We planned a very last minute trip to Costa Rica in June. We wanted to go to a Spanish speaking country so Quinn could practice his newly learned Spanish speaking skills. We have to been to Jaco, which is in souther Costa Rica several times so this time we flew into Liberia which is in Northern Costa Rica.

A rainbow greeting as we flew over the coast line of Costa Rica heading inland.

I used a travel agent to plan all of our activities in Costa Rica. She also arranged all of our transportation as we didn’t want to rent a car. We flew in to Liberia Airport and had about a 3 hour drive to our first destination of La Fortuna. About 2 hours in our driver, Victor, stopped at Cafe Macadamia so we could use the facilities and get a snack. The cafe had a beautiful view overlooking lake Arenal.

Day 2: Our hotel has views of the Arenal Volcano and also has pools that are fed from the natural thermal springs, which was one of our deciding factors. There is so, so much to do in the La Fortuna area that we could have stayed busy all day, every day. But we wanted time for both adventure and relaxing, which our travel agent managed beautifully.

We had a slow start to our morning and then went to check on the various pools. First up, the Thermal Pool. It was a pretty warm day and this pool felt hot — not so great on a hot day. But it had a swim up bar and nice shade.

On to the cooler pools, which felt just right! You can see the cloud covered volcano in the background (hit the right arrow to scroll through pics).

There were also some more ‘natural’ adult-only spas near the swimming pool.

We had lunch at the pool and then went back to the room to get ready for our first adventure. Don and Quinn are matching.

We took a river rafting trip where we gently floated down a river checking out wildlife and local fauna.

We saw bats, Jesus Christ Lizards (they can walk on water), crocodiles, and howler monkeys who were not at all happy with us and made it known. Our guide was incredibly knowledgable.

After the rafting trip we had a chocolate tasting which was fascinating. We tasted the raw cocoa pod, the roasted cocoa pod, and then the sweetened chocolate. On the way back to our hotel the guide had heard that there was a sloth in a tree by the side of the road so we stopped and saw a sloth and her baby. When we returned back to our hotel, we had a sloth on our bed!

An interesting side note of this trip is that there was a young woman travelling alone and one of the guides, Bryan, took a liking to her. These two had obvious chemistry and Quinn got to see Bryan give a master class in how to flirt without it being annoying or too much. Quinn was fascinated by the exchange and noticed subtle little moves that Bryan made.