#CostaRicaorbust2014

We recently got back from a 9 day trip to Costa Rica.  We planned the trip to celebrate our 5 year anniversary.  Brad's parents agreed to take both Cooper and Bennett, which we are so thankful for!!!  My siblings ended up coming along too.  We had been talking about the trip, and they mentioned how awesome it sounded, and it all blossomed from there...

Here you can see our 6 big luggage bags, plus we each had a backpack too.  It was not easy fitting that all into our 7-seater SUV with hardly any trunk space....

Excited to go!

We arrived in San Jose, a major city in Costa Rica, around midnight.  We stayed in a hotel near the airport before heading out to our destination, Manuel Antonio, the next morning.

Beatiful sights along the way to Manuel Antonio!

We arrived at our house!  Our room had its own balcony with a hammock!  You can kind of see our private pool on the deck below (behind Brad).  This house had 4 bedrooms that were pretty spaced out (all on separate floors), and each with their own bathroom.  So nice!

Trying the local cuisine!  Everyone was excited about the plentiful seafood options (except me and Casey that is).  :)

Manuel Antonio had lots of great restaurants that we got to try for lunch and dinner!  Brad and Kyle made our delicious breakfast...(Here you can see our restaurant was right on the ocean!)

Lots of fun drinks on the trip!

One day we went on a giant catamaran!  It was so fun!  We had beach chairs on the upper deck where we were served drinks, and we had a great view of the ocean and dolphins cruising along.  The boat also had some mini-pools to cool off in, plus hammock nets over the water.  It also had huge slides and snorkeling gear for when we stopped to swim in the ocean.  So fun!

(Excuse my giant preggo belly here...)

After a few days in Manuel Antonio we drove about 3 hours to a more remote jungle/beach area called Puerto Jimenez.  There we stayed in a huge/amazing jungle house right by the beach!  The house was all totally open to the jungle except for the bedrooms, which had some real walls and some heavy-duty screen walls.  The lack of air conditioning in the CR humidity was a challenge, but thankfully we had a private pool and ocean nearby!

You can kind of see how the main hallway of the house is totally open, with the living room on your right, jungle on the left, and stairs leading up to 4 of the bedrooms.  The house was perfect because the bedrooms were super separate and all had their own bathrooms, so we did get to feel like we had our own private space.

Both in Manuel Antonio and Puerto Jimenez we did some exploring in the jungle.  The amount of monkeys (and we saw like 4-5 different types of monkeys!) and sloths we saw was unbelievable!  In Puerto Jimenez we hiked to a waterfall, and along the way we got to see a sloth with her baby!

Hike to the waterfall.  Sorry for how sweaty we look...it was HUMID!

Our private guide/chef of the house led us on this hike, which meant (bonus!) we had a photographer along!  Luis was amazing, and he cooked wonderful meals!  It was awesome to not have to cook or clean up dishes at all!

On the last day in the jungle, Kyle and Brad went on a long/hot hike through the national park with Luis, in hopes to see some larger mammals, like tapirs.  Unfortunately they only saw more monkeys and a Costa Rican deer (which is actually cool and has a pig nose!), but they had fun still.  The rest of us stayed at the house for a beach/pool day.

Cool frog!  There were also lots of unique flowers and plants, but I didn't want to post all those.  :)

It's CR's rainy season, which meant that usually it was sunny and hot in the morning/early afternoon, and then around 3pm the clouds and rain rolled in.  Usually though, it cleared up again by early night.  We did NOT mind the rain at all.  Usually it was hot enough to hit the beach/pool by 9am, making us scorched and needing shade by 1-2pm.

(Sorry for my preggo belly here again...)

If you're on instagram, this is the hashtag we posted our pics to.  I didn't have my phone with me at all on the trip (limited internet/reception anyway), and it was AMAZING to not really worry about checking facebook/texts/emails at all.

We did spend one night on our way back to San Jose in Poas, a volcano town.  But unfortunately I didn't take pics and we weren't able to see the volcano due to clouds. But it was a really fun trip!  Brad planned it all and did a great job!  We are looking forward to our next trip to Nashville, to celebrate Brad's 30th, over Labor Day Weekend!