We were up with the roosters in Puerto Viejo. We had to truck it from the Caribbean coast back to the interior of Costa Rica to pick up Lauren’s dad from San Jose airport.

We waved goodbye to the Atlantic knowing soon enough we would be seeing the waters of the Pacific. One of my favorite parts about Central America is you can drive from ocean to ocean in one day. Bored of the Caribbean? Let’s check out the Pacific!

After we grabbed Lauren’s dad we headed out to the Pacific. First order of business, Lunch and drinks!

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Now that Laurens Mom and sister have arrived we had some exploring to do! We loaded up the rental Toyota Rav4 with all our gear and hit the road. Our first destination was the Monteverde cloud forest up in the mountains. We waved goodbye to Brad and Sheena, plugged the coords into the GPS and away we went.

It was a beautiful paved highway drive back towards the northern side of Costa Rica. After about an hour we turned off the highway and started down some smaller paved roads, which gave way to a potholed road, which eventually gave way to straight dirt track. Ahhh… GPS how I love the adventures you take us on.

The dirt track took us up into the mountains through some fairly decent offroading action for a rental Toyota Rav4. I had to use 4×4 twice to get up some steep skree track. Banging up this rough and rugged road we successfully scared the crap out of Lauren’s Mom who kept mumbling something about a “deposit”…

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Everybody settle in for a little BACK-STORY TIME. AKA Blah, blah, blah… Where are stinkin pictures?

The 4Runner has been acting up since around Lago Ometepe back in Nicaragua. For some reason she seems to have no gusto any more. I can’t seem to rev her past 3000 RPM while driving down the highway. While cruising along I could pin the pedal and the motor would bog out and run like crap. If I geared down and slowly creeped the pedal up above 3000K it seemed fine. To me and my research this sounded like a TPS (Throttle Position Sensor). We decided to go on a parts hunt in San Jose. This turned out to be a waste of time. We jump from used auto parts, to the dealer, to a new auto parts house. I found a generic O2 sensor but they had no specific 22RE parts that I could find. Oh well, She still runs, Don’t she? I’ll worry about it later.

With Laurens Mom and sister arriving to Costa Rica soon our plan was to hunker down and stay a few nights near the San Jose Airport.

We found a cheap motel in Heredia and went inside to pay for the room.

We came back outside and see some old man walking towards us with our fridge in his hands. I am runnin over yelling at him wondering how I can justify punching a Grandpa in the face when all of the sudden the owner of the motel comes out yelling that this old guy is actually his friend.

It turns out some young punk tried to run off with our fridge while we were inside paying for the room. Luckily these two old
timers saw it all go down and karate-kicked the kid who then dropped our fridge and ran off. +1 for Old Man Strength and +2 for
not having to fight a senior citizen. He probably would have kicked my ass anyway…

All that said and done we moved everything of value inside the motel room just in case. We got on facebook and sent out some feelers to see who was in the area.

Turns out one of our blog followers and a fellow expeditionportal.com member, Erick, lived right there in Heredia about 10 minutes from our motel. We met up later that night for some beers. We got to practice our spanish (which gets better and better with each drink) and listen to some awesomely horrible spanish karaoke. I considering singing those Tico’s a rendition of “The Gambler” they would never forget. Even if they wanted to…

Erick and his sweet Nissan pickup.

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Getting to far behind on our blog! It’s amazing how fast you can get behind on these things. I go back and look at the photos on our Facebook (PS: You have “LIKED” us on facebook, haven’t you!?) and it seems like years ago when we first arrived in Costa Rica. Then I look at the date and realize it has only been 1 damn month. Crazy! We are now actually in Colombia, so much has happened since then. Time to get writing and get you guys caught up!

We said goodbye to Nicaragua and crossed the border at Penas Blancas. Quite an unorganized and chaotic border. Not as many touts and pushers bothering you but no real rhyme or reason to the whole process. Lots of running around chasing down random officials in blue shirts trying their damn best to hide from these gringos who need an exit stamp! It was a literal game of “Where’s Waldo?” as we went from blue-shirted man to blue-shirted man crazily waving our paperwork in their faces. We finally found Waldo hiding out under a palm tree WAYYYYY off in the far corner of the parking lot. Clearly hiding.

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