day 1

Talk about a long day of travel. We stayed in Atlanta for the night and got up at 4:00 so we could be at the airport at 5 and on our way hopefully by 7:00. Everything went smooth. We had a lay over in Ft Lauderdale, Fl and then on to San Jose. From San Jose it was a 3 1/2 hour bus ride to Hacienda Baru where we were spending our nights in Costa Rica... The drive was immensely beautiful... in spite of being exhausted we were really beginning to get a taste of what we were in for...

Here is a photo from our plane just before landing...


We stopped along the way for some lunch and had empanada's and fried plantains... the place we stopped also had an area to observe the rojo river and crocodiles...










We were not disappointed when we arrived at the villas... we were tired, but soooo happy... The place was beautiful and this is the view from my porch...




We arrived at the waterfall villas too late to have dinner there because they cook everything fresh each day from scratch, so we ended up getting a cab (our main method of transportation while there) into town and had dinner at a local diner/hotel called tortilla flats... this was our first real experience of trying to convert USA dollars into Colones. Not an easy task after having been in route for 16 hours, but the food was delicious and our waitress understood our plight and was so kind and helped us figure it out. The hardest part of being there was NOT the language barrier, but the conversion of money and trying to figure out how much everything cost.

We were so wiped out that by the time our bellies were full we were all about to fall asleep at our table, so we headed back to the waterfall villas for our first night in Costa Rica. I've never slept in a bed that was more comfortable than my own, but the bed in my room was perfect every night...