This is the one of four posts from our first weekend excursion as a family here in Tico land. There is so much information to process I decided breaking my posts down to keep them shorter may be more user friendly for people following.
First, a few notes. Before coming to Costa Rica, Clark assembled a list of all the sights and activities he was interested in here. He shared that list with our Tico friend, Alejandro, an engineer and Clark's student at Pitt State (Alex in short-hand English...yes, I am that lazy and Alejandro approved so...😏). Alex has been instrumental in assisting us to be prepared for all things Tico and added to Clark's list.
If anyone knows much about our family, they know we have road-tripped all over the USA. We did that using a bucket-list schedule by jotting down all the places we dreamed of going then "penciled in" an approximate year and VOILA! Bucket list. We followed the same procedure (yes, I love those!) for this trip. Now we have 10 or 11 weekend excursions planned.
Clark had one weekend excursion before us because he arrived earlier to Costa Rica. Alex was still "in town" in San Jose and drove Clark "all over" the place. This included Volcan Irazu and Orosi near some hot springs. I hope Clark will guest post on his fun with Alex and the great food he experienced. I heard Alex's mom is quite an excellent chef.
On to Monteverde. When we typed the destination into our map app, Waze, we thought this might be about 3 hours away. It ended up being 5 hours. Driving in Costa Rica will be another post but let's just say we are learning it takes a long time to get a short distance which is VERY different from our po-dunk country life.
We stopped in a place near Savanna to use the restroom and have a second breakfast since we left Coronado at 6:15 am. I am SO glad we decided to leave early since it took much longer to drive then we planned. We knew we'd be hiking for a few hours and wanted to "fuel up". This was our first experience with the gallo pinto buffet. I could eat at one of these buffets a few times a week. It is so convenient, you see all the food, choose what you want on your plate, its fresh, its filling. I want to find one in Coronado!
An example of how the buffet looks. There are eggs, sausage, beans, rice, tortillas, pupusas, and fruit, among other things...platanos and fried queso.
As the city fell away and we began to climb in elevation, the views became spectacular. The pictures don't do justice to the natural beauty of the mountains here. Costa Rica is exiting their rainy season which has everything looking verdantly green. We crossed a couple river gorges and rivers in general that reminded us of what we saw in Washington state near Olympia National Park and the Ho rain forest.
The town of Monteverde was larger than I expected. That is an understatement because I honestly wasn't expecting a town at all and it was sizeable. There appeared to be some art influence there and there was everything you need without having to drive down the mountain. I just wonder how dreary it is during the wet season...
We parked and then rode a bus up to the trail entrance. Because the park is fairly small, we spent about 3 hours hiking there. Maybe with another couple hours we would have seen all the trails; most were not too steep and extremely well maintained, impressively so. We saw a couple of unique birds and our favorite South American raccoon, the coati mundi. There was small water fountain and suspension bridge. Overall, it made for a great first hiking adventure to give us a taste of what we can expect from a couple of the larger parks.
Anecdotes:
The quetzal we "saw", we didn't really see...we happened upon a guide with a group and Rose was standing near him when he was offering to take pictures of his phone that was looking through the binoculars. He reached for her and she thought, "why not", even though we weren't part of the group.
I want to add a note about using the restroom at Savanna. There were no toilet seats, so I had to do the squatty potty stance. Sorry if that's too much FYI; just keeping it real. The liquid soap was in a bowl-like cup on the counter. It was different but I'm grateful they had soap and the restroom was clean.
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