Trip to Manuel Antonio and Quepos

Hello everyone!

It's Monday, you know what that means...

weekend trip update time!

Well, the beginning and ending of the trip were a little rough...but other than that it was a great time!

On Friday after school we headed into Santa Anna to pick up the bus to San Jose. We were supposed to all meet at the bus stop a 3. Haha, well...by 3:10 all of the girls were there and we were only missing Sean. So we waited...and waited...and waited...and searched...and waited...until 3:45 when we said "screw him." Then, lo and behold, he was at the San Jose bus stop already when we got there. What a punk. It turned out alright though because we were able to hop on an earlier bus at 5.

I think we got into Quepos at about 9:30, with two things on our mind: hotel and food!

We found our place to stay fairly easily, and the owner of the place was really nice and very funny. When the 6 of us walked in he looked at Sean and said "What do you do with five girls?! I have one and that is enough?! All these women, they are a lot of trouble!" Haha...he was very cool. He also directed us to a restaurant that was still open. Our rooms were right off of the common area and we immediately met a Belgian and two Aussies who were hanging out. They came out to dinner with us to a BYOB place and the two Aussies told us their story about how they just decided in a couple of days that they wanted to do a world tour - they started off by going to the US and they are making their way down to South America; from there they are heading to Europe and then to Asia. I admire their ability to be so spontaneous - I'm not the pick up and go world backpacking type, haha!

After dinner we headed over to the small casino at the Best Western, just for a little fun. It was hilarious because for roulette they had like a BINGO ball setup, and they had a five card draw table (never seen that before!).

We turned in kinda early because we knew we wanted to get up early the next day to head to Manuel Antonio for the beach!

I think we got up somewhere around 8 in the morning, had a fantastic (and fairly cheap) breakfast at the hotel and then caught the bus to Manuel Antonio. There were a ton of market stands lining the street along the beach. The walk through the national park wasn't nearly the hike that Cahuita was - but along the way we saw four sloths, some capuccins, and an iguana :)

Third beach was absolutely gorgeous - and totally worth the $10 and walk to get there. It was in its own little cove right up against the edge of the jungle...beautiful. Unfortunately I was an idiot and left my camera at the hotel for the first half of the day, so you have to wait until I get pictures from the rest of the crew for me to add them here.

We stayed at Third Beach until about 1 - soaking up the sun, swimming in the ocean, floating with the greatest of ease (yay salt water)! There was quite the episode when a very large raccoonish animal started skulking around the edge of the beach looking for unattended food - well, he found one! And even though Brika started running up the beach at him, he made off with this woman's bag of bread. It was absolutely hilarious - definitely funniest home videos materal, I wish we had a video of it!

We headed back into town for a small lunch and a little bit of market shopping (I got two beautiful necklaces for $6) and then we caught the bus back to Quepos. It was miserably hot and the sun was ridiculous - I swear I was putting sunblock on every 20 minutes but my shoulders are toast!

We showered, changed, and freshened up to head back toward Manuel Antonio to go to El Avion for dinner. El Avion is a restaurant based off of an actual cargo plane that was left in Nicaragua,bought, and transported all the way to Manuel Antonio. The restaurant is right on the edge of a cliff and has a gorgeous view - so we got there by 5 to make sure we had a good spot for sunset watching. And - we definitely did! The sunset was absolutely gorgeous!




















After sunset watching and a fantastic dinner we went back to Manuel Antonio - our real reason for going back was because Sean and I had talked to a guy earlier about horseback riding in the morning and we told him we would come back to set up a reservation... we went all the way back and he wasn't there! :-/ So, what else would we do except for split some bottles of wine on the beach! Haha :) The six of us passed around some bottles under the stars while we waited for the next bus back to Quepos - it was pretty awesome. After we got back, Sean, Jillian and I went out for a night of dancing.

Sunday we got up for breakfast, walked around town for a while, had a huge lunch (burgers!) and then got on the bus back to San Jose at about 2:45. We got into SJ at about 6:30 and hopped on a bus to Santa Anna. The bus we took, however, was a bus that takes the calle vieja route - a route which no one in the group had gone on at night before - big mistake. We missed our stop, went all the way to the end of the route, had to get on another bus to take us back...it was a big mess! We didn't get back into Santa Anna until almost 8! (what should have been about a 40 minute bus ride turned into 1:30!) We grabbed some pizza for dinner in Santa Anna and then I headed back to Belen.

Well, that's about it. I wish I had more pictures to show you; I will add the pics of the beach as soon as I get them from the others. This weekend there are no big plans - we are staying in town for BINGO at PAS on Friday night (which is also Jillian's last night here!) And then there were 5... :(