Pura Vida en Costa Rica: Beach-bound by 3 AM

3 AM departure

5 friends and 1 dog

12 hours

Puerto Viejo, Manzanilla Beach, Costa Rica

I will try my best through my stories and pictures to have this blog entry live up to the greatness of this trip! This was honestly, one of the best and most memorable days of my life. Where do I begin?

We packed up earlier Saturday and left Turrialba at 3:00 AM. In the car we had Juan, Tammy, Marco, and their dog, Dixie and then drove about five minutes to pick up Berto. All five of us packed into the car with swimsuits, lunches, and a couple towels and set out on our road trip! It took us about two hours to get there and on the way we played bilingual games, stopped for breakfast and had Argentinian empanadas and batidos de fruta (smoothies), got a flat tire, but luckily the Incredible Hulk (literally, HUGE muscular man) was walking his dog and helped us get the old tire off of our car. Finally, we made it to the beach! The water was warm, but then again, I'm a Minnesotan. For my friends, it was a little cool.

< Tire. Gone.

> Incredible Hulk saves the day. This pic doesn't do him justice.

This was OUR tree for the day! No one around. We sat on the log and had a picnic used the tree's swing, climbed the tree, and swam here...ahh I miss it already...

I was hoping to find some monkeys in Puerto Viejo, luckily I found one in our tree!

Story of the towel (for below): Juan was curled up on the shoreline of the beach like he was sleeping so I covered him up with a towel. No more than a half second later a HUGE wave washed up on the shore and drenched the towel. Berto looked at me and said, "That was mine!"...Oops :)

Juan was trying to take this picture with my phone, but couldn't figure out how. We were out there quite a while when suddenly a huge wave splashed us all over and drenched our clothes. After that, the waves were pretty heavy and by the time they were done, we couldn't have been any wetter.

We wanted to make it look like a mystery how we got to this rock...success?

Splash! Not expected! Sooo happy!

The entrance into the cave!!

Dixie provided us much entertainment throughout the day. She is a dog who needs to be cuddled with and near her owners at all times. When we were all swimming, Dixie was whimpering on the shoreline until she braved it out and came into the water. But she hated it so much, she swam to the closest person and climbed up them and on top of their head, wrapping her feet around their face, shoulders, whatever was convenient to get her out of the water. The only bad thing was that she would leave some pretty good scratches on whoever's bare skin she would climb.

This was Dixie's lake. We were walking near it, and randomly although she was so afraid of the water earlier she walked right into in and laid down, to cool off I assume, but for us it was pretty funny.