Tamarindo

Sophie had a bad ear ache in the night last night from the airplane.  She woke up around 3am crying but wouldn't take the chewable Advil I had brought with me because its "yucky".  Well, sweetheart the choice is yours - yucky medicine that makes your ears feel better or a pain in your ears that 'really hurts'.  Eventually she chose the Advil, but it took a while and a double dose before she fell asleep with me.  In the morning she told Maria that she and I had had a little fight in the night because she wouldn't take her medicine.

I'm not sure what took us so long to get moving today, but we had breakfast and a coffee and eventually set out for Tamarindo to do some shopping and to pick up a few other groceries that we figured we would need for dinners.

Tamarindo is a very touristy area, lots of little souvenir shops and restaurants, lots of tour options available.  I think that we're going to rent ATVs at one point, Rita said not to do a tour that you can rent ATVs for a couple of hours just at the bottom of the road and they'll show you were to go.  Maybe I'll see if Antonio wants to take us on a tour somewhere.  He speaks to me in Spanglish all day and I'm surprised by how much I get and how well I'm able to communicate back to him.  His wife, Sylvia, is the housekeeper for the home as well.  Anyway, back to Tamarindo.

Sophie is looking for sunglasses, but ended up settling on a hat.  The girls were very helpful when we arrived and great on the plane so I told them I would give them each $20 for them to spend on what they want.  Sophie really wanted to get another whistle on a necklace like she had from the last time we were here - she said to Maria while she was looking at it on the beach "How much is this again?"  $4. "I think I changed my mind"...I said to her later, if I paid the $4 would you want one?  YES!  She's so funny...just wants to make sure she gets the value out of her $20.  So Paige and Sophie both chose a whistle and I reinstated the 'no whistling in the car' rule.

After some shopping we went and had lunch on the beach.  I had shrimp with a coconut and pineapple rub on it that was amazing, the girls had a cheese pizza and Maria had mahi mahi - all the food was delicious.  The girls got to play in the water while Maria and I sipped our Pina Colada and Marguerita - natures playground.

We stopped for groceries (more tequila) and boogie boards and sand toys before we left Tamarindo - we figured we had to be back to Potrero by about 2:30pm for Jay and Trevor to arrive.  

Before we left the house we set the GPS up with "HOME" and gave the coordinates to Jay by text.  It wasn't until we tried to return home using those coordinates that we realized that it doesn't take you up the right road...it takes you to a closed road that is just past the dirt road to our house.  So Maria and I backtracked and found our road (which to this point we had only been up once when following Rita up, so we were going by what looked familiar) and then texted Jay and Trevor telling them to call us when they get to Potrero and I would go down the hill and meet them to bring them to the right place.   Well, they didn't get a GPS, they got a wifi hotspot and Apple Maps, which apparently is crap.  So I told them to meet me at the only place I remember that is about 8 mins from the house, a restaurant called The Shack.  I met them at The Shack and they followed me back up to the house.  The same thing happened to Jay at the rental place only his Gold Amex had a fraud alert on it so they wouldn't process the deposit on the car and made him take the super duper insurance...so his $90 a week mini suv ended up costing him $650USD!  Tell me how happy he was about that...then they said because his gold wouldn't go through they were upping the deposit on the Mastercard..which is our reno card, so its got a balance on it until the next statement date when it normally doesn't have much on it so they tried to put through $5,000USD deposit plus the $650USD rental and it was declined because there wasn't room on the balance.  Jay was fit!  Finally had to put it on his business card - lol, glad I wasn't there!

I had told Jay to have the rental place make sure they take the Monkey Trail as a short cut as well, Trevor texted saying that the monkey trail was a bit sketchy!

We made salad and bbq chicken for dinner, with some sours and beer consumed as well.  Jay even had 2 sours!  His allergy to tequila forgotten, but he hasn't fallen in love with them like the rest of us - he still tastes the memory of vomit from the Great Tequila Fiasco of 2013 with Steve, The Enabler, Faust.

That's a Twizzler straw.