The adventure begins
Our plane landed on the Costa Rican tarmac Saturday afternoon! A few hours (horas) later we were eating our first family meal at La Roca. This small restaurant sits just outside Samara on the main road to our hotel in Nosara. Our exhaustion from traveling was buoyed by the excitement of being here. Or mine was, anyway. I knew it should take about three hours to drive the 127 km from the airport in Liberia to our hotel in Nosara, using a mix of paved, dirt and gravel roads. We were traveling in the rainy season, at dusk, in our rented 2WD SUV (thanks Avis! Wait until you read my TripAdvisor review!) Kim did not list me as a driver on the car, so the stress of driving everywhere was placed solely on her shoulders.
Everyone warned me that we were going to get rained on. Driving in the rain is not normally fun, and add to that the devil-may-care attitude of the Tican drivers. The locals have no regard for solid yellow center lines, but at least they give a little beep as they fly past you on rutted and pot-holey roads.
Tengo hambre!
We drove for about an hour and a half, looking for a roadside restaurant. Locally, these small restaurants are called sodas and are oftentimes built off of someone’s house. The small granola bar I’d eaten on the plane had long burned off and I was ready to eat some Tican cuisine. Eventually we found La Roca, which had a nice parking area that didn’t seem too challenging for our little 2WD Qashqai. True to its name, the restaurant sits on rocks. I had the best seat of our table, close to the edge.
I ordered what the rest of the fam ordered. We each had casado: a plateful of potatoes in sauce (this one tasted like mushroom gravy) rice, beans, a simple salad of lettuce and pico de gallo, and a protein. I ordered what Aubrie had because 1) it was fried chicken and fried chicken is tasty, and 2) it was easy to point to her and hold up two fingers instead of ordering something in my broken Spanish. Kim and Tayler had the grilled chicken version.
Muy bien a La Roca
Our late lunch/early dinner was great! The chicken was crispy but not dry. The potatoes melted in our mouths and the rice mixed with the beans was filling. Kim and I drank Costa Rican beer, Imperial. I liken it to America’s Budweiser, unfortunately. She and I drink mostly microbrews from the states, so the Imperial is a little bland to our sophisticated taste buds.
Regardless, we were full and happy and ready to continue on to Nosara. The sun was still shining brightly. The rains had not yet started for the day. We drove on the windy, narrow road. The GPS we decided to rent from Avis (this is the only good thing you offered us, Avis!) was a lifesaver, as we obviously did not know these roads that well. The GPS also gave us warning when we were nearing important areas, such as school zones, speed bumps and bridges.
A note about these Costa Rican bridges: a majority of them are one lane. One side normally has a yield sign and paint on the road. These visual warnings are great, however, if I had been driving, I would have wanted them a little further away from the bridge itself. If not for the GPS’s advanced audio warning, we may have driven too fast onto the bridge and met other traffic head-on. No bueno!
If I had to choose my last meal…
The casada we ate was fabulous. Fueled up and ready to move on to our next adventure, we piled back in the mighty Qashqai. The sun shone down on us as we wound around mountains, down into valleys and up hills. Our bellies full, we had unknown excitement ahead of us.