog readers, the Carters/Faulconer/Yager crew made it to Costa Rica. It was more challenging to drive here by far. Laura, of course, read up on everything, but the rest of us were clueless. Costa Rica has been saving millions by not posting signs anywhere. I mean we have seen 4 and it's a big deal when we do see them. So, we rented a car from Adobe Rental Car, declined the GPS and headed on our way with a paper map of Costa Rica. We managed really well overall until San Ramon where we had a minor snafu when the ATM we hopped out to use didn't work and we were separated for a minute. We found each other without cell phones! Then, we found a bank and managed to get some Cólones. We managed to find our road and stopped outside of town at a yummy restaurant called La Choza de Doña Emilce. After lunch, we headed up north on Route 702, well at least we thought it was until we saw an actual sign that said so. The roads are windy and hilly, there are one way bridges, we went up ...