October 3rd - 4th

Today we left the villa and drove about 45 minutes down the road to another beach town, where we were going to be staying for one night on our way back to San Jose.  We had an odd number of nights left, so we figured one more night at the beach with a change of scenery would probably be good.  We cashed in some of our points for a free hotel night that we had earned from all our travels.

Once again, we were the only people in our hotel, so we had the place to ourselves, which worked out to our advantage since the owner ended up giving us an upgrade to the nicest room.

We toured around the town a little bit, but were sort of worn out from traveling at this point, so we just sort of hung around our hotel room, swam in the pool, and watched HBO.  We went down to the beach for dinner in time to see the sunset which was pretty, and we got some traditional Costa Rican food for dinner, followed by some gelato, and some souvenir shopping.  We were looking for a CR magnet, but didn't find any that weren't tremendously ugly.

We went back to the room in time to watch the first presidential debate.  We were glad to get regular American TV at our hotel.

Thursday morning we woke up, had breakfast, and hung around the pool until it was time to check out.  Then we packed up and drove up the rode to Playa Herradura to hang around for the day.  We walked along the beach, sat on our beach mat, played some cards, and laid around for a while until we were too hot, and just decided we had had enough and we were ready to go to San Jose.

On the drive back to San Jose we stopped at the Crocodile Bridge.  Under this bridge is one of the largest herds(?) of wild crocodiles in the world.  The crocodiles were gigantic.  It was cool to be able to see them from afar.

After the crocs, we continued on our drive and made it to San Jose a little earlier than we had planned so we figured we would go on a little tour of the downtown area.  It was slightly frightening.  The roads were crowded and narrow, and Joseph had read that it was a common scam people would run where they would slice your tires without you knowing, and then, when you had to change the tires they would offer to help and then just steal your stuff out of the car, so I was on edge the whole time hoping that wouldn't happen.  Luckily it didn't.  There wasn't a lot to see downtown, but I am glad we got an up close view of the city.

We were staying the next two nights with some family friends, the Dorseys, who are currently living in Costa Rica, in Escazu, right outside of San Jose.  So, after our little tour of downtown, we headed back to the Megaplex mall where we were planning on meeting them.  Since once again, it would have been impossible to find the house with only the street directions.

Luckily, we found a pay phone and were able to meet up with them, with very little hassle.  So we headed to their house where we just hung around chatting and catching up all evening.