Chilling in Costa Rica

While leather-jacket Fall ceded to wool-coat Fall back in New York, I spent the last week in a completely different sartorial state of mind – tank tops and cut-offs in Costa Rica. 

I was there with my in-laws – parents and brothers and sisters and nieces and nephews and a boyfriend who feels like family. There were 12 of us in all, sharing a rental with a view of the ocean on the country’s northwest coast. 

Family vacations like this require a recalibration of sorts, and it always takes me a beat to adjust. One of my toxic traits is that I think of travel as a challenge – to accumulate as many experiences as possible, as quickly as possible. Bonus points if those experiences are food, fashion, or literature-related. Double bonus points if they’re photogenic. 

I also live my day-to-day life at great speed – it’s the sort of life where efficiency is so necessary that I’ve turned it into a dogma of sorts. Productivity as a point of pride. But in the context of a tropical holiday, that’s like turning off an 80 mph highway onto a county road – and then being disappointed when that road doesn’t have a good bookstore or cute vintage shop. 

So while the others fell in step with our environment instantly – treasuring the freedom of formless days and understanding, innately, that the time together is the whole point, I pined and languished a bit, inventing errands, asking about activities, and otherwise casting about for some structure. 

Then, eventually, I got over myself. 

And got down to the business of enjoying the trip. 

So what DID we do?

We stuck close to home in Guanacaste, largely limiting our encounters with the area’s deeply pitted dirt roads to three-minute golf cart rides down to the beach or fifteen-minute rides into Playa del Coco, the nearest town. 

We became one-week-only regulars at the local beachside restaurant, Father Rooster, where the food was just fine but the drinks were excellent, and the service unhurried in a way that somehow felt relaxed rather than infuriating. There was live music one night – lots of Fleetwood Mac and Wilson Phillips covers, plus the occasional Whitney Houston high note – and Kip was so hypnotized by it that he parked himself in front of the band’s singer for most of the evening.

We passed long mornings and afternoons in our villa’s pool, where the kids played elaborate and endless games of monster, slowly exhausting one adult after another with their boundless energy. 

We did one proper excursion, breaking into two groups – an adventurous group that hiked around waterfalls and peered into long-dormant volcanos, and the traveling-with-small-kids group, which learned how to make chocolate, danced with butterflies, and nearly got peed on by flying monkeys at a nearby adventure park. 

I don’t, after a week, have any handle on the essential nature of this country, or at least none deeper than that slogan, Pura Vida, that’s a constant on everything from souvenir magnets to street art. There seem to be a lot of ex-pats here – liver-spotted white folks who fall somewhere in between tourist and local, swaying alongside me to Hold On at Father Rooster. Meanwhile, my Spanish is so shaky and my sunburn so fresh that there’s no chance anyone would mistake me for anything other than the interloper I am.

So Costa Rica continues to elude me. And the nearest bookstore – 90 minutes away in Tamarindo – remains unexplored. All the more reason to come back. But maybe to Nosara next time.