First Week Itinerary 

Hello, welcome back to the free creative podcast. I’m your host, Miranda Anderson. Today, you’re listening to Episode Number 251, and I’m recording live here in Nosara, Costa Rica, where my family has spent the last month. Today’s episode is going to be a little bit of a walk through our first week.

I know that I usually like to share some intentional pieces of advice or tips or new understanding that can pique your curiosity about different topics. Today’s episode and next week’s episode are going to be a review of our family’s trip.

I’ve had a bunch of people ask about our itinerary, I know that it’s daunting to plan a family trip, especially a long one or a big one, going to somewhere that you may have never been before, and so hopefully you’ll glean some information from what I share these next couple weeks, even though it’s not going to be like a targeted themed lesson per se, like my episodes tend to be generally.

There’s not going to be like three ways to have fun in Costa Rica with your family. These episodes are going to be more storytelling and sharing some experiences and interesting things that we’ve seen and done.

You can just imagine that we are meeting for lunch at our local favorite… restaurant, and after we order and grab our giant Diet Cokes with lime with crushed ice you say, hey, how was the first part of your trip? This episode will be my response. Of course, this is still a Live Free Creative podcast, so I’m going to start with a quick segment.

This one will be Peaks of the Week.

Segment: Peaks of the Week Costa Rica Version

I thought I would share some of the go to items that we’ve loved having on this trip so far. Some Costa Rica slash tropical beach related products that I either haven’t been using for very long and I’ve been really impressed with or things that I’m happy we brought.

Nomadix Towels

I’m going to start with something that I discovered last summer, and I just keep feeling like these are such a cool product.

They’re towels. They’re very lightweight sort of microfiber beach towels. They’re They roll up tight, they dry out quickly, and they’re virtually sand proof. So, you can lay it out on the beach on dry sand, and when you stand up and shake it off a little bit to dry off, the sand hasn’t clumped up inside the fibers of the towel because it’s so flat, or the type of microfiber they use.

I bought a bunch of them last year for my summer camp. I gave them away. As part of the sort of welcome kit for summer camp and as part of that ordered some so that each person in my family had one. So, we have five nomadic beach towels and I have brought them to the pool, to the river. I’m, I mostly love them for the beach.

Like they’re great for the beach. They’re fun for camping and for going to the pool and other things. But there’s something about the being able to easily shake off the sand, having them dry quickly and Pack lightly. I can put all five of them in my beach bag. Where everyone else is carrying something different to the beach and fit five beach towels into a little raffia beach bag.

It’s great. So, I will link those in the show notes. I love them and I’m so glad that we brought them. I will mention that everywhere that we’ve stayed has included beach or pool towels as part of the accommodations. Right now, we are staying in a pool. in a beach house right by the beach, and they have beach towels, pool towels, and shower towels.

And the beach towels that they’ve provided are great. They’re thin Turkish towels. They’re beautiful. And I prefer the nomadix towels because they stay cleaner and sand proof. Longer and more easily. So, I’m glad that we brought them.

Raffia Beach Bag

I already mentioned another peak of the week, which is this raffia beach tote I found it in Morocco So I’m not going to be able to link thing that the exact thing that I bought because I found it at a market in Marrakesh when I was looking at it though, it was succumbing to the Pressure of all my sisters and my mom.

We all bought them and we bought them for our daughters as well And we had them personalized for our daughters, which was so cute so plum has her little raffia beach bag and I have mine is a big square and It’s really cute, it’s really beachy looking, but I didn’t realize until I started taking it to the beach how amazing it is to have something that is waterproof and sand proof on the beach.

I can toss in our towels, water bottles I usually bring the kindle and sunglasses and some extra sunscreen, and I sit it on the sand and everything, because it’s sturdy, everything stays in place. It’s in there intact easily and when I bring it home, all the sand just falls out of the bottom.

It’s been amazing. So, I take that to the beach every time we go, which is every day these last few weeks and I will find something like share so that you get an idea of what I’m talking about.

Kindle Kids Paperwhite

A couple of things that I’m keeping in my beach bag are my Kindle Kids Paperwhite. I have done it.

I’ve hopped. the fence to being a Kindle person. I’m so happy that I took the plunge before this trip. Last month, we spent a week in Outer Banks, and I packed an entire, basically like a duffel bag full of books that I had gotten at the library before the trip. And I read. a fiction beach read a day while we were there, so I finished eight books during the week.

And I realized there’s just no way I’m going to be able to keep up with the amount of fun reading that I like to do in the summer when we’re in Costa Rica. I can’t bring an entire checked suitcase full of books. So many people recommended a Kindle. I’ve resisted for years because I really do love the feel and smell and experience of reading a book.

And I’ve been really surprised how adaptable. I’ve been converting to the Kindle. I love that it’s not. on my phone or on another brightly lit, blue lit device. My friend Jansen Bradshaw recommended the Kids Paperwhite because it’s the same device, the same actual technology, and the same Kindle itself as the adult one, but it’s less expensive.

And it comes with a case, which I don’t love the cover style of the case, so I’ve just covered mine with Stickers and that’s worked for me and they it’s really cool and funky and I have loved it I’ve gone through and we also have Kindle Unlimited as part of our Prime membership anyway, and so I Have read dozens of books and as soon as I finish one I can return it to the shelf and grab another one I’ve I haven’t been very picky.

I’m reading just like some of the bestsellers or the highly recommended ones. A lot of the books that I’m picking are things that I haven’t ever heard of before that are just available and that’s fine with me for right now. So, I’m loving the kids Kindle Paperwhite. I will link that in the show notes so you can see what I’m talking about.

I got one for each of my kids because we’re trying to do a screen free vacation. And it’s gone well. We are doing some movie nights and the occasional show on the TV at the beach house, but for the most part, there’s been not either haven’t met any video games. There hasn’t been much. We severely restricted my teenagers iPhone.

So, the kids have been using their Kindles. As their go to device and I love that. It’s been great. So, I love the Kindle Kids paper whites.

Sun Bum Products 

Face Mist, After Sun Lotion, Face Bar

The other things that I’m tossing in my beach bag daily and that we used even when we were in the mountains are sun bum sunscreen and this special picarin insect repellent that I found online.

I’m going to talk a little bit about both of those just quickly. I am not usually super picky when it comes to sunscreen. If people have it around, it’s great. I fell in love with sun balm here in Costa Rica a couple years ago, though. It smells delicious. It’s all vegan, gluten free, and reef compliant, and I just have been really impressed with it.

So, we have some spray, we have some actual like body lotion. Sometimes I feel like it’s more protective maybe, like maybe you just get it on better if you put lotion on. I love their face mist. It’s a very lightweight mist that if you’ve been out on the beach, you in your kind of sandy and salty.

You don’t want to, it’s hard to reapply, but the face mist makes it so you can just spritz. And at least your face and some more sensitive areas can be, get they’re re up of 50 sunscreens. And I also love their after-sun lotion, which I got for the first time for this trip.

I keep it in the fridge. You don’t have to. It just is nice when you’re, you want to soothe a little bit of some Over sun body, whether it’s a sunburn or you’re just feeling a little bit of sun fatigue on your skin, there after sun lotion when it’s cold just feels like a dream. It’s amazing. So, I’ve been super impressed, and I am a huge sun bum fan.

Pecaridin Insect Repellant

I’ve been tossing those into the beach bag along with this Percarin insect repellent. I looked for what is the most effective, easy to find, deep, free, repellent for being in the rain forest. And this, I don’t know, I probably read an article that explained a lot of different ones, but this Picarin one has been working well.

So, I will say we are still getting the occasional mosquito bite, especially when we’re up in the rain forest areas, the cloud forest. It doesn’t smell weird. I feel like it’s okay. It’s a chemical still, but I feel like it’s done a really good job. I bought six bottles to bring with us, and we’ve gone through them, and we are like on our last bottle, and we go home in a week.

So, it’s about perfect. Maybe, depending on where you are, about a bottle a week for a family works well. And I’ll link that. I feel like it’s been great to have. I’m happy that we brought it.

Rubber Birkenstock Sandals

And the last thing that I wanted to share that I’ve just loved are these rubber Birkenstocks. I love Birkenstocks anyway.

I found Last summer I got the thong version, like the t strap rubber ones. They’re inexpensive. They’re like 25 maybe. I got mine at Dick’s Sporting Goods, and I love that these ones feel really secure on my foot. They’re not just like a regular flip flop. They have a strap over the top of your foot and then the t strap that goes in between your toes, so they look cute.

They’re also super waterproof. They feel like clouds when I’m walking on them and I’ve been able to walk over the rocky roads, go on some small hikes with them. I feel like they’re an excellent beach and water shoe. Not to keep on your feet if you were running a river or if you’re swimming in a waterfall and you need to have shoes on, I would keep to a Teva or something for that.

But. They’ve been my favorite every single day shoe here on this trip, so I will link those as well. Those, my friends, are my Costa Rica Peaks of the Week.

The Long Version of our Costa Rica Family Adventure Part One

Now let me tell you a little bit about the first part of our trip, what I have been calling Anderson’s Pura Vida Adventure. Pura Vida is Spanish for pure life. It’s a phrase that people use all the time in Costa Rica and really describes the beautiful, calm, being one with nature, caring for the environment, being present in your life, sort of energy that exists here in this country.

My history with Costa Rica

Just for a quick overview. I lived in Costa Rica in a city called Nicoya, which is on the Guanacaste Peninsula, when I was in college. After my first year of college, I took a semester off school, moved to Costa Rica for a semester with the sole purpose of learning Spanish. I went to a Spanish immersion school.

I lived with a family nearby where I could walk to school and then walk back to their house where they fed me and had conversations with me, even though I could barely understand for the first few weeks. And I got more adept at Spanish as time went on and made it through the program, came home speaking fluently and feeling good.

Confident with my ability to now move on and converse and practice with people outside of the classroom. I returned to Costa Rica about a year later for a 10-day backpacking trip with a couple girlfriends from college, and we had such an incredible experience. Went back to some of my favorite places that I had loved when I had been here for a semester and discovered some new places that I really enjoyed.

So, Costa Rica was high on my list of feeling… Like home, feeling familiar, somewhere that I knew I wanted to return to over again. Fast forward several years My parent family, my home family of origin, planned a family reunion on the beaches of Costa Rica. At the time, I was pregnant with Plum, and we had Milo and Elliot, and I was married, of course.

So, Dave and my family came to Costa Rica for probably another week or ten days. Stayed on a beach in a different part of the country than I was familiar with a little further north in Playa Hermosa. We stayed in these twin beach houses and had such an amazing time. And then after everyone else went home, Dave and I had extended our trip by a few days so that we could really relax in a resort with the boys.

Which was awesome. It was the first time that we had opted for an all-inclusive resort as a family. And we were like, this is the life, as our boys just ordered endless nachos at the pool. And we could like lounge, and it just was wonderful. It was a great cap on that experience, on that adventure to Costa Rica.

And then we’ve been wanting to get back ever since. So, a couple years ago, Dave and I came for our 15-year wedding anniversary and explored a couple new places. We went to La Fortuna, we went to Arenal Volcano, which is in the middle of the country, and we came out to Nosara, which I had heard about and was intrigued by and was excited about.

It’s a small sort of hippie vibes beach town. It’s a lot smaller than some of the bigger beach areas a little further north. Playa Tamarindo is a big beach and Playa Flamingo. And this is a little more out of the way. It’s a little bit sleepier of a town. And. We really enjoyed our time here, and that’s when I started planning for the retreat that I’m hosting this fall, a couple’s retreat to Costa Rica, an adventure and connection retreat that I’m thrilled is coming together beautifully.

And, when we decided we needed to bring our family here. For years, Dave and I have talked about wanting to teach our kids Spanish, have cultural immersion experiences with them, and bring them to somewhere for an extended period that they can nestle in and because of the pandemic Everything got pushed back a few years, and this year we finally were able to make it happen.

So last fall, we started planning this trip. We found a great beach house that we were excited about. We made sure our schedule’s lined up, Dave’s job is flexible enough that he can work remotely, and so he’s been doing hybrid work while we’re here. And… Of course, my job has always been flexible because I can do what I want, even though I’m sitting in our rental car outside the beach house recording this podcast episode.

It’s as flexible as I want it to be. And we started to plan for real. So, I wanted to come and spend a long time in the same place so that we could develop a little bit of a rhythm. We could really relax into the vacation, but also do it more affordably in an Airbnb where we’re cooking and we’re You know, going to the beach and going to the pool rather than going on big excursions every single day.

There’s sort of a balance on vacation that we found of, if you want to like, do full tourist mode, it’s usually high energy and more expensive. And if you are willing to settle into long term tourist or more living a little bit more local feeling, you can’t ever, it takes a long time to be a local, but to…

Have a little bit more local appeal that is usually a little bit less expensive and a little bit more calm, relaxed. You’re not, looking for all the things to do. You’re just being okay walking to the beach every day. So, we knew that we wanted a little bit of both this trip and the easiest way we found to swing it was to spend our first week doing what I called adventure week. 

Adventure Week + Relaxation Weeks

Where we came a week before our rental began and spent the first week. Doing full adventure mode where we packed in the activities, we were driving to different places around the country, and then we knew once we landed at the beach that we would just settle in and relax and enjoy being at the beach for the last part of the trip.

So today in this episode I want to share the first part of our trip, which is that first 8 to 10 days where we were on high adventure mode, and I’ll share where we went and some of the things that we chose to do. And then next week I’m going to share about the downtime, the rhythms of being on the beach and some of our favorite things about being here in Nosara.

We decided to fly to San Jose, which is the center of the country. It’s like pinpoint in the middle of the country because the flights were so much less expensive. We flew direct while we were, if you listen to a couple of weeks ago, the episode about our getting here, we were supposed to fly direct from.

Washington DC to San Jose. And because I missed our flights, we ended up having a layover on the way here through San Salvador, but on the way home, we’ll fly direct. And so, it was nice to, as a whole family know that we had a direct flight. It’s only about four and a half hours from where we live on the East coast to.

San Jose. But once you get to San Jose, you’re not nearby the beaches or the volcanoes. You’re right in the middle. And so, we opted to rent a car and keep it for the whole month, which has been a great decision. It’s allowed us a lot of freedoms that we otherwise would have wouldn’t have had as we were trying to, if we had been figuring out transportation the whole time, so it’s nice to rent a car.

One thing to note about renting a car in Costa Rica, though, is that the main highways are paved and well maintained. Anything off a main highway, which is like most of the roads in the country, or not a main highway are usually dirt roads. Sometimes you cross actual rivers like where you must drive, up to the, partway up the tire through water, moving water.

So, if you’re not feeling super confident about your driving abilities or your comfort level driving in a different country, then I would think hard about it because you need a four-wheel drive if you’re going anywhere in the mountains or the beach. And it just gets a little bit, it’s a, it’s an adventure in and of itself, the driving piece.

Buena Vista del Rincón de la Vieja 

We rented a car and drove straight from the airport up to a place called Buena Vista Lodge that I have been to. This was my third time going and I have great memories of every time that I’ve been there. I was so excited to bring the kids. The first time I went to was 20 years ago. So that’s how long this.

Lodge has been operating with some of the same features. They’ve added a bunch of new things now, which we got to experience. It’s about a two and a half to three-hour drive from San Jose, and it is up near a volcano called Rincon which is the volcano of the old woman, basically. Rincon de la Vieja is up in the northwestern part of the country, and it borders…

Nicaragua and it’s This beautiful, very jungle feeling, rainforest feeling area where there’s tons of birds, tons of animals. It’s like kind of a wild outback, which is why that’s where there are canopy tours and river running tours and hot springs. The thermal dynamics of Theirs several volcanoes in Costa Rica, and there’s a lot of thermal activity around them.

Rincon de la Vieja is an active volcano. It doesn’t spew lava, but it does put off gases and occasional charcoal dust and things like that. And because of that, nearby there’s a big energy plant where they’re capturing and retrieving the energy from the thermal activity to use to power the country.

I found out this trip that 90% of the energy, the electricity used in Costa Rica is Captured in Costa Rica through natural sources, thermal energy, water, and wind primarily. So really fascinating how they’re able to, it’s such a small country with 5% of the world’s biodiversity, which is plants and animals and insects.

5% of the entire world’s biodiversity lives in this tiny country in Central America and They are basically self-energizing with, by capturing the clean energy here in the country, which is awesome. I think as a country, it’s been a huge priority for them. And as individuals, talking to a lot of the people that we’ve had a chance to talk to, guides and our Spanish instructors at Spanish school and some other local folks that we’ve had a chance to get to know.

Those are high priorities individually and as communities and as a country. So that’s part of why they’re doing such a great job of it. In fact, at Buena Vista on our last day there, we spent three days there. We were able to tour their organic farm and one of the things that they have happening on the farm is methane, a methane gas converter.

So, it’s a, it’s basically poop power. They take the manure from the cows and the horses, and they shovel it once a day into this system and it goes in it. To where the methane gas that is like an off gas from all the manure rises to the top of this big giant industrial looking bubble and then it’s piped out into where it can be used for cooking fuel to power ovens and to heat for cooking in the kitchen.

It’s awesome. All of that to say this is a cool country and a cool area of the country up here in Rincón de la Vieja. Buena Vista Lodge is an older area so that we stayed on the property, and we opted to do a package. You can stay and then like individually buy the water slide or the zipline and I just went for it and decided to do a two-night stay with this package that was the essential package and it basically for one price included everything.

all the activities that we wanted to do as well as all our meals. I loved just knowing in advance what it was going to cost and just paying for it up front and knowing that we now had our free reign of the property, and we could do all the different things that we were there to do. Over the couple of days.

And so, we really did pack it in and it was great to do that because they only allow up to four people in the rooms. There are two queen beds in each of the rooms. We ended up staying in two rooms that were in the same house connected. It was like a little duplex down by one of their little lakes, about a five-minute walk from the main lodge.

And that worked out fine for us. The boys stayed in one room, Plum and Dave and I stayed in the other one. Our doors were right next to each other, and although the rooms themselves weren’t connected, they were all in the same building, and so it felt fine. The boys loved having their own room. It was funny to watch them interact in their own kind of space.

And we the first day that we got there, we just got there in time to check in, walk around and see things and then have a great dinner. And the food was awesome. So, we had a great dinner on site, wandered down and went to sleep. The next morning was like a full adventure day. We started with a canopy tour where we walked on these hanging bridges through the cloud forest.

This was new for me at Buena Vista. They didn’t have this the last time we were there. And it was cool to be able to be up in the trees. Our guide was attentive and paid attention to detail, and he was able to point out some animals and insects that we otherwise wouldn’t have seen and some birds.

We saw a bunch of monkeys and a coati and a several different kinds of birds on that walk and heard a lot about the trees. We heard about the ficus. Vines, how they, they latch on to a mother tree and grow up the tree and then drop vines down. And over the years they end up wrapping and choking out the main tree.

And the ficus that was originally a vine, like a parasitic vine becomes the tree. And there are these huge ficus trees that. essentially took over the base of a different tree to form, just wild and incredible. At the end of our tour, he showed us a termite’s nest and tapped on it until there were termites crawling on his hand and told us about how much protein termites have and offered us all termites.

So, we all tapped on the termite. This is a, this is like a rainforest termite. It’s not like the termites in your house. We all tasted termites, they crawled on our fingers and it’s, there’s a little bit of a weird feeling of it crawling on your finger and you opting to put it in your mouth rather than shake it off, but they tasted good.

They were woody, almost like chewing on grass or chewing on a little, like a little twig which makes sense because they eat. These, these rainforest trees, and apparently, they’re just a huge source of nutrition and protein, and when our guide was telling us when people get lost in the rainforest, if they’re out, wandering or they are trying to survive, that if they can find a termite’s nest, that they can stay alive for a lot longer because it provides essential nutrition.

So, we tried termites first thing in the morning, and then the next activity that we went for, we went and woke up our teenager who had decided to sleep in rather than do the canopy walk. We went and got him, and we all went on the jungle water slide. This water slide is… So long. It probably takes a full like 30 or 40 seconds from the top to the bottom.

That’s how long it is. And it’s made of concrete that set down the hill. So, it’s on a hill. And if you have ever been to Park City or heard of the Alpine slide, it reminds me of that where the track for the water slide is set into the mountainside. So, the. Incline is determined by the ground beneath it.

You don’t feel like you’re going to fall out, for example, like at a water park where you’re, you climb up a huge staircase and then it’s like a free-standing waterfall. This one’s in the ground. You still must climb up the hill. There’s a pathway up and you take an inner tube, which kind of protects you from the edge, like from the sides of the concrete slide.

And you also wear a helmet, and You walk up a long trail. It feels like a nice workout to get to the top. And then you sit down in the water slide and a door closes behind you on the water system. And there’s a big filling tank and they tell you, do you want to go slow, medium, or fast? And depending on your answer is how full they will fill this tank with the door behind you.

And then when you’re ready to go, they open it up and that gush of water. propels you down the slide and keeps you soaring down the water slide all the way until you finish in a pool at the bottom. It is a rush, it’s hilarious, it’s a little bit scary and you feel like what is happening here but also, I’ve done it now several times and I’ve been safe, and the kids all did it and they were safe and it’s just fun and funny and a unique experience.

So that’s one thing that we love at Buena Vista Lodge. After we all rode the water slide several times, I think we had three turns each and we took full advantage of those. We dried off and went to lunch and our lunch was a buffet on. This overlook, there’s three different restaurants on site and we walked about 10 minutes over to this overlook where we ate on a deck that was on the edge of a mountainside basically with this giant view of the valley and it was amazing.

We could see the vultures soaring below us. That’s how high up in terms of elevation we were. It was cool. The food again was great. I was glad that we had just paid for everything in advance, and we could just take advantage of it. And after lunch we went on our first horseback ride of the trip.

It was fun. Plum was a little nervous at first and the guide was great with her. He just said, you don’t have to worry about steering. I’ll hold onto your horse’s rope. And of course, these trail ride horses are so used to just walking the trail. You almost don’t need to hold on.

They know where they’re going. They just follow the horse in front of them. So, everyone was safe, and it was beautiful. We went off the main road for a while and we’re up in the hills. Almost felt like we were in a, like a canopy or a tunnel of trees and leaves. At one point we saw tons of birds and butterflies and it’s at this point we got up to the very top of a hill on the edge of the property and our guide pointed out the thermal plant, like the power plant that is using the energy from the volcano, which is cool to hear about.

Everyone had a great time. It was fun. We were then ready for the zip line, and we had, our middle son opted out of the zip line. He had no interest in zipping through the jungle on a wire, and so the other two, and Dave and I, went to do the zip line and plum got a little nervous. She got up on that first platform and was just like, I don’t think I’m going to do this.

I don’t want to like. It can look a little scary up high and if you’re unsure about being clipped into a harness, that’s all kind of a new feeling. So, she was nervous, and I said, okay I’ll walk with you. And so, the boys took off on doing this zip line tour. There were about seven lines total.

They’re all long. And so, we knew where the end was because of ours. walk on the hanging bridges in the morning. We had gone past the last canopy, the last zipline platform. So Plum and I wandered over there, and it took us about 25 minutes. We were walking slowly, and on the way, we saw a tree of white-faced monkeys, capuchin monkeys, and it was fun because we hadn’t seen those yet.

We had seen a few different groups of spider monkeys, and we had seen some howlers, which are two of the three types of monkeys in Costa Rica, but white-faced monkeys are a little bit At least in that area or in the areas where I’ve been, they’re a little bit trickier to see. So, it was fun, and it was just a quiet moment in the forest with Plum and I, there was no one else around.

We were just making our way over to the zip line. So, it was fun to see those. We got to the other zip line, and they were waiting for us, and Plum had said she was going to give it a try for the very last line, and the guide let her ride with me, which I was interesting. wasn’t sure of my ability to taxi her.

That’s something the guides usually do, but the guy said, you look strong, you can do this, and so he essentially clipped Plum onto my lap, and then we did the last zip line together, and it was great to give her that experience, to have her feel comfortable doing it with me, and at the end of that, long line.

She said, that was so fun. I can’t wait to do that again. So just giving her a little bit of confidence, letting her do it at her own pace and to just do one line instead of all seven was generous of the guides. Milo was over the moon. He was looking for like a pro by the end, which is awesome.

Dave had a great time and we finished up feeling like the zip line was huge. success. We walked over and picked up Elliot, who had been just hanging out in the cabin by himself reading his Kindle while we were on the zipline, and we all got on the tractor to ride down to the thermal hot springs. This is one of my favorite places in the whole country.

The Buena Vista Lodge hot springs area is just nestled right into the jungle next to a cold river. So, you get to like here and see the river going by the way that it’s set up. There are about five or six different pools of different temperatures all within this one area. And they also have S a steam room, like a wet sauna and a mud pit, like a thermal lava mud area where they have these big tubs of volcanic mud and it’s hot.

You must keep your fingers on the top of it because if you dig your hand down in there, it’ll get burned. It’s pretty, it’s hot, thermal mud and the idea is that you can. have a little bit of a spa treatment on your own. It’s a DIY spa day. You rub the mud the thermal mud on your face and your body.

There’s a platform where you can let it dry for a little while. There are outdoor showers. You can rinse it off when you’re ready and then you can start to soak in the hot springs. I love hot tubs. I love hot water. I love hot springs. This just feels like a pinnacle of all of it. I loved sitting in the wet sauna and just being in its enveloped in this thick tropical humidity that feels healing.

It’s a little bit uncomfortable and feels really healing. And then the pools are just gorgeous. They’re hot. So, the closest one to the thermal springs is the hottest and they all have temperatures on them in Celsius. So, I don’t know. I guess I could calculate it, but I’m guessing that the hottest is about 105 degrees and then they go down from there to the very bottom one.

They go down a little stair step area. There’s plenty of space in all of them. We were with a tractor full of people, so there were probably 18 people on our tractor, and we saw people while we were there at the hot springs, but we weren’t soaking in the same pool as anyone ever because there’s enough space to spread out.

There’s a place you can go get drinks. The kids all got. Virgin pina coladas and we’re sipping on a pina coladas while we’re sitting in the hot springs. It’s just magical and really relaxing and feels therapeutic as it’s meant to. So, I love it. Buena Vista is a great place to do a bunch of things all at once, as you can hear.

And after we soaked in the hot springs for a while, we took the tractor back up, had a fantastic dinner, and got ready to leave the next day. So, we stayed for half of the day. Then the following day, we slept there for two nights, and we had a great breakfast. And then we did this farm tour and I loved seeing the animals.

They had a bunch of different animals and plants and a great garden. I really loved seeing the bee section. They, the guide who took us around the farm is a bio engineer or something, a naturalist, but also with education in like basically farm engineering, maybe agricultural engineering. He was knowledgeable, and he told us all about these five different kinds of bees.

These are different varieties of bees that are stinger less and it was so fascinating. I’d never seen bees this tiny. They looked like little, tiny flies, but he said these are important pollinators. And here’s how they’re, they have these different types of nests that they make, and it was cool.

That’s where he showed us the poop power machine, too, at the end. And all in all, just felt like a complete experience. So many different fun activities. The ability to relax and enjoy family time and be out doing things that we were excited to do that feel really Costa Rican, the jungle water slide and doing zip lines is something that people really do here at the hot springs.

It all felt awesome and fun to introduce the kids to all of that, old enough for them to remember it. The boys had done the zip lines when they were toddlers when we were here when they were young, and so we have memories and pictures of them. Elliot doesn’t remember it. He was two at the time, and he wrote the whole thing with a guide, like with a taxi.

So, it was an interesting sort of circle to be back here as a family and have everyone just really love it. We needed to drive that afternoon. We decided to spend one night. In the midpoint between where we were, which is up Vieja and where we were headed, which is Biwa a different area still up north where we were going to do some different activities and stay at a different lodge.

Stopover in Liberia

In the middle is a city called Liberia. Liberia was. You want to fly to if you’re planning on doing the west coast beaches like the Guanacaste beaches of Costa Rica That’s where we’ll fly into when we come for Novios in November. It’s just closer to everything So the reason we didn’t fly there this time is because it was so much more expensive and you couldn’t get there with a direct flight, and we had all the kids, but in the fall, we just the two of us, so we are paying a little bit more, and we don’t mind having a layover to get there, because once you land, you’re closer to everything.

The other thing that’s nice about Liberia is a little bit bigger city, so we were able to easily find lunch, and We wanted to see the Barbie movie. This is just like perfect timing that the Barbie movie had just come out. And I looked it up and there was a movie theater that showed one English movie.

We could have gone in Spanish, but I wanted Plum. Plum was excited. And so, I knew that she’d have an easier experience if it was in English with Spanish subtitles, which is what we ended up getting tickets for. And so, we went to the Barbie movie in Liberia and my favorite part about the movie.

The movie’s a whole other thing that we can talk about at a different time, but my favorite part about being at the theater, I thought this was like a special thing for the Barbie movie. They had popcorn, they had regular butter salt popcorn, and then they had cinnamon sugar kettle corn. And you could buy…

Straight sweet corn, straight salty corn, or a mixed box. We got the mixed box, and this was my favorite movie popcorn experience ever. Imagine crunching on sweet cinnamon sugar popcorn and buttery salted popcorn. Such a good combination. I found out later from my Spanish instructor here. In Nosara, that, that’s typical of all movie theaters in Costa Rica.

It wasn’t like a Barbie movie special, which is what I was expecting. That’s just, if you go to a movie in Costa Rica, you get to have cinnamon kettle corn. Pretty awesome. I don’t normally go on movies on vacation. Sometimes. I do. And turns out it was a fun cultural experience to add to this vacation.

After that night, we stayed nearby Liberia. And then in the morning on our way up to La Carolina Lodge, which is where we stayed the next couple of nights, we stopped in at a little rescue center called Las Pumas Rescate or Las Pumas Rescue Center. It was just on the Google map. I noticed it as like a highlight on the map as I was looking at the directions, we would take up to La Carolina Lodge.

And I’m so glad that we stopped. It was about 12 for a ticket to go around and see the animals. And each of the animals has a big plaque with their names and how they came to the center. This is a rescue center where the animals have all been harmed or mistreated in some way. And there unable because of their past to be released back into the wild.

So, they come to the rescue center to spend the remainder of their lives. They’re well taken care of there by the center. It was fascinating to see so many different, beautiful, incredible tropical animals all in one place. They looked well cared for, which was the guides were great. We were able to talk to just a couple of them along the path.

We did a self-guided tour because the main tour guide already had a group when we arrived but reading the plaques and wandering and just seeing the different animals was. Really interesting and special, engaging for the kids. We probably only wandered around for about 45 minutes, but it was well worth it.

Las Pumas Rescate

And all the kids have commented about how cool it was. I was glad that we made the quick stop at Las Pumas Rescue Center. The other big, huge win of that stop was that I landed in Costa Rica and realized that I didn’t bring a Costa Rican bird book with me, and I brought my binoculars. I knew I was going to want to do some birding while I was here.

What a place to do bird watching where there’s hundreds of different species of birds that all live in the, in these small areas. And so, I was on the search from day one for a bird book and I even reached out to a birding expert whose website I found online who lives in Costa Rica to say, where do you think I could find a bird book?

I could have easily ordered one on Amazon when I was at home or found one at a bookstore. And once I got here, it just is not as easy. There isn’t like a regular bookstore around, especially not with English books. So, I ducked into the gift shop at Amazon. The Puma at Las Pumas Rescue Center, and they had the premier Costa Rican birding book in English in the gift shop, and I was so glad because I had looked all over Liberia.

I, called a couple places. I even called the Hilton Garden Inn is like the main hotel right by the Liberia Airport. Because it caters so much to Americans, I figured maybe they would have something in the gift shop, and I wasn’t able to find it there. This was a huge win for me, and I’m so glad that I got it before we went up to La Carolina Lodge, because once we got there, the list of birds that I had seen and could identify skyrocketed.

La Carolina Lodge

This place is… Incredible. The lodge itself is called La Carolina Lodge. It’s in Bijagua, which is a very small area up north. It’s in

a volcano like Buena Vista is connected to Rincón de la Vieja. La Carolina Lodge is A family-owned group of cabins, there’s a main lodge and then there’s a group of small, beautiful cabins tucked right along a river up in, out of the way in this area. And from there you can take off and do some different types of tours, but the beauty of the lodge is being there.

It’s unreal. It’s just such a beautiful place. So well cared for. So well designed. It feels like you have snuck into a hidden rainforest garden and that you just get to exist there for a while. There’s a platform down on the river. You can swim in the watering hole of this river. It’s a fresh cold river.

It was really refreshing to swim in. They’ve built an incredible hot tub. On the river, so it’s right next to the river where they are piping water from the river in and around a wood burning fire pit, basically. And then the water releases into the hot tub. So, it’s a full hot tub next to a cold river.

I’ve seen similar wood fired hot tubs, like on Scandinavian websites and when we lived in Texas and went to West Texas, we could rent a big Dutch tub, it was called, where they, they light a wood burning fire in this little thing next to it and it pipes the water in and through and heats it.

It was a beautiful use of that technology, just right on the riverside. Surrounded by nature, just really immersed in it. They have these beautiful little stoops where they put fresh fruit in the morning to attract tropical birds. And I could have sat there all day. I counted like two dozen varieties of tropical birds within the day.

20 minutes of sitting and watching the birding stations. I’m so glad I had my book because I could start identifying them. These are so unfamiliar to me. It’s not like Cardinals and Robins and Magpies. I’m like, oh my gosh, what’s happening? They’re so beautiful. This is where if you followed along on Instagram, you saw that I was able to see A tree full of nests of Montezuma or Oropendula birds.

They’re hanging baskets. These birds weave these baskets and hang them from the branches of trees to lay their eggs in. And when we were there, the nestlings had all hatched. And so, I looked up at this tree. I had this very spiritual, emotional experience of wandering over right at dusk. As the sun was setting, a guide at the lodge had told me, Oh.

That bird, I had noticed a bird and said, Oh my goodness, that birds gorgeous. And he said that bird is an Oropendola, and they have their nests hanging in the tree over there. And so, I had wandered down by myself and I turned the corner and just saw this massive tree with all these little hanging birds’ nests and all these little chirps, just the whole tree was filled with little chirping nestlings that are all, alive, being fed by their mamas, getting ready to take off on their own and, big.

The birds are big, the Montezuma oropendolas are big birds, and they would swoop in and tuck themselves into a nest with some food and then come out again and swoop away. It’s just like a beautiful moment and felt unique, like something that I had never imagined and didn’t ever plan to.

Have as an experience been beautiful there at the lodge. They have several different activities that you can do on site in the morning. Every morning they do a farm tour. Another farm tour again. The food most of the food that they serve on site is grown or raised. in their own farm. So, we all got a chance to milk some of the cows.

We got to go see where they have the fryer chickens, and the egg laying chickens and the pigs they keep on site. Later, that day, we decided to do another horseback ride because they offer horseback rides around the property. And the guide at the main guide Alejandro at La Carolina Lodge is just really a special guy.

And I could tell from talking to him about the birds. If we went on a horseback ride with him, it’d be fun because he’d be able to point out and tell us about things that otherwise we wouldn’t learn about. At this point, Plum’s feeling confident. Remember, she was not feeling very confident on her horse the first time we did it.

On this ride, she figured it out and got her… Her horse-riding confidence, and it was awesome to watch her go from being a little nervous about it to feeling super comfortable riding around on her own and using her reins to steer her horse. We on this ride saw a couple cool things. One was a viper curled up on a branch of a tree and Alejandro You had grabbed a stick and used a stick to lift the leaf to show us where it was.

I would never have seen it. I would have gone right past it. Really fascinating. A little nerve wracking. Snakes can be scary and that reminds me, I forgot to tell you a story about the Buena Vista Lodge. I’ll come back to it. The other amazing thing that we saw on this horseback ride was a speckled owl, a spectacled owl nestling.

So, owls are tricky to see. In general, because they’re nocturnal and they’re, shy. They don’t come hang out in your yard usually. And this speckled owl, we didn’t see the adult owl, but Alejandro told us that the owl had laid eggs in a tree trunk and that the baby owl…

was now being raised, and they stay in the nest for about 12 weeks is what I read online, about 12 to 16 weeks before they take off. And so, it’s a baby owl, where the full top of its head is white, and it has these big black eyes, like a big black mask on his face. And he was able to point it out to us, and we could see it through our binoculars, which was…

Again, cool. Just a unique experience that you would only get with an experienced guide who paid attention to the natural world around him and what’s happening. It was again, fascinating, especially for me with my You know, my recently acquired in the last few years obsession and love of birds.

It was cool and felt like a special experience and the kids really loved seeing it too. Before I tell you about our chocolate making workshop, which is what came next, I’m going to just give you a quick scary story. Of the last, on the morning we left Buena Vista Lodge, we opened the doors to our cabins and there’s a little tiny garden pathway in front and there was a snake on it.

And the kids were like, hey mom, look, here’s a snake. And I came out and was like, oh yeah, there is a snake right there. It was a little bit coiled at the front. It wasn’t very big. It was probably, a foot and a half long. And I told the kids, don’t touch it. Milo’s, can I try to catch it? I was like, no, do not touch that snake.

But if you want to take a picture of it, you can. So, we were all standing around this snake. We’re about three feet away from it. Plum has her little Instax camera that she uses on vacations. And she, got a little closer. I was like, okay, that’s close enough. She took a picture, and I took some pictures.

We took a video. We were like, wow, cool nature. And. Then we went, up to breakfast. So, the next day we arrive at La Carolina Lodge and we’re meeting people and getting settled in. And I talked to Alejandro, who’s the main guide there and this, naturalist. And he, I was asking about the birds and about some of the other animals.

And he was telling me about how he had just seen Viper, and he showed me a picture on his phone of this eyelash viper that he had seen up on the trail, and I was like, oh, wow, that’s incredible, and, told him about how when I was here years ago, backpacking, I had seen an eyelash viper, and I didn’t know what it was until later, like I looked it up later and realized, there’s this wild, wildly venomous snake, Sunning on the trail, and I walked around it, and anyway, it reminded me, oh yeah, we saw a snake yesterday.

I don’t know what it is. Maybe I’ll show you the picture. So, I pull out my phone, and I show him this picture of the snake that was two feet away from all my kids. And his eyes go wide, and his face gets a little paler. And he says, That’s a terciopelos. Which I, of course, have no idea what he’s talking about.

He said that snake is the most dangerous snake in Central America. It is the most venomous snake that we have in Costa Rica. It was my turn for my eyes to go wide and my face to go white, as he tells me that because of its size, that was probably a baby who then can’t control their venom output, and if it had bit one of my kids, they likely would not have survived.

At this point, I’m very glad that it’s the next day, and that indeed we all survived our encounter with the terciopelos, or I think it’s also called a Fer de lance. And I… Maybe shouldn’t have told my kids that, but I circled back around and found my kids and said, okay, listen, that snake we saw was incredibly dangerous and we should have run the other way when we saw it rather than circle around it and take pictures and videos.

So we did a little bit of brushing up on our venomous snake understanding and feel super grateful that we did not have very sad encounter with a venomous snake during the rest of our stay at La Carolina Lodge it was clear that Alejandro had shared that story with a couple other people because I noticed some looks and I, asked a couple of the other people about Oh, did you hear about our snake encounter?

And they’re like, yeah, you’re lucky. Really. Yeah, we feel very lucky. Leaving our snake story behind, we are going to move on to the chocolate workshop. There is, there’s just a few areas in the world where cacao grows easily, and Costa Rica happens to be one of them. It’s just got the right temperature, the right environment, the right level of humidity and heat for cacao to grow easily, and it doesn’t grow in the whole country.

Finca La Amistad

It only grows in certain parts of the country. One of them is up in Bijagua, Alajuela, Upala, north where we were. We saw that there was a local farm. It was 10-minute drive from La Carolina Lodge that did a chocolate tour and a workshop where you can make your own chocolate bars. I thought the kids would love this.

I love chocolate. We thought this would be great. So, we drove over and what I expected was to like walk through the farm and see the growing process and the fruit and the fermentation and every, I think every other time I’ve come to Costa Rica, I’ve done a chocolate tour. I really love seeing the process and seeing the farms.

And Dave and I did one the last time we were here. I did it when I very first came. We did it as a family 10 years ago. So, it felt really like something that we love doing when we’re here. And so, I expected the farm piece, and we just did the workshop piece. I didn’t realize when I signed up that there’s two different types.

We could have done a farm tour and then the workshop separate, and I had just signed up for the workshop. So now I know next time we would do the farm tour in addition to the workshop. Because I’ve done it myself, I felt ah, that’s fine. We were able to walk around a little bit just on the campus of the farm and see some chocolate fruit growing on the trees, and so we were able to show the kids and tell them a little bit about it.

Their patience level is probably fine to just do the workshop, which ended up being great. We started with roasted chocolate beans and then ground them down and separated the shells from the nibs. We roasted the bean, then separated the nibs from the crust.

We then ground the nibs down into paste. And then we did the conching process of putting the chocolate, the ground down chocolate bean, in with cocoa butter and powdered milk and sugar because we had opted to do milk chocolate. That was the children’s decision, not mine. And then watched, as it started to conch, and they explained to us that the conching takes place over 24 to 48 hours.

But since we were doing this workshop, they had conched some the day before. We set our machine aside. It was like a cooking show where they’re like, and you pull it out of the oven one second later. So, here’s the 24-hour process that now is this beautiful, silky, smooth chocolate ready to be poured into forms.

This was fun for the kids. We were able to pour our own bars and then they had a bunch of different toppings that you could add to them. Chocolate nibs powdered coffee beans, like round coffee beans. coconut, different types of nuts and raisins and chili powder. We each made our own bars and hilariously, we ended up with about five pounds of chocolate. So much chocolate all these bars that we had made. It’s been fun, because we did keep them in a cooler on our drive out to the beach, but we have just kept them in the fridge. And. Now, three and a half weeks later, we’re almost out of chocolate.

I thought for sure what are we going to do when we must, pack this home, but we’ve been steadily eating through our chocolate supply. We haven’t had to buy chocolate one time since then. We did our chocolate workshop and have so had so much chocolate and individual chocolates with different, flavors and different stuff that we put in the kids loved it, and they’ve, I think, loved having an endless supply of chocolate for the last few weeks, so that was also great.

The chocolate farm that we went to is called Farm La Amistad, and I will, I’m going to just link all these different places in short form. In the show notes, so if you’re building an itinerary or looking at a trip to Costa Rica, you can easily access them just in one chunk at the top of the show notes, which the show notes are always at livefreecreative.co/podcast. You can look for this episode number 251 to find all that information. So, I’m almost to the end of our adventure week.

We finished the chocolate workshop, soaked in the hot tub a little bit more, and… Slept one more night at La Carolina Lodge, woke up, had an incredible breakfast, and then started driving down to Nosara.

Stopover at Hacienda El Viejo

It’s about a four-hour drive from Bijagua, where we were out to the beach, and I wanted to break it up with a lunchtime activity, and so we drove about two and a half hours to El Viejo, Hacienda El Viejo, which is right on the Palo Verde National Park River. It’s the Tempisque River, which is known in the country for being full of crocodiles.

And therefore, we went to go on a crocodile boat tour. When we arrived at Hacienda El Viejo, which is in the middle of nowhere in all of these, cane fields, we were welcomed and went in and had a buffet lunch to start our activity, our tour, which was great to stretch our legs and have a great meal, use the restroom, and shake off the drive.

And then we. Headed over about 15-minute drive away to the boat launch dock, and this is where we met our boat guide and hopped onto the boat. Our family was alone on this boat at the time of day we chose. There was no one else with us, so the boat probably fits 25 or 30 people, but it was just the five of us and our guide and the boat captain.

It was cool to have kind of a private tour. And we launched off within… 30 seconds of launching, I looked over to my left and saw a giant crocodile on the shore. We took pictures and videos, and then from then, for the next 45 minutes, probably every three to four minutes, we spotted a crocodile, whether it was in the water, coming up on the land, sunning on the beach, a little beady eye looking out at us there were crocodiles truly everywhere.

And then, there were so many cool birds to be right along the water like that the first bird that we saw, I, my jaw was on the floor. So beautiful. It was called a tiger heron. I am very familiar with the great blue heron that we see often in Richmond along the James River. The tiger heron has a yellow throat and black and white striped neck and is big like a blue, like a great blue but colorful.

It was like, what is this incredible bird? We saw green heron, little blue heron, and three different kinds of kingfishers. There were iguanas also all over the place. And we got to see a couple cool basilisk lizards. They are these funky little green lizards that can run on water.

They have these long toes. And they run across the top of the water. It’s just wild. Toward the end of the boat tour, our guides really felt bad. We hadn’t seen monkeys yet. And we were like, we’ve seen monkeys. We saw them at Buena Vista, heard them at La Carolina Lodge.  I didn’t mention this La Carolina Lodge has a resident sloth.

They have a few on the property, but one That their favorite tree happens to be right in kind of the middle of the property. And so, we were able to see it on both days up hanging out in the tree, just stretching out doing its thing. So fun to see a sloth. Sloths are very common in Costa Rica.

And I think it’s a, it’s a bucket list item for people who travel here. So, it’s always nice to see a sloth when we’re here. And. Our guides really wanted us to see monkeys, so we drove downriver for a while until we spotted a big troop of howler monkeys up in the trees, and they were far away, but still always fun to see them.

And then we headed back we spent another about hour doing a cultural tour at Hacienda El Viejo, where we were able to see sugar cane. This is a cane region, like there are fields of sugar cane all around. Hacienda El Viejo, so it was fun to see the sugar cane, how they use an ox, who’s trained to just walk in circle to help move the machine that grinds the sugar cane into juice.

Then they boil the juice down into the raw sugar and it comes in blocks and, it’s been used for hundreds of years like that. We tried some sugar cane candies and we made some tortillas on an open fire and just had a kind of a nice cultural moment before we hopped back in the car and headed out.

So that Hacienda El Viejo boat tour at Palo Verde was our halfway point between La Carolina Lodge and heading out to Nosara. And so, we were able to finish up the day pulling into Nosara Beach Town where we were able to check into our beach house and enjoy diving into the less adventurous, more relaxing More kind of rhythm of hanging on the beach for a few weeks phase of this trip.

Next Week: Our weeks on the beach!

That’s where I’m going to leave you for today. I hope that you’ve enjoyed hearing about our Anderson Puerto Vida adventure week, the first week of our trip and if you’re looking for ideas for traveling with your family to Costa Rica, I’ll share where we stayed and the activities that we did in the show notes.

And I can’t wait to share with you next week about what these last few weeks have looked like, hanging out on the beach, some of the places that we’ve eaten and the activities that we’ve done out here. And overall, just how amazing it’s been to have this opportunity and to take advantage of it. As a family, I have thought recently about how different seasons of our lives have different opportunities that arise, and sometimes we take advantage of them and sometimes we don’t, and the opportunity season goes away.

It’s not that the opportunities themselves leave, but just that the time of life where it seems like things converge to this is the moment, might pass. I’ve just been so grateful this trip, every time I look around and my kids are just, they feel like really great ages for a trip like this, where they are interested and curious, and they’re old enough to be, somewhat independent, Milo and Elliot can walk out to the beach together, they can stay in a hotel room by themselves together They’re in an interesting dynamic right now where they are friends and enemies.

So, they, still bicker and quarrel and have a lot of fun together. Dave and I have been soaking in moments of watching them cheer each other on and watching them play together and playing together with them. We’ve Bought and brought some board games and we’ve had some incredible family experiences and while the trip itself is amazing this is going to sound very cliche, but my favorite parts have been watching and experiencing my family in a new way and These experiences and adventures are one of the keys that’s unlocking some of that connection and some of that togetherness and Also, you don’t have to go to Costa Rica to Intentionally connect and have new experiences with your family.

That’s where I’m going to leave you. I hope that you’ve enjoyed this episode like I mentioned. It’s not a typical one. You’ll have to find your own lessons in the things that I shared today. Maybe one of them is to like… Read up on snakes before you go to the rainforest. But I will be back next week probably recording from the car in front of the beach house again and update you on the last half of our trip.

And then I’ll be back home in Richmond for the following episodes and jumping back into a little bit more of a typical groove. I hope you have a wonderful week, and I will talk with you again next time. Bye.