Bringing Eden Home: it's a young man's world

Getting to our hotel in Santa Theresa was a 300m
hike up a steep incline. Not a good choice.

Everywhere we look it's backpackers, adventure seekers, vagabond surfers from the US, Europe, and Australia. The trade-off with enjoying the beauty of this area is that one has to deal with the roads here -- among the worst in Costa Rica. The modes of transport are exclusively ATVs and 4x4 SUVs. Average age looks to be about early 20s. It may be a young person's paradise, but suffice to say, it's not the easiest place for a woman almost 7 months pregnant and two small children. We are in the small surfing town of Santa Theresa on the Nicoya Peninsula.

Taking a trip like this is about voluntary displacement. We expect there will be the unexpected. But I grossly underestimated how limiting it would be with Eliza's condition and the age of our children. I'm too used to galavanting freely by myself to the outermost territories of our grantmaking world. Traveling with a young family has given me a whole new awareness of how much I naively assume perfect health, extreme mobility, and some degree of ruggedness. Obviously, these are not to be taken for granted (even for a young man, for that matter).

We finally concluded that the house in San Jose very likely has bed bugs (the signs are telltale), leaving us without a reliable home base. As a consequence, we have decided to come home early. We arrive next weekend, cutting this adventure short by two weeks.

So now we focus on making the most of the remaining days we have here.