Costa Rica!

Like I said in the last post, Nate and I got to go to Costa Rica for a week.   It was such an amazing place to visit!  It was the perfect baby-moon before our baby girl arrives in about 2 months!  We feel so blessed we were able to take a week off from real life and enjoy some time away (thank you Mom, Dad, and Samantha for watching our boys!)

Over a year ago, Nate's work proposed this couples retreat for anyone that met their goals for the year.  Nate worked really hard all of 2012 and qualified us for this trip!  All those long hours at work totally paid off!  :)  Last year we went on a Caribbean cruise and this year we got to go to Costa Rica so we have definitely been spoiled lately! We are really good friends with a lot of the people in Nate's office so getting to go to these awesome places with them makes these trips so fun.

In Costa Rica, we stayed at the Los Suenos Marriot resort on the Herradura Beach.  My pictures do not do justice to how gorgeous this place is!  The best part of the resort is the amazing pool area.  We spent a lot of time there because it was SO hot and humid.

We flew into San Jose, Costa Rica late on a Sunday night and took an hour and a half bus ride to the resort along the Pacific Coast.  We got to stay there for five whole days before heading back on Saturday.  For my own memory, here's the breakdown of what we did each day:

MONDAY:

The first day we were there, we took a taxi to Jaco which is a little town about 10 minutes from the resort. Jaco has tons of shopping and restaurants right next to the beach.  Jaco Beach has really big waves and Nate and the other guys we were with sure had fun playing in the water!  After hanging out at the beach for a while, we ate rice and beans for lunch (the staple foods down there) and then we found this local smoothie place with the best fruit smoothies ever.  Nate's strawberry soursop smoothie was especially amazing and we made it a priority to go back there again for more before we left  After we spent a while in Jaco, we headed back to the resort to swim and hang out.  Nate played water volleyball with a bunch of the other guys for a while and Nate showed off his serious volleyball skills.  Who knew?

That night we met up with some of our friends for dinner.  Next to our resort was this fancy marina with high-end shopping and restaurants and a beautiful pier along the water.  So we walked over there for dinner and ate at this yummy Italian restaurant.

TUESDAY:

Nate and I decided to spend the next morning hanging out at the resort.  We ate at the Marriot's breakfast buffet (like we did every other morning) and we filled up on fresh fruit, waffles, pastries, eggs, bacon, and lots of other yummy breakfast foods.  We looked forward to that delicious buffet each morning and were sure happy the price was included in our hotel stay because it was $55 a morning if not! Later on, we hung out by the pool and walked along Herradura Beach. We really enjoyed our time just lounging by the pool, reading books, and swimming around.  It felt good to have this week to relax and have no other cares in the world!

(I especially liked lounging around in this hammock looking out at the ocean until I was ambushed by these iguanas.)

We also made sure to get a belly shot to show our baby girl that she (sort of) got to travel to Costa Rica too.  So here I am at about 28 weeks:

In the afternoon, Nate went on a Zip-lining tour.  The locals call them canopy tours because you literally glide right between the huge, lush trees in the middle of the rainforest.  Being pregnant, I was not allowed to go on the zip-lines (which was okay with me cause I am deathly afraid of heights!) so I stayed back at the pool while Nate went. He loved it! I think it was the highlight of his trip.  He went on 12 different zip-lines from the top of the mountain all the way down.  And he even went on one little section upside down and backwards!  That definitely gave him a good adrenaline rush!

That night, we went over to the Marina again and tried a different restaurant called the Hook Up.  And after dinner we met in the lobby for a good old-fashioned game night.  

WEDNESDAY:

The next morning we woke up early for a fun excursion on some outriggers.  We paddled the outriggers from one beach to another private beach for some awesome snorkeling.  We hiked down the beach a ways for the perfect spot to snorkel.  We saw so many cool looking fish and coral reefs.  Sadly, I forgot our underwater camera that day so we didn't get any pictures.  Then we had lunch on the beach and then loaded back up in the outriggers and paddled all the way back.  We did a couple of races with the other outriggers and even though our team tried hard, we never won.  But we did get some sore arms and shoulders from trying!  And please notice Nate's beautiful hat in these pictures.  He didn't want to get sunburned too bad so he wore my floppy hat for the day. :)

THURSDAY:

After a long excursion on Wednesday, we took it easy on Thursday again.  Most of the other people we were with did too.  We all wanted to enjoy the resort as much as we could.  We swam, relaxed by the pool, and played more volleyball.  That night, we had a fancy dinner with all 25 couples there with us at a place called The Galeon.  Nate and I don't usually eat at super expensive restaurants so we felt a little guilty that our meal ended up costing somewhere close to $180 for the two of us.  But luckily his work treated us to the dinner and we didn't have to pick up the tab :) 

FRIDAY:

On our last day there, we wanted to see as much as we could of Costa Rica so we rented a car for the day.  Travis and Jessie rode with us and Ashley and Jake took another car and we drove all the way to Puntarenas.  On our way, we stopped at the "Crocodile Bridge" for some pictures.  We walked along this narrow bridge to look down below at about 30 crocodiles just lounging around. Some local guy sold us a dead chicken for $4 and we threw little bits of this dead chicken into the water to see what the crocs would do.  It was so entertaining to watch.  As soon as we'd throw a piece down, all of the crocodiles around start moving around and fighting for the chicken. And the vultures would join in and try to steal the chicken pieces too.  It was pretty crazy to watch. 

After crocodile bridge, we drove to this aquarium in Puntarenas that we were told was "really cool" but it ended up being pretty lame.  The coolest thing to see were the crocs up close and the turtles, but that was about it.  There were a few fish to see too but nothing cooler than what we saw snorkeling.  The aquarium was definitely not as cool as it was made out to be.

Even though the aquarium was pretty lame and it was incredibly hot that day, we still managed to have fun there.

(Nate sure makes a creepy mermaid, huh?!)

Jake and Ashley's review on the place:

After driving around Costa Rica and visiting Puntarenas, we loaded back up in the car and headed back to Jaco Beach.  Nate and the other guys played in the waves for a while ago but the waves were HUGE so they didn't go out too far.  Then we got to witness the most beautiful sunset right there on the beach.  And we did not waste the opportunity for some sunset pics.

After soaking in the last few minutes of the Costa Rican sun, we hit up the delicious smoothie place again for our strawberry soursop smoothies and then went back to the resort for a late night swim.  We woke up at 4am the next morning to head back home and that was the end of our trip!  We had such an amazing vacation there and feel so blessed we got to go!

And another awesome thing about this trip is that we had a long layover in Dallas on the way there and on the way back.  And since Nathan and Danae now live in Dallas - we were able to see them!  On the way down, Nathan picked us up at the airport and we got to see their new beautiful house.  And on the way back, Nathan, Danae, and their girls picked us up at the airport and we went out to lunch at a yummy restaurant called Twisted Root in downtown Dallas.  It worked out great to fly through Dallas so we could see them! That was an added plus of our trip!