January 31
Hola from Liberia Costa Rica. After two uneventful flights, we landed in Liberia mid-afternoon. The first adventure, or should we say misadventure, came when Lynn missed the last stair on the way down to the immigration area. In her defense, all the stairs were white tile except for the last one which was black tile….the exact same color as the floor. Thinking it was the floor, she was totally unprepared for another step. She landed ON HER KNEES (ouch) in a perfect kneeling position. It was actually quite graceful. The good news is that while her knees are a bit sore, there doesn’t appear to be any serious damage….not even a little limp.
The next adventure was figuring out the money. It’s been quite awhile since we’ve had to deal with anything other than Euro, which is pretty simple, so it took about several minutes with a calculator to figure out the conversion. Turns out it’s very similar to the conversion Lynn dealt with when she lived in Italy before the Euro. The Italian Lira, or mil, as they called it had bills in the thousands. That’s also the case with the Colon. We got about $175 from the ATM and got 20,000 colon. We finally figured out there are about 600 colon per dollar. It will take some getting used to but we should be fine in a day or so.
Our third adventure today was taking the bus into Liberia. We’re staying at the Hilton Garden Inn at the airport and the only way to get “downtown” was either the city bus for $1.60 for the two of us or a $20 cab ride. Obviously we choose the bus. It was actually very easy and we didn’t have any difficulty at all. There’s really not much in Liberia so we walked around for a little while then had some dinner…our first authentic Costa Rican dinner. Peter had what amounted to a tomato and lettuce sandwich on toast with a thin slice of chicken in there someplace. Lynn’s dinner was way more interesting a piece of chicken in a delicious broth, rice and some cold pasta. It was quite good.
After taking the bus back to the hotel we stopped for happy hour at the hotel bar before heading up to the beautiful, upgraded one bedroom suite. Lynn has diamond status at Hilton so we usually score some good upgrades.
Since we were up at 3:30am (eastern) it will probably be an early night. Tomorrow we’re taking a shuttle to Neuvo Arenal where we’ll spend a week. Talk with you from the mountains.
Love us….