Welcome back to Live Free Creative Podcast. I’m your host, Miranda Anderson, still recording live in Costa Rica. This is episode number 252, Costa Rican Anderson Family Adventure Part 2. If you listened in last week. Last week you heard the first week of our month abroad. The first week was all about adventure in the mountains, by the volcanoes, in the rainforest.

Three weeks in Nosara, Costa Rica

We intentionally planned this trip to have a front-loaded adventure week so that the last three weeks of our trip we could settle into a little bit more of a routine at the beach. I left you last week where we spent our first night. in Nosara at the Nosara Beach Hotel, which is a beautiful hotel on a bluff overlooking both big beaches here in Nosara. There’s Playa Pelada to the north and Playa Guiones to the south.

Nosara is a beach town known for surfing and yoga and wellness. That’s about an hour and a half south of some of the bigger more well-known destinations, beach destinations on the Guanacaste coast, which are Tamarindo, Playa Flamingo, Playa Hermosa.

This area is a little bit less developed, which is one of the reasons that we really like it. And that said, it’s growing and developing. Even having been here two years ago for an anniversary trip, coming back, we noticed there is a lot of new construction. Homes and restaurants and businesses popping up all over. Luckily, most of the area down by the coast is really well managed by a community development organization that started back in the 70s and 80s that has some great guidelines for building for sustainability and for environmental friendliness and keeping at least half of the area natural, and there’s also about 250 meters from the shoreline in Nosara, is protected.

There are no beachfront hotels, restaurants, or anything. With one, maybe a couple small exceptions, everything along the very coastline is protected. You may stay in a house or a hotel that’s a five-minute walk from the beach and you walk just through a quick trail out to the sand. What’s nice about that is when you’re on the beach, you feel like you’re very isolated in the middle of nowhere.

It’s beautiful. The view from the beach in front of you is ocean and behind you is jungle. And that’s unique in, I think, a lot of… More developed beaches, there’s a boardwalk and that’s fun. It’s just a whole different energy. I really appreciate being on the beach and feeling like I’m just surrounded by nature.

It’s perfect for what we were looking for our family for this trip. I’m going to skip the segment this week. I had slated it a “life lately” for this week, and the whole episode is going to be about life lately. I will just dive right in to sharing a little bit about these last three weeks here on the beach in Nosara to give you an idea of the rhythms that we set up, some of the adventures that we had even while we were here, and some of our favorite parts of being on the beach for so long.

Where we stayed: Airbnb

The first thing that I will talk about is where we have stayed. Probably last fall, when we started to explore this idea of spending A whole month in Costa Rica, I started to look on Airbnb and found a couple great options. One of them is the house that we ended up staying in that’s about a ten-minute walk from the beach.

It’s a three-bedroom house that has its own small plunge pool and a full kitchen, a couple bathrooms, and it just felt like a great location for a longer term stay where we would be able to buy groceries and cook meals and have a pool right out the door if we didn’t feel like walking all the way to the beach and it ended up being wonderful.

There are dozens of cool options for beach house stays in the area. Some of them are meant for bigger groups and so they’re big and expensive and the one that we have with just, three bedrooms, three bathrooms and a little pool. It’s probably, I’d say, 1,500 square feet or less, the whole house, and it’s been perfect for us.

There are smaller options as well, and there’s even some great condos and apartments for rent if you’re looking for something a little bit smaller. There are also some cool hotels around. For a shorter-term stay, that’s probably a fun option for a family because we were staying for so long, and I mentioned this last week, one of the things that made it possible to stay for so long financially was knowing that we could keep our home budget, but just be on vacation.

Being able to have an affordable beach house and then buying groceries and being in a rhythm rather than having every single day feel like a big adventure like the first week of our trip. These last few weeks we’ve done some fun things and also mostly we’ve been going to the beach.

Something that’s nice that you may not be aware of is that a lot of rentals on Airbnb have monthly rates so it may look like it’s You know, $400 a night, but if you put in a full month, maybe you get a 30% discount.

That was the case with this beach house. I had initially put in two weeks and then three weeks, and when I put it in a month, it ended up taking 30 or 40% off and made it. less expensive to, for us to rent the beach house for an entire month than to rent it for three weeks. It was a no brainer.

I’m glad we secured the beach house before anything else. In fact, we didn’t even buy plane tickets until maybe three months ago, and we had the beach house rental for Maybe six or eight months and that’s about I guess the time frame like planning ahead about that far probably makes sense Depending on your circumstances, but I think a lot of the great especially more affordable nice places go quickly.

That gives you an idea of our beach house.

A few Airbnbs in Nosara I like:

Where we stayed: Four Winds Serenity

Up to 6 guests: Luxe Villa

Up to 6 guests: Salty Villa

Up to 4 guests: SALT apartment

Up to 3 guests: Boheme Apartment

Up to 3 guests: Beach Apartment

Some Handy Supplies: Pool Floats and Beach Chairs

Once we got settled into the beach house, we unpacked fully, took everything out of our suitcases, tucked our suitcases away, operated out of closets and drawers, just like we would at home. That simple thing made us feel like we were. Staying for a while, which is nice.

Another fun thing that we did for this trip was plan for the pool, and I brought about six, maybe seven, flotation devices, like fun inner tubes from Target. I brought them flat in the packages in my suitcase, and then I also brought a small air pump so that I could fill them up easily. And we tossed those all in the pool, and then they have been so fun to take out to the beach as well.

We learned this last month in Outer Banks that hose inner tubes, like the circle tubes, especially the ones with handles, are fun on the beach. They feel like you’re in a wave pool, the wave pool of the ocean. That is a high recommendation that I have for beach trips. I did see a great article about making sure that they’re disposed of properly whether they’re thrown away or recycled or left for the next family, and to not take the types of inner tubes that have glitter inside them.

Which I have one of those here, but it’s in the pool, and after this article about how you shouldn’t take those into the ocean in case they pop, that glitter is bad for the marine life. Just word of caution on that. No glitter inner tubes in the ocean. Another thing that I packed in my suitcase for having a longer-term trip was some very lightweight foldable beach chairs that I found also at Target.

I had my eye on a couple of different brands. I was going to go to REI and then I saw these on an end cap at Target. They were like $25 each and they’re cool. They fold all the way flat. They fit into a regular checked size suitcase. And I brought two of them and I’m going to leave them here at the future guests to use because I love sitting on the beach with some back support.

I don’t want to really sit there all day. And as it turns out, there are only a few days in these last few weeks that I sat on the beach. But for the times that I did, that I wasn’t out playing in the water or surfing, it was nice to have something to lean against. A lightweight, if you can swing it, a lightweight beach chair is great.

Spanish Immersion Classes at Nosara Spanish Institute

In general, our plan, once we got to the beach, was to enjoy the beach. We knew we wanted to do surfing and surf lessons. I found a Spanish institute here in Nosara that we spent one week doing Spanish lessons at.

Ideally, we would have spent more time there, but for cost and for my kid’s attention spans, we thought at least one week of immersion classes would be beneficial for them just to be in the environment of hearing and speaking a little bit of Spanish.

And it turned out to be so fun. It’s called the Nosara Spanish Institute. It’s been around for a long time, and they have levels. From very beginner, never heard or spoken a word of Spanish, all the way up to advanced level conversation. We were, we spanned the board. My kids were all in a beginner class together, a private class with the three of them, and they had a blast with their instructor.

Dave was in an intermediate conversation class, and he had another student in his class along with the instructor, and I was in an advanced conversation class with another student and the instructor. My class was so fun and funny because we spent two hours debating interesting and sometimes controversial topics on purpose in Spanish because It can be difficult to express sensitive emotions in a different language that’s like an outer ring of comfort.

To not simply be asking for something or telling a story about something or using like your basic vocabulary, but to be trying to Convince or persuade or explain a deeply held belief can be tricky and searching for those words and the way you want to talk about it and explain it was a great exercise and pushed our boundaries a little bit.

It helped that both my classmate Miles, who was a young guy from Great Britain who was here learning Spanish, and I each had some strong opinions. There were moments of just looking at each other and wanting to be able to explain. Our reasoning or having misunderstandings, like often we would say something and there wasn’t a lot of nuances in the way we said it, even though we meant it with nuance.

Tt was really a great exercise in taking our language ability a little bit deeper and I had a blast, and I was grateful that. Dave had a blast. My kids had a blast. I would absolutely recommend Nosara Spanish Institute, and I would love to do it again when we come back.

Our first week here on the beach, of our three beach weeks, our first week we did Spanish classes in the morning, and then fell into a rhythm of going to the beach in the afternoon, coming home, making dinner, swimming in the pool, playing family games, and then going to sleep and waking up and doing it all over again.

One thing we realized quickly is that the beach is just as much fun in the rain as it is in the sun, and sometimes even more fun because you don’t worry so much about getting too hot or sweaty. When it’s a little bit of overcast and rainy, it can be wonderful at the beach. Here in Costa Rica, on the Pacific side, the water is wonderful.

Nosara Beaches

It’s like bathtub warm at any time. It’s also beautiful because the sand goes on forever at an even incline into the ocean. At high tide, we could probably walk a hundred meters into the ocean and still have our feet on the sand. And at low tide you have those hundred meters of like flat beach, plus we could still walk out.

Today we were surfing around an hour after low tide, just as the tide was coming in. And I was still probably another 50 meters into the ocean before I had to get up on my board to paddle, that I wasn’t like walking my surfboard out into the waves. It’s wonderful. Small kids can swim right along the edge and can walk, they can touch for a long time at high tide or at low tide.

It’s smooth and even. One thing that may feel like a downfall of the beach, is that it’s not like a white sand, super dry sand, because the beach isn’t, at low tide it’s very wide, but it’s also, most of it has been sand just been wet with the ocean water and so mostly you get that sort of fluffy sand up by the vegetation by the trees in the jungle.

And then at high tide that’s all there is because the water is so high that you have just like maybe about 10 to 15 meters of sand and vegetation that you can plant your seats in at low tide, the beach is wide from where the trees end to where the water starts, and a lot of it is just like a flat plane where the water has just been, that’s like that sort of mid wetness.

It’s perfect sandcastle building wetness right there in the middle. If you go to the beach at low tide and you want to sit close to the water, you’re not going to be digging your toes into the sand, for example. It’ll be more like digging your toes into the sandy mud. And if you go at low tide and you want to sit on the soft, fluffy, dry sand, you’ll be far away from the water.

I don’t know if that’s important. That just is something that I thought was interesting and have noted.

Learning to Surf

We’ve mostly chosen what time of day to go to the beach based on the tides for learning to surf. It’s interesting that we got a couple different perspectives. On probably day three of our first week, we decided to do surf lessons, which I wanted to do as close to the beginning as possible so that we had that information and could continue practicing while we’re here.

Our surf instructor said the best time for us to be on the beach was within an hour of high tide. An hour before high tide or an hour after high tide was a great time for us to surf. Then, a couple days later, when we rented surfboards for the first time, the woman at the surfboard shop said she thought that low tide was the best time for us to ride within a couple hours of low tide because, and this was her reason: the water’s so far out from the shore that you get a lot longer of a ride.

We’re beginners, so it didn’t end up mattering a whole lot. We tried around high tide. We tried around low tide. We’re just riding the foam right now. Anyway, we don’t really know how to like cruise along the side of a wave like you see in surf videos. I think for our level, it didn’t matter a whole lot and I think anywhere you go, the whatever beach you’re on, the local surf people know what the best option is.

For here, it didn’t seem to matter for us. I know that the waves were a lot bigger at high tide, of course. One afternoon, just last week, Dave and I took a next step surf lesson with our same original surf instructor, and we tried to get out past the break so that we could start trying to catch these bigger waves.

I paddled for a full 20 minutes. And got crashed into repeatedly and tried hard. And I ended up just not having the physical strength and stamina that I needed to get past the breaking waves to where you can catch like a wave before it has turned white, flipped over you can tell I’m an advanced surfer from all these technological terms that I’m using.

I just thought it was interesting that. It didn’t seem to matter what I did. I could not get past the break more than once. I got out there one time. Our instructor helped me onto a great wave. And I did ride one beautiful wave all the way into shore. And then I was like, I don’t think I can do that again.

I’ve tried to get past the break two more times now at lower tide. A few days ago, I tried, and I just kept getting a little bit frustrated at how hard it was. I decided, I’m a beginner enough. I’m just going to stay on the inside and ride the foam and practice getting up and practice balancing and practice like trying to cut into the wave, turn rather than just go straight to the shore.

And today I rode this afternoon with Dave, and It was a lot, there was a lot more space between the waves, and so there was more time to try to get out past that sort of invisible line of the break where the waves start turning, crashing, and turning white. I did get out there a couple times, and then I didn’t really know what to do, and at one point today is…

So dumb. There’s another lady surfing who looked about my age. I don’t know. She looked older than me to me, but I’m thinking now she probably was my age and I’m just delusional about how old I actually am. We’re out, we got out there and the beautiful thing about being. Just be on the break is that you can sit up on your board and just wait for the waves and you can rest.

And it’s a really nice thing if you can make it out there. I was up resting on my board. I was just what do I do now? I have no idea, like how to tell when a wave’s coming. I don’t know what it’s going to look like. And I turned to this woman and just say, “This is the first time I’ve really made it out here by myself. I don’t, how do I know, like when a wave’s coming, what should I do?”

And she gave me this look like, oh, I don’t know. And I’m sure she’s thinking, what are you doing out here? If you’re just to be like, why are you out here? If you don’t know what you’re doing. And then a wave started to come, and she laid down and started to paddle up the wave.

And I was like, oh, that looks like one. Should I try? And she said, you could ride the foam. And at that point I didn’t have enough time to turn around. So, I started to paddle. Like I was going to go up and over the wave or kind of through it. I was trying to go through it, and it crashed right on me, but it picked up my board and I ended up surfing it backwards.

I didn’t stand up on my board, but I felt my board get pushed. As if I was surfing, I was suspended in the wave for a good while going backwards. My face in the wave, and my feet in the air behind me, I’m sure the fins of my board are just sticking out. And then, finally, it rolled over enough that it flipped me over, and I was underwater, and, and I came back up, and I was fine, but I was just thinking, I finally get out past the break, and I catch a wave backwards, unintentionally.

I should not be out there by myself. I should, have another couple lessons before I try to do it on my own.

Okay, I’m going to get back on track here. Thank you for enduring my surf story. Turns out Dave and I really like surfing, and our kids really like surfing, and we live in Virginia, two and a half hours from the beach.

I don’t know how or if we can make, getting better at surfing a part of our regular lives, but we’re going to see, because it’s something that we all really enjoyed. Dave and I surfed. probably every other day, every three days at least, during the last three weeks that we were here, and it just felt like a joy to go out into the water, especially when I stayed in front of the break and I just practiced standing up and floating and being in the waves, and it’s fun.

I am excited for the next chance that I get, which I don’t know when that will be, but it helps when the waves are you know, relatively even, and the water feels like bath water. Nosara is a great place to learn to surf.

Finding a Rhythm at the Beach

I want to tell you about a couple other of the basic routines that we got in place here for the last three weeks of our trip, and then I will finish up by telling you some of the highlights that were special things that we did while we were here.

I told you about the beach house, walking to the beach, taking our surfboard, and taking our in our tubes to the beach taking a beach chair, maybe if we were going to be there for more than a couple hours, we had a great option here where our beach house is located that there, we passed a surf shop on the way to the beach.

Renting Surf Boards: Agua Tibia

Five minutes from here, we got to a place called Agua Tibia, which is a fantastic surf shop run by locals. Great people. We had so much fun just getting to know them a little bit. We could pick up our boards and walk straight out to the beach for, another five minutes away and then drop the boards off on the way home.

Here in Nosara, there are half a dozen surf shops. So anywhere you happen to be, there’s going to be one on the way to the beach. And I’m sure that they’re all great. We just happen to love being right by Agua Tibia and being able to… Go there regularly and we I just paid upfront rather than doing like a whole week rental We just paid for basically made like our own DIY punch card where we paid in advance for a bunch of two board rentals.

They just kept the tab for us so that I didn’t have to bring money every time that I came because it’s not always a good Idea to bring money out to the beach when you’re going surfing.

One-Month Gym Membership

another great routine that we decided to settle into was a to get a gym membership for just one month. This maybe wouldn’t make sense for everyone, but one of the things that Dave and I have really loved doing together in the last two years is going to CrossFit. Our local gym in Richmond is CrossFit Addict. It’s fantastic. Some of our favorite people are there. It feels like a community. We’ve made such great friends.

We go four or five days a week when we’re home. And working out together and challenging each other and supporting each other has been a fun addition to our relationship, 17 years in. It made a lot of sense for us to invest in a month at a great gym so that we could continue with some of the rhythms of our exercise and fitness routines like we do at home.

Where our beach house is located, we decided to join Bodhi Tree Gym, which is just right up the road a walking distance from where we were. That made it so that we Went. I think if it had been further away or if it required the hassle of a drive or, taking a tuk-tuk or something, it wouldn’t have happened as often.

But because we could just walk out the door, walk up the street five minutes, be in the gym, spend 30 minutes or an hour, depending on what we had planned the rest of the day, and that little bit of, sometimes it was hard exercise, sometimes it was more like stretching and recovery after a day at the beach, for example, felt really great and for three weeks.

If I go on vacation for a week, I very rarely go to a hotel gym, even though I like exercise, I’m usually walking around or doing other things that add up to the type of fitness that I want. That felt fun for us.

Community Yoga Classes

The other thing that I loved was buying some community passes to individual yoga classes. also, at Bodhi tree. Bodhi tree has been around forever. It was one of the first sort of yoga institutions here in Nosara and part of why Nosara was put on the map as a yoga haven.

There are now dozens of places to do yoga. Every hotel offers some sort of yoga class or a yoga instructor. I chose to go to Bodhi Tree mostly because of how close it was. Again, walking distance. I really like the way they handle their community passes. At the front desk of the hotel, you can buy tokens that are good for any community yoga class.

And then you just show up to the class, which is convenient because they have, they call their yoga studios shalas, and they have three different shalas in different parts of the hotel area, which it’s a huge sprawling hotel. And because I bought my tokens in advance, I could look at the schedule, see what was going to work for me, and then go directly to the shala rather than having to go back to the front desk every time and, buy a pass and then go, I could just buy a bunch of tokens at the beginning of the stay, which is what I did.

I kept them in my fanny pack. And then if the inspiration hit. that I wanted to go to yoga, or I had some spare time in the afternoon when people were having some downtime, siesta, or in the morning if people hadn’t gotten up yet and I was ready to go, I could wander up, do a yoga class, and then come back in and jump right back in.

Plum came to one yoga class with just me and then came to another one with Dave and me I don’t know that Dave had ever been to a formal yoga class before, and he really liked it, and Plum really likes doing cosmic kids’ yoga on YouTube. So, she had a great time at the classes They were a little bit long for her.

So, she participated for the first little bit and then just laid down on her mat or looked around the room and watched other people. Even though she wasn’t fully engaged the whole time, I loved sharing the experience with her. I thought it was a really great opportunity for her to get the feeling of an adult yoga class.

This was a great opportunity for Dave and Plum to get to know what a yoga class feels like. They both really enjoyed them, and I think that means that we’ll be on the lookout for some opportunities to do yoga more frequently in Richmond. I haven’t joined a yoga gym in Richmond. Because I go to CrossFit so often, and before that, I mostly ran by myself for exercise.

And I’m excited to try some different yoga classes. I think being here and doing so many in a short period of time reminded me how much I really like it. I’ve done yoga since college. For 20, maybe 25 years. it’s been a fringe part of my life. I’ve been very aware of it. I have a great yoga instructor come to all my retreats.

I’ve offered yoga classes. I taught community classes when I was very first married because I wanted to volunteer and even though I didn’t have a yoga certification, the group that I was teaching classes to didn’t mind. I really like yoga and this It was a fun opportunity to add it into the rhythm of my life and realize that it’s something that I’d like to do more of.

Meal Planning/Cooking at the Beach House

Two more quick routine things that we got into here. One of them both are things that we do at home. One is meal planning. And if you remember, Dave oversaw all our meals and family food over the last year while I was in grad school. This was my opportunity to dive back into helping in the kitchen, where I was, I took a step back from that over the last year.

And we had a lot of fun coming up with simple, fresh, easy to make meals that we could find all the ingredients easily at the grocery store. Since we were only here for a couple weeks, we didn’t want to need to buy the types of things that last a long time. Minimize the number of spices we needed, for example, but we came up with some great meals and had a lot of fun cooking, which is a perfect time to transition to a quick ad break for today’s sponsor.

SPONSOR: GreenChef

Today’s show is sponsored by Green Chef. If you have been listening to this show for any length of time, you know how much I love a meal kit. I was first introduced to them with HelloFresh, who has sponsored the show and I’ve talked about for years. And Green Chef is now owned by HelloFresh, which is so fun.

I love both brands and I’ve been particularly smitten lately with Green Chef because it is the most sustainable and healthy. option out there right now. They’re the number one meal kit for eating clean. No artificial colors, sweeteners, high fructose corn syrup, limited added sugar, very limited processed ingredients.

All the fruits and vegetables are certified organic. Cage free eggs and sustainably sourced seafood, which we’ve learned on our trip here, is incredibly important. It’s great for your health. It’s also crucial for the environment. As a family, we’ve been trying to eat a little bit more protein than we had previously and with Green Chef, we can choose meals that have at least 40 grams of protein on average per serving, which is hard to get in normal life, so being able to choose like a paleo, high protein, Option is awesome.

Of course, my very favorite thing about Green Chef is how simple it is. I can get ahead of my busy season with these step-by-step recipes, including dinners that Dave or I or one of our kids can make in 25 minutes or less. I know as we’re getting ready to transition back home after a big trip and a long time away, I really am looking forward to having that Green Chef box arrive on my doorstep and to not have to think about it.

Easy, fresh, delicious, and sustainable meals for my family. Give it a try today. Go to greenchef.com/livefree50 and use code livefree50 to get 50% off plus free shipping. 

Simple, Healthy Meals

While we didn’t have Green Chef here in Costa Rica, we followed a similar very simple healthy protein packed idea, of course without the ease of not having to think about it and having premeasured, pre proportioned ingredients out for us.

We tried to keep meals as simple as possible. Except for date night, which is the last thing that became part of our regular routine here that has been part of our regular routine in our lives for many years. It was nice to have a home base and have our kids be old enough that we could leave them at the beach house with their own homemade dinner while Dave and I tried some fun restaurants and had some time to ourselves on Saturday nights.

Date Nights

We went to three fantastic date night restaurants, and I’m going to mention them here. The first one is a restaurant called Coyol that is quite an experience even just to get to. It requires, requires, a four-wheel drive. If it’s a little bit rainy, it can be sketchy.

It’s about 30 minutes from Nosara up into the road. Once you get there, the experience is breathtaking. You’re up high enough that you can see all the way out to the ocean. It’s this beautiful view and it’s this crazy, designed, beautifully lit, inspired restaurant up on the mountainside, in the middle of nowhere.

To be honest, we had a fantastic. date night meal up there and loved it so much that we, I re-sketched some of my itinerary for our retreat, which is coming up in November, our couple’s retreat, because I thought we must bring the couples up here. It was not part of the original plan because I had never been there before and after experiencing it, I thought I must share this with our Novios couples.

The next Saturday night, we went to a new little restaurant called Sendero, it’s part of the Sendero Hotel, which I think opened in the last year. Beautiful, very minimal, boho feeling hotel with fantastic food. It was very date night feeling. People were dressed up a little bit. It’s a very nice hotel, and everything was candlelit. There were mostly adults around. It’s a nice and was a beautiful, comfortable environment for a great date.

Our final date night was at another new restaurant that I just wandered into one day. I had a meeting with the manager at Nosara Beach Hotel, where we’re staying with our novios group. And on the way back, I was walking through the town, just enjoying having a little bit of time by myself. I wandered in front of this.

This place that I thought was a greenhouse I thought it was like a nursery, and there were so many beautiful potted plants, and I peeked in, the door was open to like the courtyard, and so I walked in, and I saw a guy, I was like, can I come in here? And he’s oh yeah. Turns out it’s a new restaurant.

They’re not open yet. They, it’s called Posada Margherita. They have another one in Tulum, apparently, that’s been there for 25 years. And they just opened this location in the spring. incredibly authentic Italian food. So good. Great focaccia, great pizza. We have had a Napoli pizza in Naples, and this was as close as I’ve had since then and then homemade pasta like made right there in the kitchen right before it’s served to us.

We ended up having a lobster and shrimp fettuccine, which was amazing, and it was this beautiful setting. It’s a cool little courtyard with a couple greenhouses in it and tons of potted plants. So even though there’s probably a dozen tables, they all feel like their own private little It’s romantic and beautiful.

We were there right as the sun was setting and there was a big rainbow overhead. It was just special. Those were some fun dates night restaurants. I’ve gotten you through our basic routines. Going to the gym, going to yoga, going to the beach, surfing, doing date night, cooking at home.

We just did regular grocery shopping at the grocery store in town. We drove about 15 minutes away to get past the more tourist grocery stores into one where… Things were a little bit more reasonably priced. We were shopping with the local Ticos and ticas, Costa Ricans, and the other great routine that we had that I failed to mention earlier was pizza night.

Friday Pizza Nights

We have had Friday pizza nights forever. We found a little pizza place on the side of the road downtown in Nosara, in Guiones Playa, Guiones Norte, called Pura Pizza. It’s like an open front little pizza… restaurant where you can just walk up and grab a slice. We also realized we could buy a whole pizza and they do a Friday night special, which worked out well for us.

We tried it the first Friday and loved the pizza. And so, we just did that every Friday that we were here. And by the end, we also occasionally would be walking by during the week and go grab a slice. By the end today, I told the pizza guy. I went and got a slice at lunch and told him that we’re going home tomorrow but thank you for all the wonderful pizza.

They had gone to recognize us. I’m a huge fan of Pura Pizza. We’ll go back and back again.

Special Activities at the Beach

Beyond the routine, we did a couple special things where we were here at the beach. We hiked to a fun waterfall, we saw turtles nesting, and we went on a catamaran for an afternoon sail.

We also did a day trip back into the mountains because we heard about a waterfall that we wanted to go to before we left the country, mostly because I’m doing some reconnaissance for Novios for the retreat coming up in a couple of months. And I thought it might be something we wanted to do, but I didn’t want to plan on it until I had experienced it.

So, we did take two days away from the beach, go back up into the mountains to hike this waterfall. So, I’m going to tell you about those four.

Hiking Malanoche Waterfall

Out of the routine activities that happened during the last three weeks. The first one is a very simple local hike to a local waterfall called Malanoche. During the rainy season, Malanoche only has water when it’s raining and when it has been raining recently, which is counterintuitive. I don’t totally understand because today someone told us that during the summer here, like the drier season, which is coming up in December to March, the rivers are always full.

I don’t, I haven’t taken the time to figure out what’s happening there. Someone mentioned, I think it was our surf instructor, Rolo, told us, there’s water in Malanoche, so you should go hike it. I remembered when we started on the hike, it’s, you just put the… Malanoche waterfall into Google Maps and it will take you to the free parking lot.

It’s public land right now I don’t know if it’s public. I think someone may own it, but it’s not restricted people hike it and do and you can swim in It’s really great Kind of random and when we started along the way I realized Dave and I did this hike as an Airbnb experience when we were here two years ago You know, you can look up on Airbnb all different sorts of experiences that are led by, usually by locals offering, cooking classes or yoga classes or photography services or crafts or whatever.

We had looked up and seen a waterfall hike and I thought, oh, that would be fun to go hike to a waterfall as a couple. And we paid maybe 50 each to have a guide pick us up. Take us to this waterfall. We hiked up to the waterfall with him, swam there. He cut up a pineapple for us. It was great, fun.

And I’m glad that we had done that then two years ago and even paid for it because this time we knew where we were going. There are a couple parts on the trail where you must cross a little bit of a creek or you’re going around a fence and it feels like a local. hike. It’s not like National Park with signage or anything, but because we were familiar, we were able to make it to the waterfall.

We timed it nicely without even meaning to that we got there right as a big group was leaving. And so, we had the waterfall and the swimming hole to ourselves for about a half hour, which was about the perfect amount of time. We needed to swim. So, this water is cold. Swimming in the rivers is cold.

Swimming in the ocean here is warm. You must brace yourself, dive in. It’s fresh water though. It felt good. It’s fun to be near a waterfall and to jump off the rocks. We made sure it was deep enough to, cannonball in a few times and just a wonderful, natural experience out there at Malanoche Waterfall.

Arribada of Nesting Turtles at Ostional Refuge

The next experience that we had that was just otherworldly was experiencing what’s called an arribada. “Arribada” is a word used for arrival. And there’s a particular type of turtle, sea turtle, that nests in synchrony. All sea turtles nest up on beaches. Normally, most of the sea turtles nest individually.

They’ll, a certain time of year maybe, but they’ll go up one by one and dig nests and lay their eggs. The olive ridley sea turtles, which are native to this area and nest on the beaches at Ostional Refuge, which is just north of Nosara, nest in groups of hundreds or thousands at once.

I was reading all about it, where scientists will note a flotilla of turtles out in the ocean. Satellites will pick up that there are a bunch of turtles all together. And then, sometime around the new moon, a few days, maybe a week before the darkest night, which is the new moon, where there’s no moon, these turtles will start to come ashore in droves.

It happens every night for about four to five days. Hundreds of turtles all come ashore after sundown. and leave just after sunrise and they come up, they waddle up and they dig their nests, lay a hundred or so eggs each, pad their nests back down, and then crawl their way back to the ocean. I shared all about this on Instagram, so if you got to see those pictures.

It’s fun. I probably need to go back and turn my trip into a highlight. I haven’t done that yet.

I realized as we were preparing for this trip that we would be here for long enough. It was highly likely that we would be here around one of the Arribadas. Because if it happens about monthly during the rainy season, and we’re here for a month, it seems likely that it would happen during the time that we’re here.

I let our Airbnb host know that we were really interested in that. I also did a bunch of research about it. There’s a lot of restrictions around… seeing turtle nesting, of course, because they’re protected. It, the beach where they lay is protected, and the animals themselves are protected.

I discovered that to experience the arribada, you need to have a guide, a licensed guide, and the guides can take only a certain amount of people at a time, so that they regulate the number of humans on the beach at any time during the nesting period.

I told our Airbnb host “If you hear that the Arribada starts, please let us know or, if you could help us find a guide, that’d be great.” I think it was, like, two days later, he said, you’ll never believe it. Arribada has started.

Here’s the other thing that’s funny about it. There’s not a science to it. They know around when it’s going to start, but even with all the conditions and everything, they can’t say Oh, we’re going to plan three months ahead because we know when the new moon is. It’s sometime around there, but they don’t know exactly. There’s like a turtle wait, and then as soon as the arrival begins, then they mark the arrival has begun, and people can start securing their guides.

Because I had let our host know, he got back to me like two days later, maybe even the next day and said the arrival began today. You’ll never believe it. Here’s our guide’s name. Let you know, let me know if you want us to book you and so we booked with a guide. We’d chose a morning which meant that we got to the beach at 5 am, before sunrise.

We were able to see the turtles as the last of them for the evening came ashore and laid and went back in. When we got there, there were several dozens of turtles already laying and some more coming up and mostly they were headed back out to the ocean. This was a once in a lifetime breathtakingly beautiful experience that I don’t even know exactly how to describe.

I will say that as a mom I felt this like very visceral reaction to these mama turtles fighting their way out of the ocean, where movement is so easy for them. They’re so beautiful in the water and so awkward on the land. You could tell that every foot took so much energy and I stopped and watched this turtle waddle her way up and stop and breathe.

And just I could see her throat moving as air came in and out, just watching her breathe deeply, and then start moving again, and then stop to breathe deeply. And it just reminded me of the labor of labor. The work of labor. Becoming a mom and that actual moment, of course, we don’t lay eggs as humans, but watching these female turtles fight to get up onto the sand, dig themselves a hole when they’re already worn out, sit there in a trance to lay their eggs.

They lay, a hundred or so eggs, and then they have the work of covering their nest back up. And the Olive Ridley turtles are small. They’re smaller than some of the other sea turtle species, and so their fins aren’t big enough for them to only use their flippers to cover their nests.

They move their whole bodies and use their shells themselves, like the belly of their shells, to tamp their nests down. And then they turn around and waddle. awkwardly back down all the way down the beach until finally they get in far enough that the next wave can carry them out to where they can swim freely again.

The whole process probably takes a couple hours per turtle and was so beautiful to witness. It was just cool.

Rio Celeste Waterfall (not at the beach)

A few days after we experienced the sea turtles nesting, we decided to drive back up into the mountains to see a waterfall called Rio Celeste. We decided to stay at La Carolina Lodge again, which we had stayed at in our first week.

The kids raved about it the whole time we were there. And when we said, hey, we’re going to go stay a night at La Carolina Lodge, they all got so excited. It’s such a wonderful place. The food’s fantastic. They were all excited to swim in the river and sit on the hot tub. And we woke up the next morning. So, we drove up, stayed in La Carolina Lodge.

I woke up in the morning and drove over to the trailhead for Rio Celeste, which is about a three-and-a-half-mile hike with several different overlooks. One of them is for brilliant waterfall, just a huge giant waterfall that goes into a pool that is so blue it looks like Gatorade. That’s the main attraction.

Up the trail you also can see a laguna, it’s called Laguna Azul, it’s like the blue lagoon. You also can see some volcanic activity, there’s like a place in the river where you can see the bubbles coming up like a hot spring. And then at the final stop of the trail you see where two clear rivers come together and where they join, the pH of the water changes, which changes some of the molecules in the water from a tiny, teeny, tiny particle to about triple or quadruple their size.

 This creates an optical illusion of the water looking bluish white, and it’s interesting to read about it because it talks about the way we see it like a prism, when you hang a crystal in a window and it reflects rainbows into the room, it explained on, on the board, on the hike. I’m a reader. I like to read all along the way on these hikes and like historical monuments and things like that. I read about how this particle, the prism, the way it reflects the light, it only bounces out the white and blue. So rather than seeing the whole rainbow in the river, you just see this vivid blue.

It’s cool. After doing the hike, we gave it five stars, like absolutely we want to take our group to do this. It was fun. It was a great hike, like the actual hike is through the jungle. It’s a little rugged at times, but not too difficult. We saw several small people, like young kids on the hike with their parents.

I saw a woman with different abilities, that one leg was significantly shorter than the other, and so she had an assistant device and a thick shoe. And she was navigating the hike, even the rocky parts. She had a little bit of help from the group she was with. Also, some older folks on the hike. I feel like with some stamina and interest it is not wheelchair accessible, but accessible with some help for most people.

Catamaran Sailing

Our last fun outside-of-the-routine activity for this trip was going on a catamaran sailing afternoon. There’s a company called Kaya that I had investigated and was interested in and so we booked for the five of us to go on a morning sail out into the ocean.

You can snorkel if the tide is low. We went when the tide was high, but at low tide, the sailboat stops at a pink sand beach that only emerges during low tide.

We’re excited to hopefully see that sometime in the future when we come back.

We spent most of the time on the water just cruising, and we saw those same Olive Ridley turtles that we had seen nesting a couple weeks before. We saw them out swimming in the middle of the ocean, which was exciting and came full circle.

It was a beautiful day. I love being on a sailboat. I grew up sailing with my dad. He was a sailor. My parents both sailed together when they were first married. And then we had a catamaran, a small catamaran with a trampoline for the whole time I grew up, I think my dad still has it, in fact. I like being on a sailboat.

I like being in the middle of the ocean, on the water. It was fun. The view, of course, is beautiful out there. There were some great snacks and drinks, which were, was fun. It started with a spread of fresh fruit. The kids were going crazy for the fresh pineapple and mini bananas and this funky fruit called mammon that looks like a spiky alien on the outside and then you crack it open, and it has what tastes like a giant grape. Like a golf ball sized grape with a seed inside I think milo ate like 12 of those.

They love just relaxing and chatting and ordering another round of Fanta’s. There were a couple other people, another family on the boat with us, a couple other people that we had fun chatting with. At one point about halfway through the sail, we stopped, and they let down the ropes on the side of the sailboat so that we could jump off into the water and swim in the middle of the sea.

They also pulled out some paddle boards and pool noodles and things to play with. We probably spent about an hour swimming and. My boys were all trying flips off the side of the boat. I did a headstand for a very short amount of time on the inflatable, stand up paddleboard. Just a great, fun family activity.

On the way back, sailing back, they put out another spread of snacks. And these were, again, so delicious. Fresh ceviche made right on the boat, chips and guacamole and cheese and bread and crackers and cut up vegetables. It was just such a spread. So beautiful. And after jumping and playing and expending a lot of energy it felt nice to have a snack and just relax again on our sail back into shore. Highly recommend Kaya.

Family Date Night at La Luna

To wrap up our trip, we did a family date night at a nice restaurant right on the sand. It’s one of the very few restaurants right on the sand because it’s been there for so long. It’s called La Luna.

It’s beautiful any time of day, but especially beautiful at sunset, so I made these reservations a couple weeks ago for all our family to sit and have a fantastic meal, talk about the trip, talk about what we loved and our good memories, and things that we’re excited about for the future.

We are now trying to start this transition into back to school, which is going to be a little bit abrupt for us as the kids start school on Monday and we will be arriving home the day after this show goes live. Very quick turnaround for us.

 La Luna is beautiful, and I would highly recommend it. In the show notes for this episode, I am not going to go into all my favorites and places to hit and things that we loved. I’ve talked about some of them. put a little bit of a list in the show notes, too, of just some of our favorite experiences here in Nosara, some favorite restaurants, and some things that we’ve really enjoyed.

Why This Trip Matters

For the most part, these last few weeks have just been spending time together, walking to the beach, being outside, connecting to nature, having family game nights, cooking at home. It’s felt really healing.

This last year for us was really wild with my school being incredibly busy, and our kids, of course, all having their own individual needs. I was out of town a lot, and this trip, in some ways, felt like a chance for us all to breathe together, to reconnect as a family and all be on the same page for several weeks in a row to just, the only plan was our own plan, our own family together.

I’m grateful that we did this and that we did it now. I can already see the dynamics of our family starting to shift as my kids are getting older, and I feel like we encapsulated this beautiful moment. Before Milo goes to high school next week. Plum and Eliot and Milo all are these great, interesting, dynamic transitional ages.

They’re all like tweens or teens. And in a couple years, I don’t know what it’s going to look like, how busy they’re going to be with other things, what personal pursuits they’ll be exploring. I don’t buy into by any means that you only have your kids for 18 years because I know that my parents still have me and I’m 40, and there’s something about capturing a moment of family dynamic, a season that I don’t know that we’ll easily return to or that we’ll get back to.

I think that this is a fleeting season. It felt important. It felt important to be here and to do this together.

Fully candid, I’m not ready to go home. I wish that we could stay for another month or two. I really loved it. I’ve loved the pace. I’ve loved the exploring together. I’ve loved being together.

I am excited to have a little bit of personal time. That doesn’t come easily on a family vacation for so long, other than my solo yoga classes and the occasional walk around town. I’ve been with everyone all the time. There’s something beautiful about that I’m going to miss, and I also, I will look forward to having some more alone time when we get home.

There are things about this trip that I want to take home with us, and I’m going to journal on the airplane. About what some of those are so that I can pull my thoughts together and maybe I’ll share some ideas in the future. And there are also things about our home life that we brought here with us.

Reevaluating and Realigning

I think that it’s a beautiful thing to step out of your everyday routine, sometimes for a long time if you can swing it, to be able to see your life a little bit more clearly because you’re not in the middle of it. And I think that’s a piece of what we’ve done here has been able to be with each other and experiencing new things and reconnecting and having a chance to reevaluate what does this next stage look like for us?

What do, what does our home life look like? What are some things that we want to keep and some things we want to tweak about our life and how do we begin to make those steps to realign and even just to have the time to think about what? What are what is alignment for us? What are our values?

What feels good and how do we come back into harmony that way of course life is never perfect there’s always unexpected obstacles and things that come and go and in any small way that we can see the good, identify what we, what matters to us, and to have the choices that we make reflect those things in our everyday lives, that’s something that we can do.

We can, and we don’t always because life just gets so busy. Having a chance to pause and reconnect to ourselves and to each other has been instrumental for us, and I cannot think of a better place to do that than here in Costa Rica.

I will go ahead and leave you with that for this episode.