First Stop, La Fortuna

Our Bus pulling into Parque Centrale
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The bus ride to La Fortuna was uneventful, but we passed the time by taking in all the sights and sounds of the city and countryside zipping by our bus window.  This being a public bus, there were many stops and the locals started piling in.  By the 2nd hour the bus was completely full and people were jammed in the aisles leaning over us to get leverage. Halfway through our bus ride, we pulled into the bus station at San Carlos.  By this time Daivin turned to Leah and said "I have to pee like a race horse". Leah realized that he hadn't peed since the New York City airport! Daivin rushed to the washroom only to return to the bus minutes later begging Leah for some money to get into the pay-as-you-go washroom!  We had some Costa Rican currency (colones) from buying water at the Atlantico Norte bus station.

Water fountain at Parque Centrale
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Leah stayed on the bus and while stretching her legs she started chatting with the girl sitting across the aisle from us. Her and her boyfriend were from Colorado and were staying in La Fortuna as well. We discussed that we both planned on visiting the La Fortuna Waterfall the next day and figured we might bump into them again.

The bus ride lasted the full five hours as expected and we were very eager to get into La Fortuna before dark. The bus started driving through town and we had our town map from our guidebook out so we could figure out where we would be dropped off. We couldn't seem to find it on the map but a friendly local on the bus confirmed that our drop off point Parque Centrale was coming up!

Lush garden at Parque Centrale directly across from our hotel
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We got off the bus at Parque Centrale and it was a little chaotic. As we tried to get our packs from underneath the bus, solicitors started hounding us to try to get us to book at their hotel. We had not arranged for a room yet so we tried to re-group off to the side of the park but we couldn't get away from these persistent people! There was so much to take it - parque centrale was a beautiful lush garden but we had no time to stop and enjoy the scenery. It was getting dark and we needed to find a place to stay! One of the solicitors pointed east of the town to a clouded part of the sky and said "You'll want to stay over there as the volcano is that way" The volcano! We had almost forgotten to look for the famous Arenal Volcano as there was so much madness around us. The area was too cloudy to see the volcano but we were excited to be so close to it none the less. We walked around, our packs getting heavy and tried to find a hotel. We checked out a few, one not so nice, one that was full and ended up at Hotel Paraiso Tropicale. This hotel had a wonderful view of the volcano and we were still being stalked by the solicitors so we decided to stay there.