Last Days of Our Costa Rican Adventure

February 15

After a day of roaming around San Jose we’re back in our room for our last night in Costa Rica. Yesterday was pretty low key. We drove the 3 hours to San Jose where we checked into the Doubletree before returning the rental car. It was an uneventful, but interesting trip. The scenery was beautiful as we drove through the mountains and Peter saw a very large group of crocs in a river bed. Lynn preferred to do some last minute shopping but the pictures are pretty impressive. Here’s a video he took of these guys.  https://youtu.be/-HDqgLBv86A

Once he got his fill of very large reptiles, he joined Lynn at the shop. He’s been looking at hammocks since we got here so we finally bought one. It’s a 2-person hammock with 3-foot pieces of wood at each end. The shop owner wrapped it up for us but we’re not exactly sure how we’re going to get it home. It won’t fit in the overhead and we’re not sure if it will make it in checked luggage as it is an easily “pilferable” item. Hopefully the SWA luggage guys are honest and we’ll see it again in Tampa. We’re also not sure where we’re going to hang it once we get home. We can buy a hammock stand but we’re thinking of putting up a pergola in the backyard so that would be a good place for it. We’ll come up with something.

Lunch at the Doubletree pool

The Doubletree is a very nice hotel and it’s great to sleep in a king size bed again after the full size one in Quepos. By the time we got settled and had lunch by the pool it was almost 3pm so we decided just to chill the rest of the day.

National Theater

Today we went into San Jose for the day. There’s not too much there but we enjoyed a tour of the National Theater which was beautiful. It’s relatively small, only holding about 750 people, but it is filled with beautiful architecture, paintings and statues.

There is one ceiling paining in the meeting hall that is very cool. The woman in the picture almost seems alive as her head appears to turn to follow as you walk. Seriously, when we were standing on the right side of the painting, she was looking right at us. As we started slowly walking to the left her head appeared to turn and by the time we got to the other side of the room, she was looking at us full face. It was pretty amazing.

Painting of woman with moving head. The head was facing the other way when we stood to the right.
In the gathering room.
Theater lobby
Inside the Cathedral; simple but beautiful

We also stopped in at the Cathedral and another smaller church. Compared to the churches in Europe these were very simple, but they were beautiful in their simplicity.

San Jose has every U.S. fast food place you can think of, but we decided to eat with the locals at a cafeteria style restaurant. Lynn didn’t care for the yellow dish (still not sure what it is) but everything else was delicious.

Delicious lunch except the yellow stuff; not sure what it was but I didn’t like it.
Entrance to Chinatown

After lunch we wandered around some more, stumbling into Chinatown. It’s only about 2 blocks long and other than the arch and balloons left over from Chinese New Year, there wasn’t much there either.

It took about 30 minutes to walk back to the bus stop for the 30-minute ride back to the hotel. We plan to eat dinner at the hotel as there’s not much within walking distance and the shuttle only goes to the airport. So, it will be another quiet night but that’s okay as we have a long day tomorrow. We’re taking a shuttle at 6:30am for our 9am flight. We stop in Houston and again in Raleigh (but don’t change planes) before landing in Tampa at 8:45pm. Not sure why we booked a 2-stop flight probably less expensive. We’re sure it sounded like a good idea at the time but now we’re wishing we were getting to Tampa a little sooner as we’ve got 3 days of driving ahead of us.

We’ll touch base again when we’re back in Florida. Have a great night everyone.

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