Our Costa Rica Family Adventure

Every big trip has a "we're really doing this" moment, and ours came a full two days before we ever set foot in Costa Rica. Between our flights out of Missoula, a layover in Chicago, and a red-eye connection through Charlotte, our family landed at our jumping-off hotel with a grand total of about three hours of sleep between us. If you've ever tried to keep two kids upright and pleasant through a triple-flight travel day, you already know: we were running on airport coffee and pure momentum by the time we finally touched down in San José.

The good news is that Costa Rica has a way of waking you back up. Immigration and baggage claim were fairly painless, aside from the long lines, and the second we walked out through customs, we spotted Alfonso — our driver for the next three hours — holding a sign with our name on it, unbothered by the small army of unofficial taxi drivers working the crowd around him.

The drive from San José to La Fortuna is a solid three hours without traffic, but we weren't lucky enough to avoid it. About an hour in, Alfonso pulled us off at Mi Rancho, a little roadside restaurant with genuinely good food and, more importantly to our kids, a resident toucan who wanders the dining room like he owns the place. He is apparently famous for hopping table to table and stealing food directly off people's plates.

He flew right up to ours, inspected the situation, and declined to steal a single bite — which Brierty took as a personal insult. No toucan heist for us. Maybe next time.

By the time we rolled into La Fortuna, traffic had stretched our three-hour drive closer to five, and the kids had given up and fallen asleep somewhere around hour four. Nobody complained about that part.

We checked into Lomas del Volcán a little frazzled and a lot excited, and the hotel did exactly what a good first-night hotel should do: handed us welcome drinks, loaded our luggage onto a golf cart, and drove us to our room like we were VIPs instead of four extremely tired travelers. The kids, at least, thought the golf cart alone made the whole trip worth it.

We had just enough energy left for one thing: a night swim. The hotel has a few pools, and we picked the heated one, which we had almost entirely to ourselves under a light rain. About halfway through, an enormous bat joined the party, swooping low over the water to pick off bugs drawn in by the pool lights - even swimming in Costa Rica is an adventure! 

We toweled off, collapsed into bed, and were able to catch a few hours of sleep before our early morning adventure began.