We’ve finished our four week stay at Casa Playa Bonita in Playa Flamingo Costa Rica and are back in Denver for more winter. One thing we learned on this trip is that if you want to be assured hot weather in the winter, go way south where it is actually summer. In this case we were at about 10 degrees north latitude during their dry season. For all of our 28 days I imagine the daytime high was at least 95 degrees, if that low, and we could count the total clouds in the sky for the four weeks on one hand. In other words, the weather was perfect.In addition to the perfect weather and our wonderful rental house on the beach, we found the people helpful and friendly, good food, beautiful flowering trees and fun animals to observe in the jungle and at the beach. We hope to return to the area soon. Here are some photo highlights of our stay.

Our next adventure returned Benjamin and me along with our new adventurers, Dave and Lisa Wangsness, to Parque Nacional Rincon de la Vieja but to the Santa Maria station rather than the Las Pailas station where we hiked earlier.  Santa Maria is more remote taking nearly an hour to go the final 15 miles resulting in only four cars in the parking area all day.  Also, there was no English speaking ranger at this station as there was at Las Pailas.  The trail was less up and down, there were more streams to cross, a lovely waterfall and many thermal pools loudly bubbling away.  Our wildlife spottings found less cooperative monkeys than those we encountered at Las Pailas, a coral snake and probably a green vine snake.  At the end of our nearly seven hour hike we received a great show from a flock of Toucans, a truly gorgeous bird.

Benjamin and Fernanda finished their week with us on Saturday the 9th after Dave and Lisa had joined us on the 6th.  We continue to enjoy most of our evening meals at Angelina’s, Tubla, Marie’s, Pleamar, Copa Cabana in neighboring Tamarindo and an occasional excellent meal prepared by our housekeeper Blanca.

Still researching our next adventure but in the meantime enjoying the continuous streak of cloudless days as we overlook the thundering Pacific Ocean.

On February 5th we headed to Parque Nacional Rincon de la Vieja Las Pailas ranger station.  It is about a two hour drive from Flamingo Beach.  The jungle hike was gorgeous with wonderful vegatation, streams, falls, and a swinging bridge made of rebar, wire and fence material.  We saw a beautiful Toucan that did not hang around long enough for either Benjamin or I to catch in one of our lenses, turkeys, butterflies, an amazing dragon fly whose motion resembles a helicopter when it flies and the extremely cute and curious white faced monkeys.  These guys were incredibly entertaining and seemed to grow in number the longer we were clicking and flashing.  While always difficult to shoot straight up into the jungle canopy, included here are a few of the shots I managed.  Benjamin managed more and, of course, better ones but I’ll keep trying to learn his tricks.

Well, it has been nearly a week since my only post from Costa Rica.  That’s because our guests of this past week have not been able to pull themselves away from the pool or ocean which are equally accessible from this house.  It is a very special location so we understand.

Our new restaurant for the week that we found on our own is Tubla here in Playa Flamingo, which was good and reasonably priced although understaffed.  But service everywhere here is slow.  We had a mediocre dinner in Tamarindo, an excellent dinner on our patio prepared by our housekeeper Blanca and a fun dinner at sunset on the beach at Coco Loco, I mean literally a special table on the beach, at Coco Loco.  However, don’t go to Coco Loco without cash because the majority of the time the credit card machine is broken.

My daughter Kristin and her husband Rob left us today, Dale and Debbie Cummins leave us on Wednesday and Konnie and I will head to the jungle on Thursday.  Benjamin and Fernanda arrive on Saturday.

So for now, here are a few pictures from the week.

We began to get away about this time of year in 2007 with a one week stint on the Big Island of Hawaii.  In 2008 and 2009 we spent two weeks in St. John USVI followed by two weeks in Akumal, Mexico, then three weeks in Tortola BVI and four weeks in Tortola last year.

So our seventh escape from wintertime so far is our greatest escape from cold temperatures as the upper 90s to low 100s each day have been the rule here at 10 degrees north latitude.  Konnie and I arrived here on the northwest coast of Costa Rica on Saturday January 19.  We spent the next several days settling into the rental house, checking out restaurants and shopping for various items.

On Tuesday evening my daughter Kristin and her husband Rob, who live in Phoenix, joined us for the first time on this adventure followed on Wednesday by Dale and Debbie Cummins of Liberty, Indiana (my hometown) who are joining us for the fifth time.  More visitors arrive later during our four week escape.

Our rental house, Casa Playa Bonita on Flamingo Beach (http://casaplayabonitacr.com/CasaPlayaBonita/Welcome.html),is great, the setting spectacular, the weather not winter, and the shopping frustrating.  The locals have been very friendly and helpful.  So far all of our restaurants have been good with Angelina’s head and shoulders above the others, not only for the food but our server Irene has, in addition to her serving skills, been both vivacious as well as a good Spanish tutor.  Our other eateries so far have been Marie’s for breakfast, Coco Loco on the beach for lunch, Pleamar, Carlos & Carlos and Mar y Sol.

We will be leaving the comfort of the beach environment soon to explore what the interior has to offer.

After our return from Oxford we slipped even deeper into our pretend residents mode.  On Thursday after lunch at L’Opera, we headed to the National Gallery (free admission) to spend the whole afternoon.  We thought it to be outstanding and are unsure why we did not get there on an earlier visit.  Dinner at an Asian place near our flat.  It was not bad but not worthy of being mentioned.

On Friday we visited the Victoria & Albert Museum (free admission) where we had not been since 2010.  In addition to catching up on some regular medieval and renaissance exhibits, we visited two special photography exhibitions called “Light from the Middle East:  New Photography” and an exhibition called “Halfway to Paradise: The Birth of British Rock Photographs by Harry Hammond.”  The Rock Photo exhibition was great fun except that it was a reminder of the fact that I am racking up the years.  Yes, it was lunch at L’Opera again and dinner at one of our favorites here, Zayna (www.zaynarestaurant.co.uk), Pakistani and North Indian Cuisine, with Gail and Robin Edwards and Jacquie Martinez, great friends from my time working with the Maya Research Program in Belize.  I am scratching my head at how I failed to get pictures of our great evening.

Saturday saw lunch at a new favorite lunch and cappuccino place, Cocomaya (“Fine Chocolatier & Artisan Baker”) (www.cocomaya.co.uk) on Brompton Road followed by an all afternoon walk covering Green Park, St. James’s Park, Buckingham Palace and the other sites in the Westminster section of the city.  The evening saw us return to Ciros to enjoy an evening of music as well as the (cheeseless in my case) pizza and complementary stuff they like to throw our way.  Tonight’s server was from Serbia and had worked at Lake Tahoe.

Sunday was the most beautiful day of our 23 and we did more walking, enjoying the sun in Hyde Park and Kensington Gardens.  Breakfast at Cocomaya, lunch at Noura where they stuffed us with complementary baklava after we opted for a light lunch and dinner at Patara with Gail and Robin Edwards.

We stopped into Muffinskis for an afternoon break one day, a muffin and coffee shop in Covent Garden that we have visited before.  The music in the shop was all early Beatles.  Perfect for an old codger who lived through the British Invasion of the 60s.  As we were preparing to leave I said to one of young lady servers, “I really love the music you play.  Is that a new group from around here?”  Her jaw dropped and eyes opened wide and she clearly was reaching for the right words to not offend a customer.  She finally mustered in amazement (and you must add the accent) “It’s the Baytles.”  She was born 30 years after their rise to fame.  But they are in institution to even her.

We love London.

One of the reasons we are fond of London is the terrific transportation system that not only makes getting around the city so very easy, but that also gives great access to the rest of the country.  In the 45 days we have spent here recently, we just took our first taxi within the city the other evening.  And we have enjoyed a number of day trips outside of the city via the trains.  This trip our intended destination was Oxford.

So mid-week we headed to the Paddington Station to take off to Oxford for the day.  Oxford is home to one of the world’s most celebrated universities and is known as “the city of dreaming spires.”  You will be sick of spires and other historical buildings if you review all the pictures accompanying this post.  Anyway, educational institutions in Oxford (Ox-ford, the river crossing for the oxen back in the day) date to the 12^th century.  This is where you come to study when you are a Rhodes Scholar.

Most of Oxford’s great buildings feature the honey-colored limestone from the Cotswold Hills and they supposedly look familiar because of all the television and movie filming that takes place here including something called Harry Potter.

I will let you research Oxford to the extent you are interested and try to let the photos speak for it at least a little bit.  It deserves your visit and it deserves another visit from us.  It seems much larger than Cambridge, a city we have day tripped twice, and a single day did not allow us to cover it all.  We will try to return.

We had a lovely lunch inside St. Mary’s Church and an afternoon break at the purported “oldest established coffee house in Europe,” the Queen’s Lane Coffee House.  Dinner back in London at an inexpensive place called Thai Square.  Not bad…not great.

More on the rest of our London stay later.

We spent about 36 days here in 2010 and 2011 so we did not have grandiose plans for this part of our trip.  Rather, we planned to basically live here for a week.  Visit a few sites, enjoy the restaurants we have liked so much in the past and just hang out.

Since this blog is supposed to be helpful to other travelers and a way for us to remember all we are so fortunate to do, here is a review of the highlights of the first part of our week.

We started things off right upon our arrival on Saturday by dining at our favorite restaurant anywhere, Patara on Beauchamp (www.pataralondon.com).  We have now eaten here about a dozen times which is why we had to try the one in Vienna.  This location is much better.  More intimate, more selections, spicier food, less expensive than Vienna (especially the wine), all of the staff is Thai and all about service.  And, of course, they know and remember us from visit to visit which translates to a discount every time.  Wish we got treated that way at our regular haunts in Denver.

On Sunday I found an LA Fitness nearby where I purchased a week’s worth of passes.  They were nice enough to sell a week to me at about a 65% discount off the published daily price.  I thought that was a very nice thing to do.  Then it was laundry day but we still saw our first new discovery on this visit.  An “organic deli and patisserie” with what they term homemade food called L’Opera on Brompton Road near the big museums.  You select your food from the case (it changes each day) and they put it together.  Nice people (our server here is from the Phillipines), reasonable prices and excellent food.  Dinner at Daphnes (www.daphnes-restaurant.co.uk), a place on Draycott we found on our long Sunday afternoon walk that included Hyde Park, Knightsbridge and Kensington.  Another good pick as the food was excellent with a pleasant staff including our Hungarian server (by the end of this trip it will be very apparent the international nature of London).

After lunch again at L’Opera, on a rainy Monday we re-visited the Courtauld Institute Art Gallery at Somerset House.  It is a small gallery in a very cool old building but contains work by all the big guns.  Somerset House was built in 1770 and the courtyard is currently set up with a giant (much larger than Rockefeller Center) skating rink.  We had dinner at Ciros Pizza Pomodoro on Beauchamp (www.pomodoro.co.uk).  We had been there twice before with my granddaughter Isabelle.  I like it because they have cheeseless seafood pizzas.  Again, treated like regulars with free after dinner drinks and an invite to return for the live music on Saturday night (even though they were fully booked).  Our server here hails from Spain.

On Tuesday we spent the afternoon in the Covent Garden and Leicester Square area.  This popular area is already decked out for the year end holidays.  The great discovery this day was Stanfords (www.stanfords.co.uk), an unbelievable travel store with more travel books and maps than I have ever seen.  I estimate it is probably a 30,000ish square foot store devoted to travel.  I have been having so much trouble finding what I want in the way of travel books and maps at both our local and chain bookstores in Denver and am always reluctantly resorting to Amazon.  This place has everything.  Dinner at Tamarind (www.tamarindrestaurant.com), a wonderful Indian restaurant in Mayfair that we have been to before but not enough.  It deserves more visits.  Oh yes, the staff is Indian of course.

Next, Off to Oxford.

Day two in Bratislava was brisk but we saw sunshine for the second straight day and that makes all the difference!  We began with a visit to the Primate’s Palace that our guidebook described as the most beautiful palace in Bratislava.  Hmm?  While a lovely building from the outside, the inside was a disappointment but then it did only cost two Euros to get in.  Very little of it is viewable and what is contains very little history to view.  I need to mention that visiting museum type venues (the castle, city museum and the palace) is a bit of an unusual experience here.  First, they are very inexpensive.  Second, there is not much in the castle and even less in the Palace, so at least they don’t overcharge, but the City Museum was extensive and contained many interesting items.  Third, and I’m blaming this on being under Soviet influence for over four decades, they each had these elderly ladies that followed us around.  There is nobody else there and they follow you from room to room.  And they speak no English but try to give you direction at times such as when you are apparently not following the prescribed flow even though we were alone.  Just be aware that it creates a bit of a weird environment.

Then on to the Franciscan Church.  A Baroque church from the 17^th century, it has a locked ironwork structure across the back preventing full access.  (And now you must forgive me as I know not of what I speak.)  It does have access to the customary water supply that is used for the Catholic ritual exercised upon entering the church and two places to kneel to pray whereas the Jesuit church yesterday, which was fully open, had about 30 people in the seats on a Thursday afternoon praying which actually made it uncomfortable to just be in there as a tourist onlooker (which is okay, I mean it is a functioning church).

Then we headed for Grassalkovich Palace which is the residence of the President and is a very beautiful structure with some very funky and not scary guards in historical garb.  It is another area that has only been refurbished since independence in 1993.  And there is much refurbishing going on around the city as well as many wonderful buildings in need of attention.  There is plenty to enjoy in the city for a few days but they have a ways to go to get more of their structures to the quality of other European cities that were not handicapped by Soviet domination.

Lunch at Roland, a little retail action, a cappuccino break at Cokoladovna Bon Bon and dinner at Primi.  Bratislava was an interesting adventure and we are glad we gave it a try.

Now off to London.

We rolled across the Austrian border into Slovakia after dark on Wednesday evening.  The Austrian highways that we experienced were in excellent condition and the fact that they only used the left two lanes to pass (including the large trucks!) greatly facilitated the flow.  Now that sure would make the trips to and from the Colorado mountains more pleasurable.

It is only a mile from the Austria/Slovakia border until you hit Bratislava, a city of about a half million residents that straddles the Danube.  As you know, this part of the world has a complicated history with Slovakia only being an independent state since 1993.  Bratislava, formerly known as Pressburg, has been everything from the capital of Hungary to being part of Czechoslovakia beginning with its creation after World War I.   Now with Slovakia an independent state, Bratislava is its capital.

Bratislava’s Old Town is pedestrian friendly and full of shops, restaurants and some fun street art.  Our hotel, Marrol’s Boutique Hotel, sits on the edge of Old Town so our access to historical sites has been very convenient.  Fortunately, English is not uncommon here among the younger crowd.  So the rule seems to be that we are fine in the shops and restaurants where young people work and unable to communicate with the older ladies manning the castle and museums.

In fact, the young man working the Suveniry shop at the castle asked us where we were from.  Konnie says the United States.  He asks what state.  She says Colorado.  He says, “so you are blue.”  Our lingo permeates the world.

We spent Thursday (our second day with sun out of 13 days) visiting St. Martin’s Cathedral, the site of the coronation of eleven Hungarian kings and eight queens dating to 1563 followed by Bratislava Castle, which sits on a large hill overlooking the Danube.  In addition we visited the Jesuit Church, built in 1636 for the Protestants, and the City Museum that is located in the Old Town Hall that was created beginning in the 15^th century.  And we spent some time enjoying cappuccinos in a lovely chocolate shop (Cokoladovna Bon Bon) in Old Town.  Small coffee shops here are much more common here than they were in Vienna or Salzburg where we saw none.

We finished the day with dinner at Ristorante Kogo that is on the same garden and fountain plaza (Hviezdoslavovo Plaza) as our first night dining experience at the Slovakian restaurant Zylinder.