The Liberia Airport is off the top of the map. Sámara is at the bottom center
Playa Sámara
Playa with village
We ended up deciding to go to Sámara in Guanacaste, Costa Rica, but we did not start there. Before Sámara, we looked at Nosara where this whole travelogue thing started 30 years ago. Before that, we looked at the Caribbean at Guadeloupe and St. Martin, but the Sargassum issue knocked those two French speaking islands out of contention. The search did not begin in the New World. Malta was too expensive, Sicily, Southern Italy, Crete and a couple of Greek Islands, where the search began, might not be warm enough, and have complicated transportation issues
Along the way we had to keep asking ourselves the question of what we wanted to do. In the end I guess a warm place with a clean, swimmable ocean and a small community of ex-pats and locals that we might join I might fill the bill.
We are going to stay here for the month of March. There is a shared pool, outdoor kitchen and yoga balcony, and we have a small kitchen for oursellves. There are plenty of restaurants and beach bars and day trips available when we want to get out of town. Our hosts, Undine and Sergio sound wonderful in the reviews and we are looking forward to staying there. We have made reservations.
We are not going to rent a car. Our host will arrange for someone who will drive us the 2.5 hour trip to and from the airport, then we will rent bikes or walk to get into town. We think it will be cheaper and more relaxing not to have a car, and the money we spend will be going to locals rather than corporate pockets. Many of the local roads ford streams which invalidates the insurance.
We are flying Delta through Atlanta to Liberia, Guanacaste. We have made our reservations. I know this is early but we got exit row in Comfort Class with only two seats in the row on all four flights. The tickets are changeable and we got to use 40,000 of Dawn's miles.
(There is also a 22.5 hour trip to NYC which starts tomorrow. We will visit Carlo, a friend and former colleague, and then have dinner with Sydney, Dawn's granddaughter who is now living and working in New York. The trains did not fit our schedule so we our on the bus. I bought noise cancelling headphones to make sleeping on the bus more likely. We will use them on this trip also.)
