Category — travel

It’s been several weeks since I last posted a blog entry and for that I am most remiss. I guess I have been preoccupied and feeling a bit sorry for myself due to the fact that my exercise routine has been completely thrown off. In fact I have no reason to feel this way as I’ve had a couple of good weeks, if I don’t let the crap that floats around my mind spoil it for me. This will be a quick attempt to catch up from where I last left off to my current day status.

I went on vacation to Costa Rica with my family. We spent 8 days away from home, but discounting the two days worth of travel to get to and from our destination we has a total of 6 days to enjoy the country. Costa Rica is a very pleasant country and the people are very nice. Things are inexpensive, unrushed and everyone has a mellow pace about them.

The first place we went to was the Arenal Observatory Hotel. This is a hotel that overlooks the Arenal volcano, one of Costa Rica’s two active volcanos. We were lucky enough on one night to see the volcano partially erupt and spew molten chunks of lava down the side of it. We also went on several tours of the rain forest in this area and saw a beautiful waterfall and wild life of all sorts. We also went to a place called Baldi Hot Springs resort, which had a bunch of pools that were naturally heated from hot springs below the surface. We spent two nights in Arenal and on the third day left for Monteverdi, but not before stopping by the hanging bridges in Arenal. These are a series of suspension bridges, the type that swing and sway as you make your way across. It was scary but exciting to cross these bridges.

As we were driving to Monteverdi, we discovered the meaning of a Costa Rican massage. The roads in Costa Rica are largely unpaved and driving across the country can be considered a bit arduous at best. It was very hard to make good time due to the slow speeds you had to maintain of the rocky and rut filled roads. I will say that the smartest thing I did during the trip was to get the GPS option with my rental car as the roads were very poorly marked and you really had no idea how far away you were from place to place without it.

When we got to Monteverdi we took a tour of the rainforest at night. We were hoping to see a Sloth, but that was not to be, but did see plenty of tarantulas, birds, bats, moths and even an armadillo. The next day we went to the cloud forest where we saw lots of various birds and finally did see a Sloth. Sloths are such interesting creatures.

We didn’t stay in Monteverdi for long and headed the next day to a resort hotel in Quepos. We stayed in a beautiful hotel that overlooked Manuel Antonio National Park. On our first day in Quepos, we took a tour of the park and saw several sloths as well as many monkeys. We even came upon a deer that was friendlier than any pet dog you are likely to meet. After the tour through the park, we hung out on the beach and just played in the sand and surf until the sun started to set, whereupon we went back to our hotel to have a few drinks on the veranda bar and await for the daily arrival of the monkeys that are known to visit. By this time our children were very tired and they both fell asleep by around 6:30pm at night, so my wife and I just stayed in and brought in dinner from the hotel restaurant. This was just as well, since we got up early once again to go back to Manuel Antonio Park to take a day of relaxing on the beach. We relaxed on the sand and watched as dozens of monkeys and lizards scurried about amusing all of the tourists.

On our last full day in Quepos, we went on a Canopy Tour. This is where you ride along zip lines through the trees, swing on a Tarzan Swing a Rappel down from the top of tall trees. We all had a blast doing this and since it was just the four of us, plus just one other New Yorker, got through the canopy tour in about an hour. We were back at our hotel around noon, found a place to have lunch and then discovered a small, but beautiful beach outside of Quepos that only the locals visit. We spent out last several hours there playing in the sand and riding the waves until the sun set.

This is a very abbreviated version of our trip to Costa Rica, but I must say we had a good time. I would definitely recommend that you visit it at some point in your life, especially before it becomes all built up, thereby losing some of its rustic charm.

So I am not sure what I am feeling about this recent trip. I had decent time for a couple of nights and managed to get in a couple of swims. I tried to run a couple of times, but my leg was having none of it. The 60K that I have to do to for a NYC Marathon Qualifier is looking doubtful. I’ll try to do it anyway.

Not much happened while I was in Palm Beach. The weather was warm, the hotel was fabulous and the meetings ranged from boring to interesting. At one point I had trouble to stay away during the meetings because I was out past 3:30am the night before, getting drunk and acting foolish. I was told that one of the highlights of the trip for everyone was when I put on someone’s high heeled shoes and raced one of my gay colleagues down the hall. Some of the gay guys then started to wonder if perhaps I was bisexual. Fortunately, none of them started to hit on me.

A couple of other things happened that I will not recount here, since certain people from work that read my blog should not be exposed to it. My only real disappointment for the trip was not getting in a swim on the last day I was there. I wanted to swim in the ocean at least one time, but I never made it. I thought I would on the last day, since my flight was not until 8pm in the evening, but my last meeting ended early and I was able to make an earlier flight. I decided to give up the swim in order to get home to my children before they went to bed. As it turned out the earlier flight was an hour delayed and the limo service I booked to pick me up from the airport took an hour to make it from the JFK parking lot to the terminal at which I was waiting. But my kids were still awake so all ended well. I got home around 10:35 which didn’t give us much time to stay up, since my son had an 8am soccer game the next morning. This was pretty brutal as it was freezing cold outside in the morning and a stark contrast to the breezy high 70’s I was experiencing just a few hours earlier.