Tuesday, April 30, 2013

The memories of my late-teenage experiences in Costa Rica spawned a desire to return with my wife.  It took us a while to get there in between dental school and Army assignments in Japan, Texas, Arizona, Kentucky, Germany, and finally Alaska, but  the airlines conspired to help us out.  In the olden days of Alaska citizenship, the airlines were very eager to get you to spend your Permanent Dividend dollars with them and they promoted some amazing deals.  The Dividend was about $1200, and the airlines would offer x number of tickets to their destinations for your Dividend.  Northwest and Continental offered 3 and 4 tickets to Costa Rica at various times, so we farmed out our kids to our faithful friends and we flew away.  We arrived in Liberia, Guanacaste, the northern province of Costa Rica, rented a car and after describing to the rental agent that we were looking for a quiet beach we could relax on, he recommended Playa Junquillal.  At the time, the roads were slow going, gravel or pot-holey asphalt and poorly signed, but we reached Junquillal and set about finding a room.  The first place we looked was a hotel sprinkled down the side of a hill to the ocean called Antumalal.  It was a beautiful setting and we were some of the only guests, so we took a room closest to the beach and intended to stay for a night or two which became three, and then four, and five and six and we saddled up again to see some more of the country.  Costa Rica is varied in it’s topography with volcanoes and mountains, northern plains with agriculture, the central valley with the capital, San Jose, and both Pacific and Caribbean beaches.  You choose temperature with elevation.  San Jose is in the 70’s year round while the beaches are in the high 90’s.  We began exploring in the mountains and stayed in a rustic lodge where they were developing a very long concrete water slide and a canopy tour on zip lines, saw Rincon de la Vieja (one of 5 active volcanoes in Costa Rica), drove down to the plains again and then around Lake Arenal to see Arenal (another of the active volcanoes).  We drove down to Tabacon with it’s hot springs that drain through many pools of different temperatures where we swam in the pools and stayed the night.  Driving to the outskirts of San Jose and then to the pacific coast where we took a ferry from Puntarenas to the Nicoya peninsula, we found ourselves back where we started at Antumalal on Playa Junquillal.  After two more days of not driving and just relaxing, we made our way back to the airport and home, hoping our faithful friends still were after watching our kids for two weeks.