Wednesday, May 01, 2013

For our second Costa Rican adventure, we decided to bring along the children who were available.  Robert was on his mission, Jennifer and Rebecca were in college, and that left Carolyn, Sarah and Jonathon.  We flew in to San Jose and rented a 4WD SUV which was big enough to hold people and luggage and drove off.  Our destination was Playa Estarillos  about 10 miles south of Jaco on the Pacific coast.   At 6 PM near the equator, it is dark and at 6:30 it is pitch black.  We arrived sometime after 6:30 and while our map said there was a hotel, we could barely make out the sides of the road.  I inquired of some locals and they gave me rough idea of where to go, and by dumb luck we stumbled in to Le Auberge Pelican.  Many of the hotels are run by expatriots from various countries, and the owners here were French Canadian.  There was room in the inn, and we checked in and went to bed.  The next day, the kids hit the beach.  The beach was actually great for kids because it was a long, slow descent to the water, so they had a hard time drowning.  Carolyn and Sarah could not be persuaded that tropical sun burns white flesh quickly, and learned the hard way.  We went horseback riding in the mountains a few miles away from the hotel, and went mountain climbing with the SUV on steep roads up into the jungle.  We also spent a day at Manuel Antonio National Park which is a must-see.  In 1974 I visited the beach there before it was parkified.  It was a 6 hour bus ride on a bumpy gravel road from San Jose,  and we camped on the beach.  The body-surfing was phenomenal and we were alone there.  Now, the beach is wall-to-wall people and not nearly so much fun.  So much for building an asphalt road to an out-of-the-way place.  By the end of our trip, the girls were feeling better about their sunburns and we drove back to San Jose for the excursion home.  We still haven’t heard the end of what unfeeling parents we are to not have taken the older kids along too.