Day 2 (In which I wake up in a foreign country)

Day 2 (In which I wake up in a foreign country)

There were no clocks in our room and the only time keeping device which I had with me was my cell phone which would turn out to be insanely expensive to answer or get texts on, so I mainly kept it off.

The good and bad thing about this is that I went to bed and woke up when my body felt like it which in the case of day 1 was about 8:00 p.m. local time. Funny thing about western Costa Rica….it is bright and sunny just before 6:00 a.m. and the Ticos are early risers…quite content to weed whack just after getting out of bed.

Saturday was going to be a decompression day…a time to just relax after a stressful day of travel. I had heard from the guide books and our friends the Olsons that to get an authentic Tico breakfast, you had to look for a sign that said “Soda” and stop there. We made the ten minute drive to Playa Coco and stopped at the first Soda we saw, “Soda Los Pelones”.

We had an incredible breakfast of beans and rice, eggs, sausage, juice, and coffee. We ran across the street to the bakery to get a loaf of bread. We drove down the dusty, unpaved street to the shoreline and doubled back stopping at a supermarket. There are two obvious differences in American and Tico supermarkets. The first is that the Tico supermarkets are basically open air warehouses. The second striking thing is that every grocery store had at least one aisle with hard liquor.

We bought a few essentials (rum is essential by the way) and a few costa Rican beers. We bought some cheese, ham, and some lime flavored mayonnaise in a giant toothpaste tube. I also bought what I suspected was skim milk, but later turned out to be due to a mistranslation two quarts of buttermilk.

We went to the beach again, and took a dip in the pools. After relaxing a few hours, we decided to check out a trail we found behind one of the buildings at the resort. We hiked through a valley (where there were a surprising number of tall cactus plants), and through the wooded section of the property where we saw howler monkeys and crabs. We meandered back to the room where we saw several hundred orange throated parakeets roost in the tree in front of our room.

While Nancy read, and Isaac watched movies, I used my limited Spanish and the international language of beer to make friends with the neighbors. One was in real estate and came from a family of 15 brothers and sisters. The other was an engineer for the Bimbo bread company. (Bimbo bread is huge in CR. I didn’t have the heart or the Spanish vocabulary to explain what “Bimbo” meant in English.). Thankfully my friend “Little Matt” had told me a few funny stories about visits to Costa Rica that I could share. At one point, one of my new friends offered the toast “Poura Beera” (a twist on the Tico saying of “Pura Vida” which I thought was clever until I saw it on about a hundred shirts over the next 6 days.)

As we were settling down for the night, I got a call from the company that we were ziplining with the next day, “Pura Aventura”. For some reason or another, they were going to have to be closed for the next few days. Thankfully, you can’t throw a dead cat without hitting a zipline company in Costa Rica and so a quick phone call later we had a reservation to ride horses, ATVs and ziplines the next day at a place that was 10 minutes down the road instead of a two hour drive.

We all fell asleep shortly after 8:00 that night.
Strength and Honor
Big Matt