Last night we discovered that our favorite pizza spot, Pizzeria la Finca, also has locally brewed craft beer. I’m not much of a beer drinker, but Non and D were delighted. My dad asked what kind of beer they had and our waiter brought a selection of their craft brews from the cooler along with four chilled beer schooners. Jill and I had not intended to drink beer, but we thought it was easier to just choose a beer from the array on offer since the nice man had already gone to the trouble of bringing out the chilled beer receptacles.
I would not have guessed that they would have craft beer in Atenas, but now we can now strike lack of good beer off of the possible concerns for those visiting us. 🙂
My parents left this morning, after a thoroughly enjoyable visit. Because of the timing of their departure, Jill and I had previously let our Spanish school know we wouldn’t be in attendance today.
The airport dropoff was uneventful. Since we were out and about anyway, Jill and I decided to swing by PriceSmart in Santa Ana to restock some essentials, namely Ritz Crackers and International Delight hazelnut coffee creamer.
Jill checked the PriceSmart hours and we had about 45 minutes to kill until PriceSmart opened. We decided to use that time to drive in toward San Jose, since we’d never actually laid eyes on San Jose (other than from the window of an airplane). We got on Ruta 27, the autobahn of Costa Rica, and headed east toward the suburbs of Santa Ana and Escazu, which are 13 and 10 kilometers from the San Jose city center respectively. It was all skittles and beer until we got to Escazu. Then our 100 km/hour road ground to a halt. We were caught in the morning crush of people heading in to work in San Jose.
The crawl of traffic allowed Jill to document evidence of the existence of PF Chang’s and Chili’s in the greater San Jose metropolitan area.
Jill and I finally crested the hilltop that let us see down into the valley to San Jose. We got close enough to confirm that San Jose is crowded and sprawling and also that the traffic in San Jose is worse than the traffic in Austin (and that’s no small feat). We declared our mission accomplished and headed back from whence we came to wait for PriceSmart to open.
I’m glad we were early to PriceSmart because otherwise we would not have spent the time in the ante-chamber that allowed us to discover this gem…
That got us both chuckling for the next few minutes.
Knowing that our guests were leaving today, Jill booked light client loads earlier this week with the intention of catching up today. So it’s a heavy day for her. We don’t have any more visitors scheduled for a while, so we have moved Jill’s office to the guest bedroom on the main floor of the house. The guest bedroom doesn’t have the view of the open air office upstairs, but there’s less chance of wind buffeting making it hard to hear her clients and it’s climate controlled to keep her cool on warm days.
We’ve called an audible in the last 24 hours and booked a trip to Playas del Coco in the Guanacaste region of Costa Rica. We have not been to that region yet and are excited to explore it.
Tomorrow at 10AM Cesar is meeting us at the airport location of Adobe, where we will drop off the Hyundai and transition to Cesar’s Honda CR-V. We are excited to be back in the fold with Cesar. We will leave for Playas del Coco straight from there. It’s about a 3 1/2 our trek. Fortunately I have Jill as a co-pilot, which makes the long-ish trip over unfamiliar roads a little less intimidating.
We will enjoy two nights at the beach and then head back here on Sunday afternoon. There will likely be no blog updates until we return to HQ.
Jill and Todd in Costa Rica 