April 1 Costa Rica Here We Come!!

When I talked with Kassidy the other day, she sounded super surprised that I’m still planning to come.  Apparently this job is changing my habits some because she said it was very unlike me to just jump up and go somewhere.  Lol, no wonder I’m driving my friends and family crazy.

After a long, restless night, Justin took me to the airport at 6am for my flight.  I packed a hiking backpack with a lot more stuff than I intended on bringing and I dropped all of my other luggage off in the Crew Lounge so I can go straight back to Boston on Friday.  The flight was booked 52 out of 150, so Duke and I got our own rows.  I intended to sleep, but started watching Saving Mr. Banks on tv and stayed awake the whole time.  The movie wasn’t worth it, although Tom Hanks is a fantastic actor.

We arrive in San Jose around 8am and catch the shuttle to National Car Rentals.  It was such a rip off!  When Duke booked the car online, it said the total was $56 for the week.  Come to find out, it is mandatory to purchase insurance of $24 PER DAY!  What???  The total came to $133, but we figured it was still cheaper than the cost for both of us to take the shuttle to and from Uvita.  So very unhappy about the situation, we took the car anyways.  A Prius.  Awesome.

Next hurdle, the car place gave us a horrible map.  Most of the roads in the city were not labelled on the map.  (I felt inclined to include a picture of it in this post.) To make things worse, most of the roads IN the city weren’t labelled on the streets either!!  It took us an hour to figure out how to get headed in the right direction and we took a little detour through the mountains.  Wow, the roads were curvy!

Once outside the city, street signs were much better and it was easier to decide which way we needed to go.  We stopped to take pictures once or twice.  The mountain roads were beautiful, although scary.  We stopped at Backyard Burger for lunch.  A poor decision.  The food was expensive and not good.  We spent $45 on a burger, a burrito, 2 coronas and 2 waters.  Ouch. 

The other thing that we can’t figure out is the currency.  It’s $500 Colones to $1.  So when the bill comes it’s 20,000 colones.  Very weird to get used to.

Eventually, we made it to the Tucan Hotel and to Kassidy!!  I’ll post more about the Hotel later.  We dropped our things off, changed clothes and headed to the beach for sunset.  A guy, Joel, joined us for the ride to the beach as well.  We hung out on the beach, played in the water and watched a beautiful sunset.  At night, Kassidy cooked a delish dinner for us, we had some wine and then went to bed soon after. 

Duke at the hostel:

Thus ended our first day in Costa Rica.