Manual Antonio, Costa Rica.

We spent the last couple of days in Manuel Antonio fairly close to the hotel.  During the day, we always spent a few hours at the beach – Lucy was continuing to work on her body surfing (which involved getting dunked by every second wave) and I worked on rehabilitating Mary following Mel’s parenting fail from the first day at the beach.  I capitalised on all of this. I was slightly better at body surfing than Lucy, and with the help of the Dunning-Kruger Effect, she of course believed I was AMAZING. And with Mary – I simply had to avoid dunking her. It was odd being the favourite parent. I liked it.

We had originally decided that we weren’t going to visit the national park because we’d seen and done so much at both Tortugero and Arenal…. but then we realised there was nothing else to do if we didn’t.  So, on our last full day in Manuel Antonio, we ventured into the national park with two very reluctant little people and the promise of finding a better beach than the one immediately in front of our hotel. Of course, Mel and I had no idea if there was a beach, let alone a better one, Thankfully, our parenting approach allows us to carry-forward any undelivered promises.

As it turned out, the park was pretty amazing. There was a boardwalk through the mangroves that let the little people check out all the animals and plants.  Lucy, as is usual for her, asked a billion questions about what she was seeing. I tried to distract her by pointing out different coloured crabs (of which there were a surprising number!) and made a mental note to do some research on Wikipedia that evening. We saw a small troop of white-faced monkeys, raccoons and our favourite – the sloth!  We saw a mum and a baby up-close which is quite rare apparently. (I say apparently, because I didn’t confirm this with Wikipedia – the source of all my facts – but overheard another tourist saying so. Good enough for me).

Our final day in Costa Rica was spent travelling to San Jose (we stayed at the Adventure Inn hotel) and taking a look around the centre of town.  Lucy and Mel wanted to look at the Central Markets (which was incidentally the only activity in the top 10 of TripAdvisor’s things to do there).  The market was pretty interesting – a mixture of a food and handicraft market.  In any case, the market was fun to walk through and Mary and Lucy enjoyed pointing odd things out to one another. I also enjoyed pointing odd things out to Mel. As far as I recall, Mel enjoyed me pointing odd things out to her.

In the late afternoon we walked around the old city – it had a mixture of branded outlet stalls, fast food restaurants, and various shops selling things which didn’t seem to belong together. I tried to encourage the 4 of us to aimlessly wander the city without spending money. Mel is allergic to this so we ended up buying some (over-priced) Haviannas for Lucy and the girls bought some toys with my their pocket money.

Our final evening meal in Costa Rica was at Popeyes chicken.  I know my Dad would be proud.

Nick, August 2016

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