I’m back in the land of the living again, well kind of! I’ve had the flu for the past 8 days and it’s been reaaaaaal ugly. My fiancé took such good care of me while I was sick, but now he is sick and I feel awful about that. We are just practicing all that “in sickness and in health” stuff early. 🙂 Ok, I think we have it down.

For anyone on the cleanse, your 3 weeks is just about up if it’s not over yet! Congratulations for giving it a try!

Ok, here is the rest of our Costa Rica adventure.

On Christmas Eve we decided we needed to find a new place to stay for the rest of our trip. Someplace with air conditioning. Anyplace. We were staying in Jaco/Playa Hermosa by the way. Every hotel even remotely close was booked. So we kept expanding our search. Finally, we found a brand new Hilton (with a/c) with vacancy in Liberia. I know, funny name, right? We weren’t planning on going to Liberia on our our trip, but it turned out to be a great change of plans. Liberia is really close to great beaches, national parks and I’m convinced in 15 years it will be the Vegas of Costa Rica.
We get to Liberia and the climate there is totally different than the Puntarenas Region where we had been. Puntarenas was really green and humid. Liberia was more arid desert.
The following day we drove down the Nicoya Peninsula and went to a National Park and visited a town called Tamarindo. The National Park was cool because within the park it had something like 4 different climate zones including rain forest, dry forest, arid desert and one more I can’t remember. It also had waterfalls and 2 volcanos. Cool stuff.

The next day we went to Playa Samara and WOW, this was an incredible beach and fantastic stop! This white sand beach was so clean and safe. The water was almost as warm as bath water and we spent the entire day boogie boarding and having a blast. After our day of fun in the sun we ate a phenomenal dinner at a Mexican restaurant and headed back to Liberia.

I guess we didn’t take many pictures this day since we were in the water.
We spent the following day at another national park. This park was really huge and was known for it’s wetlands and for having over 200 bird species.
We saw a lot of wildlife in this park.

First, alligators! There were 2 and they were fighting, but only caught one on camera.

This cute little thing is a Coati Mundi. There were a bunch of them but then a car drove by and scared them all away.

Tons of monkeys! What do you think about monkeys? Cute or creepy? A little of both I think.

Iguanas are EVERYWHERE. Like squirrels here.

Ducks. I just realized I made that picture bigger than the others and I like it!
We saw tons of birds!

The next day we drove back to San Jose and enjoyed our last day in Costa Rica.

This was such an amazing vacation and it has been so fun sharing all these pictures, I hope you enjoyed them!

Adios!

It is SO cold outside in Utah. Lilly says having to go potty outside when it’s 8˚ is cruel. I don’t blame her.

So far the cleanse is going well. All two days of it. For breakfast I have the Thin Mint Protein Shake, Creamy Tomato Soup for lunch, a handful of cashews for a snack and dinner is a salad made of brown rice, black beans, greens, salsa and guacamole. Normally I’m active and I would need to eat more than this, but right now I have a nasty cold so I have mostly been sitting and am therefore not very hungry.

Ok, on to the fun stuff. Costa Rica!

My fiancé and I are both planners so we had our trip all laid out. We rented a house in Playa Hermosa, near Jaco which has the best surf in Costa Rica. The pictures and description of the rental house sounded amazing so we booked it for the whole week. Our plan was to surf, go to a volcano, a national park, surf more and my fiancé likes to paraglide so of course that was a big part of our plans.

Plans change.

We got in late so we decided to stay the first night in San Jose because the rental house was about 2 hours away. The hotel we stayed at that first night was AMAZING! We were so spoiled that first night! We liked the hotel so much we stayed there again our last night since our flight went out early in the morning.

The second day we drove out to our rental house. We stopped and took lots and lots of pictures.

This is the beach in Jaco. Beautiful, dark sand, very warm water and consistently good surf.

Then we get to the rental house. It looks just like it did in the pictures. But now would be a good time to mention the house had NO AIR CONDITIONING and since the house is not lived in most of the time, it reeked of mold. Ok, that’s fine, it has lots of windows. We rushed around and opened every window and door in the house. But then you have to close the doors at 5 because the mosquitos are too bad. And the doors and windows didn’t have bars on them so it wasn’t safe to sleep with them open anyway. Now I should mention that every night there was gun fire nearby. Like, real nearby. And roosters that go off at 5:30 in the morning. So, we wake up at 5:30 after a night of hearing random gunfire in a house that is 84˚ with 75% humidity for a heat index of 91˚.

That didn’t get us down though. We were too excited to hit the beach. My fiancé surfs and I boogie board but I was eager to try surfing. So in to the warm water we go, it was amazing! I managed to stand up on the surfboard a few times…before breaking the board. Shoot. No worries, we rented me a boogie board instead since that’s my jam 🙂 We had the BEST day of surfing/boogie boarding. We laughed and laughed and laughed. It was a great day! Until we went back to the hot house, showered and toweled off with wet towels that smelled like mold. Yummy.

We had great food while we were in Jaco. It’s not typical Costa Rican food, its pretty much like the food you find here. We ate at a great sushi restaurant (veggie rolls) and a great “fusion” restaurant that served a little bit of everything.

The second day was equally amazing. We went to this place called “The Zephyr Palace” and it is hands down the most beautiful place I have ever seen. Rooms here START at $400/night.

This place was incredible.
We stopped here and ate our homemade peanut butter sandwiches we brought 🙂

From here we went to the paragliding site because it was looking like it might be good for flying. I will post more pictures and videos of paragliding soon after I get them all off the camera. I probably took 100 pictures.

Here is one picture of future hubby assessing the site. It was so gorgeous!

After he was done flying we went back in to town and had another great dinner. Around this time we started dreading going back to the house. It was sooooo hot in that house and it was impossible to sleep much. We were getting tired and a little desperate. We decided we needed to find another place to stay. A place with air conditioning. The next day was Christmas so finding a hotel with vacancy was tough. We went in to super nerd mode, each of us conducting searches on our tablets, cross referencing expedia with trip advisor reviews and the guide book. The search got gnarly. Every good hotel we found was booked. Every hotel with vacancy had awful reviews. We just. wanted. air. conditioning…

To be continued…

I have always loved the Parade of Homes. And model homes. And MTV Cribs back in the day. And just about anything on HGTV! It’s just so fun getting to look inside people’s homes! Admittedly, my home is nowhere NEAR anything you would see on TV, but I figure if you are anything like me, you would like to have a look anyway!

So let’s start my little home tour.

First of all, I live in a Townhouse, which is awesome because it gives me the convenience of an attached 2 car garage, but NO YARD WORK!

I don’t have an actual yard, just a small courtyard, but I still have a micro garden! I am currently growing 3 very small cucumbers, lettuce, spinach, basil and kale.

When you walk in the front door you head right upstairs and into the main living area & kitchen.

I am not into decorating at all, but I do have a love for all things black and tan. Case in point:

What a ridiculous creature!

This is the other side of that wall. My dad built both of these pieces and they are hands down the nicest things in my house.

The living area is open to the kitchen, my favorite room in the house. This kitchen was probably the main reason I chose this home.

I like it a lot!

Inside the kitchen there is a huge pantry which I think is a Utah thing. We loooove our big pantry’s in Utah!

My pantry has surprisingly little food in it. As you can see I have many kitchen electrics and many spices. The only food items I really have are canned beans, quinoa, wild rice and amaranth. The rest is all fresh produce in the fridge.

There is also a 1/2 bath in the kitchen which is very convenient.

Now let’s head up another flight of stairs, that’s right, we are getting our workout in. 🙂

This is the guest bedroom.

And guest bathroom. I apologize for the lighting here.

I absolutely adore washing machines. It’s like a sickness. I think after having to use laundromats for so long, being able to do laundry in my home will forever feel like a luxury. No more lugging loads of laundry through snow! Here they are in action even!

I love them. If they were bright pink I would love them more! Do you think pinterest has directions on how to paint appliances? Probably.

Last on the tour is the master bedroom (my bedroom).

I’m pretty simple. I just went for all white. The curtains came from Target for about $20, the duvet cover is from Pottery Barn.

There is a big closet in there too but I didn’t take a picture. I’ll just tell you it’s very organized and color coded. I have all my workout (work clothes for me) clothes hanging up and I own about 4 pairs of jeans.

My bathroom.

That’s it! You have seen it all! Thanks for stopping by!