What an awesome/adventurous vacation!! After being up for around 24 hours, we finally made it to Orlando to fly to Costa Rica with a short layover in Miami. Our good friends, Shauna and Billy, checked in and were ready to head to the gate. We, on the other hand, did our best to try and fly with a passport card that’s only acceptable for land and sea travel. Uh oh!! After talking to agents, managers, and supervisors, we were told it just wasn’t going to happen. No worries, we’ll just fly to Miami and go to the passport office on Monday morning, right? Wrong!!! Monday just happened to be 4th of July!! We arrived in Miami later that morning, by now we were looking at about 28 hours without sleep. After renting a car, we decided to stay at The Eden Roc (thanks to Ashley’s mom and Dad) until we could get our passports on Tuesday morning. Although we would of rather of been in Costa Rica, we had a blast hanging out around South Beach for the 4th!! It took a grueling 12 hours on Tuesday to get our passports. (miami passport office = no fun) Finally we were on our way back to the airport around 5pm, just in time for our 7pm flight to San Jose. We were so excited to finally be on our way to Costa!!!
Upon arriving late Tuesday night, we caught a cab out to The Hermosa Bungalows, where we stayed until Sunday. You have no idea how happy we were to wake up the next morning just a couple hundred feet from the beach. If your looking for a place to stay in Costa, definitely check out the bungalows. The surf had some size and there was a lot on the vacation to do list so, we got down to business. Billy and I got to surf multiple times a day so we were stoked!!! We got to eat at a few amazing restaurants in Jaco. Our favorites were definitely Lemon Zest, Wishbone, and this little sushi spot on the strip, I forget the name though. It was amazing how fresh and delicious the food was. It made the American food hard to come back to.
On Friday we decided to go to Manuel Antonio, a national park that is about an hour away from the bungalows. You walk a ridiculously long way down a dirt road with monkeys and birds that we heard but couldn’t locate before arriving at a couple of unreal beaches!!! On the way back to Hermosa, we stopped in at the airplane restaurant, El Avion, that happened to have a sloth in a tree just off the deck. The view from the restaurant has to be one of the best in all of Costa Rica.
Aaron, from Hermosa Bungalows, has been friends with Billy since they were kids and they told the rest of us about a really cool waterfall that was pretty close to where we were staying. They also mentioned something about some mud that you rub on your skin to make it really smooth. I wasn’t too sure about it but it turned into an awesome afternoon!!! After a pretty bumpy ride in the Bego and crossing a really sketchy bridge that looked like it could collapse at any second, we made it. You pay a family a few hundred colones and your on your way. They were right, the mud definitely made your skin and hair soft and smooth.
The rest of the vacation was full of relaxing and lots of surfing, just what we needed after a crazy spring wedding season and a full fall wedding season coming up. We had an awesome time in Costa Rica!!! Stay tuned for our next vacation. It won’t be for a while but, I’m 100% sure that it will be just as eventful!!!
And finally, here is a video we made from our trip. Including a super awesome lifesize Jenga game. Warning : It is is a little shaky : ) You made need some Dramamine.