Family Vacay: A Trilogy (Vol. 1)

From the moment Landyn was accepted into this graduate program, my mom, Anita (Niters), has been talking about visiting us. She honestly may have been more excited about and ready for our move than we were. Niters and my sister, Carly, had their visit tickets booked before we left the United States in January, and I think it helped make the airport goodbye slightly less tragic for all three of us.

Well, hold onto your hats, folks, because on March 15th, the day had finally arrived: The Tribe (as we call ourselves) was reunited in Costa Rica.

The Airport

The night before their arrival I was straddling the line between healthy excitement and mania. I kinda felt like I was gonna vomit. Kinda felt pumped. Kinda felt nothing at all because I couldn’t fathom seeing two of my favorite humans in my new normal down here.

The morning of their arrival was even worse. I woke up before the sun, rolled around a bit, and, of course, pestered Landyn with my anxious energy. I got to the airport over an hour early, found a bar to plant myself in front of, and sat. Then I got up to order a drink. Then I thought better not, sat back down. But I was kinda hungry. Walked up to order a snack, changed my mind again. Up, down, up, down, until after about four rounds of this the employees behind the counter stopped trying to hide their stares.

“Cari you’ve been acting erratic in an airport, these people are gonna call security if you don’t buy a fricken bag of chips and settle down,” said me to me. So I munched my Nacho Cheese Doritos and compulsively refreshed the Spirit Airlines webpage showing me the flight status. 18 minutes. 11 minutes. 4 minutes. Text from Carly flashes across the top of my phone and the status changes to “arrived.” I almost peed my chair.

Quick background: the San Jose airport has a fairly strange layout, and for peeps that are arriving it eventually just dumps you out into this waiting area where a bunch of taxi drivers and tour companies hold up signs, and call out for customers if they aren’t already booked. It’s complete pandemonium. So there I stood, waiting with the sign I made for them (because I secretly love that all that corny shit) when I was suddenly blind sighted by a massive lump in my throat.

I have no idea what came over me, but as I waited for them to get through the fanfare that is customs and luggage retrieval, all of my I-miss-my-family emotions bubbled right up to the surface. First I can’t sit down, then I’m bawling next to the cab drivers. All aboard the hot mess express.

In the midst of my teary pacing, I saw a head of hair I recognized.

“Mom!”

*her head turns right around to find me while I struggle to unfold my sign*

When I hugged her and my sister, I realized just how much I had missed them. I think I was really compartmentalizing my life here and my life back home; FaceTime phone calls felt like enough for me until I saw Niter’s lob and Carly’s platinum pony and then the need to embrace them was suddenly, overwhelmingly potent. There’s nothing like a hug that’s been a long time coming.

El Rodeo

After waiting over two hours to get our rental car (renting a car in Costa Rica is a whole different beast than renting in the States), we were on the road to Rodeo. It was incredibly fun for me to watch their faces and hear their reactions to the surroundings.

It was also extremely trippy for me–I continued to find that I had compartmentalized more significantly than I thought. My life here, in many ways, feels entirely separate from my life back home, so to have my two distinct worlds collide was disorienting, albeit exciting and entertaining.

You could argue that my sister was more excited to see our dogs (see last post if you haven’t yet) than she was to see Landyn and I. So I think her vacation was already made when our two little cinnabons came bounding over to her as soon as she opened the car door.

Monteverde

Good news: if the freelance writing and blogging spheres don’t work out, I have immense potential as a travel agent. Prior to the family’s arrival, I took care of hotel bookings and organizing general activity timelines for their stay. Lots and lots of three-way conference calls.

The first trip of the trip: Monteverde. Monteverde is in the northwest corner of Costa Rica and has two cloud forest reserves which boast incredibly unique, biologically diverse ecosystems. Monteverde’s extremely high altitude should prohibit many tropical plants and animals indigenous to Costa Rica from growing there, but nevertheless they persist.

Aside from being known for these super cool reasons, Monteverde is also famous for being accessible only by very precarious, sketchy means. The road climbs at serious incline grades, has no barriers between the road and cliff edge, and is gravel. And it’s really windy. And the dust sometimes inhibits your ability to see the road. And there’s not always enough room for two cars, so…yeah.

My mom was rather freaked out about the drive, so we made it a group activity and figured out a system for identifying major potholes so that she could focus on all the other potentially life-threatening factors. “Gully” meant “hey there’s a pothole you should probably slow down for, but also if this car was your Jeep and not a rental then it would be pretty chill.” If we yelled “trench” that translated into “holy shit you better not let this valley topple us right off this mountain, BRAKE BRAKE BRAKE.”

Niters also really likes to verbally panic while she drives, even when the situation isn’t exactly dire, which, of course, panicked the hell out of the rest of us. So then it was decided that no one could raise their voice five octaves and yell “oh my god” anymore, but rather when someone felt a tad petrified, driving or passengering, they had to say “har har, har har,” emulating a nervous laugh. This was hysterical and surprisingly effective in relaxing everyone in the most tense moments of the drive.

At long last, after an hour and fifteen minutes of the harrowing dirt road trek, we hit pavement and all of us rejoiced that we safely arrived in the town of Monteverde. See that’s the thing about living in Costa Rica, sometimes it makes you grateful for things we regularly take for granted in the States, like paved roads.

Our B&B, Nina’s Place, was absolutely fantastic; it gave us all the positive hippie vibes of a hostel, but our private room was spacious, clean, and boasted a beautiful valley view.

 

That first night we explored the local town, ate some insanely good tacos, and checked out a couple tourist shops. For being a known tourist attraction, the town didn’t feel too developed or crowded at all. We loved it!

 

The next morning, after nearly scaring Carly to death, we made friends with a wild Coati–an animal equivalent to a raccoon here, although parts of Costa Rica do have actual raccoons, as well. He actually tried to eat off our plates, and while it was slightly concerning because this animal is the size of a medium-sized dog breed, it was also ridiculously adorable.

Prior to their arrival, I had warned my family that I was going to push them out of their comfort zones during this trip, particularly my mom. She tends to doubt herself and think she can’t do something when she’s actually totally capable. I was determined to help her see that.

Thus, we hit both of Monteverde’s cloud forest reserves–we did a hanging bridges tour through one and zip lined through the other. Both my mom and Carly are afraid of heights/being suspended solely by cables, so I knew I was asking a lot from them. But it turned out to be one of the most spectacular days of the whole trip. While on the hanging bridges, we saw tons of new plant species (super unique ecosystem, remember) and birds for my birding-obsessed beau. This included the rare Quetzal which we were able to see clear as day!!! (We admired it with our eyeballs instead of our cameras, sorry to disappoint any bird fanatics reading this)

 

There’s nothing quite like conquering a fear—that feeling of standing on a precipice (typically figurative but in this case literal) and making a conscious decision to ignore your shaking hands, quaking voice, riotous stomach and do the damn thing anyways. It makes you feel bold, empowered, liberated. Not to mention the intense adrenaline rush that comes from these adventurous activities whether they had you terrified or not. It was amazing to see my family unfold and unwind and, at times, come unglued a little bit.

After finding one line extremely traumatizing, Carly was ready to walk back to the entrance of the park. She was like a zombie during the buggy ride we took up to the next two Superman-style lines. She kept telling me she couldn’t do it, she was gonna pee, she thought she was gonna die, the whole gamit.

Mom went. Landyn went. The guy tried to hook me up next but when I took one last look back at my sis, I knew if I left her there she wouldn’t do it. So I demanded the guy stop and have her go next. I nearly had to push her off the platform myself, but she did it. And I know she’s glad she did. And you want to know what magical words of wisdom I said to her on that platform? YOLO.

That’s right. A quick throwback to the hottest phrase of 2009, “yolo.” It’s cliché, corny, overdone, ridiculous, and some people take it a little too far, but can we just talk about the sentiment behind the phrase for a second? It is so so so freakin’ true. You only live once. So do the thing that scares the shit out of you. Go zip lining. Walk on a shaky suspended bridge. Pack your life into two suitcases and move to a country you’ve never been to, a part of the world you’ve never seen. Because you only get to do this life once. And it’s so much better to have done the thing, to have pushed yourself outside of your comfort zone, than spend even a single second wondering what experiences you could have had if only you’d been a little more brave. So I guess my biggest takeaway from Monteverde is this: fear will consume you, it will ruin you, if you let it. So don’t. Because yolo.

Río Celeste

So the original plan was that after we were done in Monteverde we would go directly to Arenal. But a week before my family came, Landyn and I found out about a beautiful river/waterfall, Río Celeste, that doesn’t see nearly as much tourist action as some of our other trip destinations because it’s tucked away in a remote national park.

However, if you know it’s there, and you’re already driving from Monteverde to Arenal, it only adds another hour onto your drive time (one route takes you around one side of Arenal National Park, the other route the other). So we threw it in as a last-minute must-see.

Good thing, too, because it was on that route that a Toucan flew across the road right in front of our car and perched on a tree for us to pull over and admire him. These creatures are majestic and beautiful and I was so SO happy Carly and Anita got to see one.

Trekking out to Tenorio National Park isn’t for the faint of heart, though. You get out to the middle of nowhere, there’s one tiny sign for your turn-off to the park, and the last 30 minutes are on gravel (Niters was beyond over the gravel roads about 30 seconds into her first encounter with one in Costa Rica, and she was very vocal about this fact).

Eventually, we made it to our destination. This was also a brand new national park for Landyn and I, so all of us were excited to be experiencing another new place together.

 

We began our hike to Cataraca Río Celeste. Only ten minutes in, we were finally able to show the fam some wild monkeys. A family of Capuchins meandered about in the trees surrounding the trail, even crossing branches right above our heads.

The hike itself was relatively easy. However, this was our first hike with the fam that didn’t involve paved paths the entire time, like the hanging bridges did. It was entertaining, to say the least, to see how my mom and Carly handled the slippery, muddy sections of the trail, how they felt about crossing mossy rocks through a mini river, and overall how they gelled with one of Landyn and I’s favorite pastimes.  They’re both active, adventurous individuals, but hiking is just a whole different ball game. Aside from my mom insisting she was having a heart attack every time her heart rate got above 110 (more to come on that, later), they totally embraced it. Before this trip I had never gone on a true hike with my family and now they’ve caught the bug. Mission complete.

 

Once you reach the waterfall, there are about 250 steep stairs that take you down to the water level. While these were a pain in the ass to climb back up, the waterfall was completely, entirely worth it.

 

The impeccably clear, turquoise waters get their color from various volcanic minerals found in the two separate rivers that eventually join to form Río Celeste. Swimming is actually prohibited since the concentrated levels can make people sick. Otherwise you best believe I would’ve been soaking up those gemstone-colored waves.

After voyaging back to the start of the trail we saw the single greatest thing you can see after a hike in this tropical climate: coconuts. Coconut stands are extremely common here, and they’re so much better than the bottled coconut water b.s. you can buy in stores (which I can’t stand, in case I was too subtle there). Fresh pipas were calling our names and it was such a delight to see my mom and (especially) Carly fall in love with a good ole fresh coconut, picked nearby and sliced open with a machete.

Once we were revived, we headed back out on the open road to our next destination: Arenal. Now I know doing our trip this way, venturing off to several different locations, added up to quite a bit of time in the car…it was essentially a three hour trip everywhere we went. Do you take vacations to sit in the car? No.

But the thing about our road trips is that was where some of our best moments happened–the funniest airhead moments, the strangest comments that had everyone laughing at one person’s expense, the bonding time when I got to just be with my family. Just exist alongside them and relish our adventures together. Also the time where Landyn sat on a piece of chocolate and simultaneously destroyed the backseat and his pants.

And for my mom and Carly, they got to see a true, authentic representation of Costa Rica. Our route wasn’t all freeways and express lanes, but rather the majority was on small, windy roads through tiny towns and residential areas. They got to experience the people, the culture, the landscapes that you miss when you take puddle jumper planes around the country. They got the rare opportunity, much like Landyn and I, to straddle that line between a typical tourist and a temporary resident.

So yeah, we did exciting, unbelievable, adrenaline-junkie activities during this first leg of the trip. But a large chunk of the heart and soul of this entire vacation lies between the pictures, between the landmarks, between the action. I hate to agree with another tired cliché, but it really is true: sometimes the journey is even better than the destination.

Stay tuned for the next installment of the Family Vacay Trilogy.

Until next time, friends.