Bumpity road

I had been keeping my eye out for the tell-tale post for weeks. The announcement that the next arribada was happening in Ostional. Once I saw it, Dave and I put our heads together and decided we needed to drop everything and leave the next day. Seeing the turtles arrive to lay their eggs was one of the top things on his list of things to do in Costa Rica. The turtles arrive in sync with the full moon and the event only lasts for about a week. It can sometimes be tricky to get to the small town of Ostional due to weather and road conditions so we saw our opportunity and decided to jump on it. This was Wednesday. We took the kids out of school and hit the road Thursday morning. But there was one important stop we needed to make first…a trip to the llantera (tire shop). One of our tires had been slowly losing pressure so we knew we needed to get it checked out before taking a road trip. Tessie holds in her hand the staple that was in our tire.

This guy was awesome and the service only cost about $6.50 or 4000 colones.

We were very glad we got the tire fixed because the road to Ostional is not smooth….

My maternal grandfather used to play a game with us he called ‘bumpity road.’ He would set all of the couch cushions in his house on the floor in a line so my sister and I could jump and bounce along them. We thought it was the most fun ever. Well, decades later this phrase came to mind as we traveled for 20 miles on a dirt road full of potholes. Another phrase that came to mind was ‘marmots in the road.’ This was a game I would play with the kids in my van when I was a driver and instructor for an environmental center in Alaska. When we were on the home stretch of dirt road to the center I would swerve back and forth just a little to everyones delight and yell ‘marmots in the road!!!!’ It felt like Dave was playing this game for an hour straight.

We made it!

The Rio Ostional divides the very small town of Ostional from the much more popular beach town of Nosara. It is the only river on the route without a bridge for cars. We had been warned about this river crossing and were not keen to do it. At first we planned to stay overnight in Nosara, but decided we really didn’t want to cross the river multiple times, especially not at 4:30 in the morning. So, we decided to stay in a basic place north of the river and it turned out to be a great choice because we got to explore the small beach community of San Juanillo instead.

We did watch some locals cross however!