I went to Costa Rica for a week with Brenda, a friend from my book club. A widow, she and her husband had a time share in Aruba but she hadn’t used it for several years. She was going to lose another week but was concerned about going alone since she had never traveled without her husband. I said I’d be happy to go somewhere with her, if she was interested. After searching for a while and dealing with limited dates and locations, a week in Costa Rica opened up from May 5th to 12th, and we booked it.

We left from Bloomington, via Atlanta, and flew into Liberia. This is the largest city in the Guanacaste Province, in the northwest part of the country. We stayed in a condo, Coco Sunset, at Playas del Coco.

Amy Lentz of Avispas Adventures helped us have a great time in Costa Rica. Her tour company picked us up from the airport and we planned several tours with them: Palo Verde National Park, a day trip to Nicaragua, a beach tour, and a full day Miravalles Volcano Adventure. She also took us to a rodeo, a local festival, one night in a neighboring town.

The next day, Sunday, we took a half day tour of Palo Verde National Park. It was a river cruise and we saw lots of animals. The highlight was the capuchin monkeys that came on our boats. I got a kiss (with help of banana smeared on my cheek). It was great. Although I’ve learned, in the 10 years since the trip, that kind of forced behavior is so detrimental to the animals. I had a similar experience in Madagascar with lemurs in 2014, but don’t participate in this anymore. Let wild animals be wild.

Monday, we spent all day at the condo. Moving from pool to pool, returning to the condo to use the blender to make more margaritas, it was very relaxing.

We had a full day tour of Nicaragua on Tuesday. Carlos, our driver took us the 1 ½ hours to the border where we were met by Berman. We drove to Rivas and had a “typical” breakfast, rice, beans, eggs, tortillas, cheese. After breakfast, we visited the beautiful town of Granada and saw all the great churches and the big city square. We climbed the tower in La Merced for great views of the city, and wandered through town for an hour. We had lunch at a small restaurant en route to Lake Nicaragua.

The boat tour was wonderful and very scenic. We spent over an hour on Lake Nicaragua on the Granada isletas. What a beautiful place. We saw some very angry spider monkeys, who had bit Berman a few days before. He had an awful looking bite on his calf from feeding one monkey an orange that another monkey wanted.  We stayed picture distance away. We saw some huge and expensive homes around the lake. We saw the beautiful oropendola birds, oro – gold, pendola – pendulum, with their long yellow tails. They had odd pendulum like nests, 3-4 feet long hanging from the trees. The birds had a great call like a laugh and whistle.

We were supposed to see the volcano in Massaya but it was closed due to volcanic activity so we just drove by it en route to the market, Mercado Municipal. Very, very hot and crowded. I bought some spices but didn’t see anything else I liked. At the end of the day we visited Laguna de Apoyo, the crater of Apoyo Volcano before driving back to Costa Rica. This is Nicaragua’s largest volcanic crater lake, formed 23,000 years ago after an eruption.

We took the full day beach adventure tour on Wednesday. Getting to the first beach was amazing, quite a wild ride up dirt trails. We were definitely in the middle of nowhere. Playa la Penca was deserted and beautiful. We spent over an hour here in the great waves and on the white sand. I could have stayed longer. We went on to Playa Flamingo, a huge curving stretch of sand in Punta Salinas on the Gold Coast.

We had a good lunch on the beach close to Playa Brasilito. I had a spicy shrimp dish. The food was great but even better was the service. They brought over bowls of water with flower petals in them for us to rinse our hands, then had the very handsome waiter dried our hands. They did this both before and after lunch.

We took a short walk on the beach then went on to Playa Conchal. This beach was the one recommended to us for the best swimming and snorkeling. But the water was very cloudly, and the beach was all shells.

We also booked a full day Miravalles Volcano Adventure, with Avispas. We had an amazing day. Brenda and I joined three ladies from Dallas. We started at the Llanos de Cortez waterfall and had a refreshing swim. Beautiful!

Then we went to the zip line. We had a long walk in the forest before arriving at our first platform. This was my first time on zip lines. I was a little nervous at the first one, wondering if I was going to chicken out, but it was great. We did about nine more lines then had the last one, the long, long one leading back to the office. I had the best time and definitely planned on more zip lining. I’ve done it a couple more times since, once in New Zealand on some very high and fast lines at Queenstown. It is so much fun.

Later, we did a horseback ride for several hours through the forest, seeing the beautiful sulfur springs and more amazing views. After our ride, we had a great “typical Costa Rican lunch” at Colinas del Miravalles of rice and beans, chicken breast, goat cheese, egg, salad, fried plantain, marinated vegetables. We started off with fresh pineapple juice. Delicious! We had some great cooked bananas with ice cream to end the meal with. Finally, we ended the day at the hot springs and had an authentic volcanic mud bath. What a great day.

Coco Sunset was a nice condo we got from Brenda’s exchange. It was a little out of town on a side road so took us 10 minutes to get to town. It wasn’t that long of walk, but bad during the day when it was really hot. There was still a lot of construction going on, but the beds were comfortable, we were able to save money by eating breakfast and a few lunches in the condo, it had a good blender to make margaritas, and they had some beautiful pools. We spent several evenings at a little bar in town enjoying drinks and the views. It was a great week and I appreciate Brenda allowing me to come. Since she pays yearly for the time share, I paid for the exchange costs, a great deal for both of us.

** All photos property of Lisa, not to be copied or reproduced **