Roam: Playa Flamingo

No question our crew was excited to hit the beach. Nik’s confidence in our ability to navigate the roads had never been better. On the road out of Monteverde, we spotted one really good-sized lizard on the dirt road. Again, it seemed that every small town has a church, a school, at least one soda (restaurant) and usually a soccer field. Is it required by law?

Once we returned to the Pan American Highway, there were great paved roads almost all the way to Playa Flamingo. We had one sketchy moment near Nicoya, where there was a busy bridge that was down to one lane due to road work. Unlike in the US, there was nobody there to direct traffic. We found ourselves stuck for a while facing down a long line of traffic coming the other way. Eventually there was a break and Nik lead the charge from our side across the bridge.

Our driving adventure for the day.

Daiquiri welcome to Flamingo Beach Resort

Perfect.

We spent four nights at Playa Flamingo, and it felt like a vacation within our vacation. We spent hours in the pool and the surf; the beach was just across a dirt road from the pool. October being the height of the rainy season, we did have our share of rain, but the benefit was that it was never terribly hot. We discovered that swimming in the pouring rain is really quite fun, and rain without cold is a pleasure we just don’t get to experience in Portland. We ventured out to nearby restaurants two nights, both right on the beach. The other two nights we enjoyed happy hour and dinner at the open air second floor resort bar overlooking the beach. Rough life!

Our two journeys out during these days of leisure were to nearby Brasilito to buy a boogie board, and to Liberia in search of a laundromat. We drove the streets of Liberia, a pleasant town, much smaller than San Jose, and saw many shoppers and uniformed students just out of school. No luck finding a lavanderia however, even with some vague directions from a policia turistica, so we returned to Playa Flamingo with our dirty clothes. After that we decided that washing clothes was overrated and made do with the cleanish clothes we had left. With the humidity, things take quite a while to dry so it did not seem feasible to wash things and hang them to dry. Erica had talked with an expat from New York who pointed out that living at the beach was hard on clothes, and we did notice a couple of our things starting to turn green, like everything else in Costa Rica.

After four lovely days, it was time to pack up again and move on down the coast.