Tuesday, March 5, 2013

Last Day in Lago Arenal !!

The full month has passed and we're in the midst of laundry, packing, cleaning, updating blog, changing stuff on Facebook, reading, and, oh the house where we're staying here had a buyer look at it today.  Busy, busy!!

Sunday we did make it to the feria even though it was extremely windy - I had a hard time standing still without being blown over, literally!!  And, it was "cold".  I guess that's a relative word but for up here it was "cold" and getting "colder" !!

We did purchase a bottle of organic Malbec wine, which is very good!! A banana bread, that we haven't touched yet. And each of us had a hamburger "slider".  Yumm!  The atmosphere was fun, upbeat, and not unlike a block party.  A terrific bi-monthly event in this area.

What was wonderful for me was to finally get to meet Michele Glenn.  Michele is the "go to" woman with all information about the area and she, in turn, emails out to everyone people's wants & needs and just general comings and goings information.  She'd been under the weather most of the time we've been here, so we just never connected.  Thank You Michele & Tim for the ride to the feria!!

We all bagged the hike in La Reserva because of the weather.  But, Mike did take a short walk down to the lake.  On his way down, unfortunately, he got "nipped" by a huge mean German Shepherd that we've gingerly been walking way around when we walk down to San Luis Hotel.  This time a car squeezed Mike a little too close to the pooch and it broke the skin on Mike's shin.  He's fine but it scared the hell out of him!!!  Lucky it was only a "nip".

Sunday evening we spent with Vern & Ohgina just sitting around talking and having our evening cocktails.  I had been nursing a headache all afternoon, so I wasn't very good company.  We did go out for pizza and saw evidence of the high winds that had already blown into the area.  See picture of restaurant roof!!  We went to another place down the road and actually got to enjoy another beautiful sunset while eating our dinner.




We did decide that we would make one last visit to the hot spring river on Monday.  Not a bad plan since the weather turned really foul!!!  We've had record high winds, rain, and cold temperatures for here.  What better way to spend a nasty, yucky day than sitting in the hot river nursing some soar bones and muscles while drinking wine & beer and nibbling on pineapple & cheese with good friends? Exquisite!!





Stopped at Equus for BBQ ribs & chicken on our way home.  Then a quick tour up a side road and a stop at Christina Glass'.  Christina is the "Dame" of the Lake.  She's lived here for 23 years, has a huge beautiful home of hundreds of acres overlooking the lake and owns cattle and horse farms.  A nice visit we had!!
This was just a little (HA!!) spider that we saw on the Eucalyptus tree!





So tomorrow morning we're off by bus at 9:30am and will arrive sometime around 3pm in Grecia.  The bus ride is a bit over 4 hours from here to Alajuela and then we catch another bus to Grecia.  Our new home is a 2br/1.5ba single family home on a dead end right on the outskirts of town within walking distance to everything.  Grecia is about 1 hour west of San Jose and has approximately 16,000 residents. 

We're looking forward to our dentist appointments Friday morning that I've had booked for quite a while.  We both are wanting to have some dental work done for a fraction of the cost in the states.  Will report on that later.

BUT, the final and biggest news of this last blog from Lake Arenal is that we DID it again!!!  Our monthly expenses for EVERYTHING came to $2,000!!  If you take out the 3 big "tourist" excursions we did (zipline, catamaran, and paid Hot Springs) but leaving in the 2 nights in a B&B and all of the meals we ate out that we might not have due to not being "home", then we only spent $1,600!!! 

All in all a VERY good start to Costa Rica!!

2 comments:

Allison said...

Being that I have been a dental hygienist for almost thirty years, I will be very interested in the dental report! Have a fun month in Grecia!

Anonymous said...

Very nice, you are very lucky to do what you want to do.