First Night in Costa Rica

Lava Rocks Cafe for dinner on our first night
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We dropped off our packs in the hotel and changed out of our sticky clothes. Five hours on a bus can do that to you! All of our luggage was in good shape except for our contact solution and some hand sanitizer that exploded in our packs! Good thing for Ziploc bags!!

We headed out for dinner and a little bit of exploring the town of La Fortuna. The town is a small strip with one main street with lots of hotels, restaurants and tour operators. This town serves as a base for tourists coming here to explore the Arenal Volcano which is located in the neighbouring town. We walked up the main street looking for a restaurant to have dinner. We were tired and hungry but very excited to be in Costa Rica!!

We found a place called Lava Rocks Cafe and grabbed a table. The cafe was open air with a cool breeze and very laid back. We're not sure if it was our hunger talking but this was an amazing meal! We both choose club sandwiches but it was Costa Rican style with chicken and ham and fries. On the table was a basket with various condiments, one of which what the locals call Salsa Lizano. This is a condiment that we had read about and couldn't wait to try! It was delicious and tasted a bit like spicy BBQ sauce.  Daivin drank one of the local beer brands Imperial and Leah had a homemade lemonade marguerita. YUM!

After dinner we spotted an internet cafe that we walked into. We wanted to find one because when we were sitting in the New York Airport, Daivin saw a newsticker on a BBC worldnews program and it said that GWL had been sold off! Obviously this was concerning to Daivin and he wanted to verify if what he saw was true. He did a Google search and quickly found out that the news didn't affect the company he worked for. PHEW! We left and didn't use a computer for the rest of our two week vacation.

After Daivin's mini freakout, we checked out some local shops. As we were looking around it started raining. We realized we didn't have our umbrella but being in the rain wasn't so bad because the warm night air made it actually pleasant.  It rained pretty hard for a bit but was gone as quickly as it came.

We walked back to our hotel to call home before heading back to our room. The hotel had a large phone booth located in the lobby that we decided to use. Daivin called home first and we soon realized that it was way too hot to have two people in a phone booth in very humid weather. By the time Leah called home the heat in the phone booth was unbearable! Good thing the calls were short!

Our shower before bed turned out to be a cold one as there was no hot water! That turned out to be an interesting experience as the water was freezing even in the humid temperatures. We headed to bed with our watch alarm set for early in the morning, hoping to catch our first clear glimpse of the volcano.