The view of Playa Negra from Chris’s “shack.” It was another perfect day on the beach, in the pool, and around the card table!
As Mark noted in his Thanksgiving blog post, we’re in Tamarindo, a surfer town on the Pacific coast. The specific impetus for coming here was to join our old neighbors and Cambridge friends for Thanksgiving at a beach maybe 30 minutes south of here, but we also had time to spend in the town.
We stayed at a lovely little boutique hotel on a dirt road just a block off the beach; easy to get anywhere in town but enough of a separation from all the hubbub and surfer craziness. Interestingly, we spent a good deal of the time planning our next stops. It’s surprisingly complicated trying to figure out where to go, where to stay, what’s available, what TripAdvisor reviews have to offer and so on.
Lunch on the beach in Tamarindo. It’s surprising how little time we spent actually on the beach there, but lunch with a view like this can’t be bad.
And then, the day after Thanksgiving we got an email from friends saying they were coming to this very same area in mid-December. Would we still be around? So we rearranged things a bit and then went and found a two-bedroom villa we could rent for the week they’re here; thus the “Part I” in the title. We’re coming back in 10 days for some more beach time!
Besides our time hanging around Tamarindo and doing travel planning we spent one more day down at Playa Negra with the Cambridge crowd. We had so much fun it makes you wonder why we left Cambridge in the first place. (OK, that’s an exageration…)
Chris’s pool overlooking Playa Negra. Not a bad place to hang out.
Meanwhile, we’re off to the cloud forests in the middle of the country which should be quite the change.
We’ve found that the most efficient way to hop around the country is on these tiny planes that stop in small towns. This is the airport lounge in Tamarindo. Looks cozy, huh?