Samara Beach

Our hotel, Lisa's birthday party and boogie boy with the hotel beach in the background.

This weekend we headed to the beach we have been gazing down on for 3 weeks for some sun and surf. Well actually, we look at the Gulf of Nicoya and we were headed down and across the top of the gulf to the Pacific coast of the Nicoya Penninsula beyond. We joined together with another family whose daughters are at the Creativo and who are from CO as well and our teacher friends Kirk and Maury and another intern Lucy for a private busette down there. The CO family´s girls Courtney and Lisa are our kids favorites so that was an added bonus to the trip. We arrived Friday around 4 and went immediately into the water. We were staying atHotel Fenix which is right on the beach south of Samara in Matapalo, a very quiet area. We shared a room with Kirk and Maury that had a pull out couch in the living room and a kitchenette. They were great sports to hang with the whole kid scene and fortunately are naturally early risers too!!

Samara is one of the few beaches on the Nicoya with no rip tides which was huge incentive for us to go there, it is also one of the easiest to get to from Monteverde. The beach isnt gorgeous, it is gray sand instead of white and the water isnt very clear by the beach but who can complain . . . its the beach and the water is warm!!! The waves were small so we didnt bother with a surf lesson but they were perfect for boogie boarding. We were actually getting rides of over 100 feet in shallow water! The kids loved it. Toby could stand at his waist level and join on to the tail end of our rides and still get close to 50 ft of riding in really calm water. Cassidy invented boogie bronc riding which involves sitting astride the boogie board and getting launched into the ends of the waves. She is light enough that she can actually ride them like that!

There was also a pool and lots of hammocks and chairs in the palms between the hotel and water so it was really idyllic and no one got overly sunburned! Cass came down with Toby´s fever Saturday night (Toby had been sick Thurs with a very high fever that was done on Friday) but still played in the water all day sunday with a off and on temp up to 103!! We even went out for dinner thanks to our resident babysitters! Lisa turned 12 on Sunday so we all had a fabulous chocolate cake on the beach before we left. Kids were fabulous in the van too.

All in all a fabulous weekend. And to top it off we returned home to hot water!!!