After four weeks in sunny Playa Potrero, on Costa Rica’s Nicoya Peninsula, we loaded up the rental car and headed inland. It was time to get back on the road. We had been pretty sedentary, taking it easy in order for Heather’s left foot to heal following surgery back on Christmas Eve to repair a broken bone. One week into our stay in Potrero, she got the okay to start using the pool in our complex. The following week she was given permission to put weight on the foot, while wearing the boot, and gleefully discarded the crutches she had used for the past month. The last hurdle was to get an x-ray at a local clinic (we used the inaptly named Beachside Clinic in Huacas, located eight miles from the water), send the results to her doctor in San Jose and hopefully get the ‘all-healed’ response from him. That’s exactly what happened Wednesday morning and minutes later we were on the road, headed across the country from the Pacific coast over to the Caribbean side. We left under a cloudless sky, the heat already building towards its typical 90-degree high. We left behind the dry, brown vegetation of the Nicoya and pointed the car towards the cloud-covered mountains of the interior. By the time we reached our mid-point destination, the jungle town of Sarapiqui, where we would stop for the night, the landscape had turned lush and green, a light rain was falling, the temperature had dropped into the low 70’s, and Heather was wearing every piece of warm clothing she had.

Sarapiqui is known for its access to great hiking trails, an abundance of birdlife, hot springs and a multitude of raftable rivers. Given this was Heather’s first full day without her walking boot, we had to forego the trails and other outdoor adventures and content ourselves sitting outside the room of our lodge, watching the birdlife that flitted amongst the trees in the lodge’s expansive courtyard and listening to the frogs and cicadas fill the air with their music. As it grew dark we headed over to the dining area where our hosts, newly arrived from Spain, fed us dishes inspired by their homeland, including chicken braised with vegetables, steamed yucca, salad and a lemon-infused rice pudding, accompanied by a luscious Spanish red wine. We made it an early night, tired from our five-hour drive, and eager to get a good nights sleep before finishing the trip to the coast.

I can’t write enough good things about Potrero. We picked it mainly because it offered good-value accommodation near a nice beach. Our little villa had access to a beautiful lap pool, I could walk to the black sand beach in two minutes (I did enjoy the beach a bit more than Heather could), the water was calm enough that I could paddle (early in the morning before the breeze picked up), the town and beach are much less crowded than the more famous Playa Flamingo, just to the south, and for a small beach town, Potrero had a remarkable amount of fantastic restaurants, from little sodas serving typical Costa Rican dishes, beach-front restaurants offering fresh seafood and live music to an Italian restaurant that offered some of the best pizza and pasta we’ve ever had. While Heather’s injury prevented her from enjoying a lot of what Potrero and the surrounding area had to offer, we expect we’ll return at some time in the future. But for now, we’re looking forward to all the Caribbean coast has to offer (spoiler alert: sloths).