saltwatersteve.com/travel

I woke up STILL feeling kind of funky, though no fevery feelings.
Had our very basic complimentary continental breakfast, made some phone calls to PN Santa Rosa, and to Toyotarent. Apparently since I didn’t pick up the car last night, they deleted my reservation, but that’s all good, I got it for quite a bit cheaper just going to the office. Got Margita (our mini-landcruiser) and we were on our way. Stopped by the grocery store to get some supplies, then hightailed off to the NW corner of the country, about 4 hrs away. The roads were just fine, nicely paved, until we got into the Guanacaste region, where the CA1 was a patchwork quilt of potholes and road patches.The speed limits would often switch between 60 and 80 kph 4 times in 5 minutes. On the way, I caught my first ever glimpse of the Pacific Ocean. We got to PN Santa Rosa, paid for our camping fees, then went up the road almost to the Nicaraguan border to the town of La Cruz. After stopping to fill our fuel bottle with diesel, we drove all the way up the main drag, parked by a school and went to have a bite to eat in the restaurant across the street. The guy said we could sit anywhere but was suprised we didn’t want to sit upstairs. We asked why and he said there was a view so we said why not and lugged our extra 80 lbs of shit up the stairs, out of view of Margita, and we were treated to an amazing panorama of the peninsulas reaching out into the water and we got to see the sunset over the Pacific Ocean, my first. Meghan had pescado frito, and I had arroz con pollo. Meghan learned her lesson w/ the fish as it was served w/ the head and skin on, bones and all, similar to my pescado caribeno I’d had on La Islita (a.k.a. Little Corn). Arroz con pollo was exellente. During dinner we made an observation about the tourism industry in Costa Rica. It’s funny how when gringos come to eat in Costa Rica they change the music from pleasant latin music to the one shitty old 80’s easy listening American CD they have. Well wait, stairway to heaven and a couple of beatles tunes were on there too, so nevermind, but this wasn’t the first or even second place we’ve eaten where this has happened. I need to lean more spanish. We got back to PNSR and we had the place to ourselves. We drove around a bit and i wanted to see how off road capable Margita was - I wanted to drive down the road to Playa Naranjo, a road that, depending on which book you read is either closed or impassable during the wet season. After talking to a ranger, who kept saying it was very ugly, we tried it out. First mud pit no problem, second, no problem, third was really sketchy. Then we encountered the pit of despair. So we tuned back and camped in the SR area de acampar. In the process I managed to drive into a picnic table, causing some body damage to Margita (which hadn’t been in our posession for a whole day yet), which was ironic because I chickened out on the naranjo 4wd trail fearing damage to the rental car. Camping there was hot. Very humid but since you had to put on the rain fly, there was no breeze either. Like trying to sleep in a sauna with a nylon fabric roof in the rain.