Costa Rica Family Trip - Day 1

We were so excited for our first international trip with the boys!  Costa Rica came to the top of the list of places that were awesome, safe, had a cultural component, and had a beach component so it checked all the boxes.  Additionally, Tara and I had visited a bit more than 15 years ago with a small group of her middle school students for 10 days and were blown away by how cool the country is.

We got up for an early morning flight through Dallas and then took a connecting flight to Liberia, Costa Rica.  This picture above was pretty awesome as we flew over a volcano somewhere in Nicaragua en route.

Liberia is a fairly small airport with only a few terminal gates and then you exit almost straight down into this large, old, wide-open baggage claim area.  After picking up your bags, you have to work through their customs where we ended up in this long snaking line.  Gavin was certainly psyched to be there and after about 45 minutes, we were free to roam.

As travelling is fairly stressful for me in new places, I was a bit nervous as we tried to figure out how to get to the car rental place.  We did tons of research about the best deals and what was the most reliable and actually found this place way off the airport called Adobe Car Rentals.  After a bit of waiting, we found this small van going back and forth to their off-site rental place that ended up being about 20 minutes away from the airport.  Picking up some conversation with one other couple in the van, it turns out this place is super legit and way better than any of the big-name rental companies for Costa Rica...so we were in luck!

Once we picked up the car, it was about an hour's drive over to Tamarindo, which was the small beach town we rented an Airbnb in for the week.  The drive turned out to be fairly straight forward and we just slowly wound through the countryside on these mostly two-laned roads.  One interesting/funny experience on the drive was in the town of Belen (if I remember correctly), we met some nice heavily armed police officers who flagged us over to the side of the road out of a line of cars and asked us, obviously all in Spanish, if we felt like donating some money to the local police effort.  After a few back-and-forth glances between Tara and I, we decided we definitely would like to donate some money after which they quickly let us back on our way.  Another 40 minute down the road and we rolled into Tamarindo just before sunset.  The kids were practically jumping out of the car to check into our place, and we made it just in time to see the last glimpses of light from our porch looking down towards the ocean.

Not to be deterred, they quickly threw on some swimming trunks and we ran down the two blocks to the beach from our place.  The light was fading quickly, but they were already loving it.  We just had this feeling that it would be a pretty epic trip we were about to experience.

One last picture from the beach looking South across the Playa Tamarindo shore before heading back up to our place to try to seek out some food for dinner.