Costa Rica

My wife is my favorite person to travel with. She’s pretty much up for anything. That works well for me because I like to travel by the seat of my pants. I’m not an all-inclusive resort or a cruise ship kind of person. Travel should be an adventure, not a prepackaged, happy meal, strip mall kind of thing.

When my wife was three months pregnant with our first son, and I was long-haired and chubby, we took a trip to Costa Rica. We booked a flight and a rental SUV, and had a general idea of where we were headed. When the time came, we flew into San Jose, picked up our vehicle, and drove to Fortuna where we stayed in a lodge that used to be a Smithsonian research station for the Arenal volcano.  After being there for several days, we moved on to the Pacific coast where we stayed in a cabin that smelled like hippies.   The place was beautiful, but it gave off an unclean vibe.  My wife felt like the beach town was too much like Wildwood New Jersey, so we left the next day. That was all well and good, because I was scared of catching some kind of new age lice from the patchouli smelling bed in the cabin.   Our next stop was Santa Elena, a town in the mountains near the Monteverde cloud forests. We ended up staying in a simple, plywood walled building, made up of three one-room apartments. It was quiet, clean, and it had hot water. It was perfect. As a side bonus, the lady who ran the place invited us over for breakfast, and to feed the monkeys that came out of the forest every morning. We hiked every day while we were there. My wife swears she saw a black panther. I only caught a glimpse of it, but I believe her.  It is best to always believe her.  Argue at your own risk.

The experience that best summed up the whole trip, happened on our last day. We had already hit the main attractions in the area, and were looking for something to do. My wife saw a sign for a waterfall that had the same name as her dad. Okay. To get there, I drove our rental several miles down a dirt road and through a couple streams to a farmer’s house. The trail to the falls ran through the man’s property. To get access to the trail, you had to yell until you got his attention, and then pay him a few bucks each. We threw on our daypacks and headed out. Because I am a true gentleman, I walked through the tall grass in front of my pregnant wife. That way, if we ran into any one of Costa Rica’s 17 different variety of poisonous snakes, I would get bit, fall on the ground, and say something heroic like, “Save yourself, it’s too late for me, go, just go.” The trail eventually joined the river and crossed it a couple times on footbridges that were tied off to large trees so that when flash floods came, they wouldn’t get washed downstream. Then it rained torrentially. An hour later, we stood at the bottom of a waterfall that was nearly two hundred and fifty feet tall. Just the two of us, in the middle of the Costa Rican rain forest.

I’ll never forget that moment. My first son is going on ten years old now, and I no longer have long hair, and I’m a lot less chubby. It’s almost time to go back and have some new adventures.