Semana Santa fell early this year, and while it did not coincide with spring break for DC schools, the surrounding states of Maryland and Virginia opted for vacation schedules that overlapped with the Easter holidays. This enabled friends from our Kigali days to come travel with us for a week — a trip that definitively marks the beginning of the end of our Costa Rica tour.
Over the last two-and-a-half years, we have traveled all over this small, beautiful country, endeavoring to leave almost no stone unturned. Having checked off pretty much all of the items on our Costa Rica bucket list, we've opted to dedicate our last few months to revisiting our favorite places, to the extent our hectic end-of-tour schedule permits, of course. We hardly left San Jose in the month leading into Semana Santa, spending more time than we would have liked on various logistics. For example, making travel arrangements that complied with applicable regulations and airline restrictions and also enabled us to fly our dog home required weeks of correspondence with the Embassy's travel agent.
Just like last year, when another family of Foreign Service friends traveled with us over Semana Santa, we split the week between mountains and beach to give our visitors as broad a perspective of Costa Rica's many attractions as possible. We started at Playa Flamingo, which we had visited with D's parents, and ended in Monteverde — Costa Rica's famed cloud forest and the birthplace of zip-line canopy tours. We've counted Monteverde among our favorite Costa Rican destinations since our very first travels around this country some twenty years ago. Remarkably, nearly a year had elapsed since we last set foot there.
As both locations were ones we had visited previously, there were few new and noteworthy experiences to mark this week. A snorkeling outing from Playa Flamingo, a visit to a section of cloud forest we had not previously explored in Monteverde — both excellent — but what really made this trip particularly enjoyable was sharing some of our favorite Costa Rican experiences with our friends and seeing these remarkable places through their eyes. Our friend remarking that he had been zip-lining many times before but never quite like this, our friends' children setting foot on a hanging bridge for the first time — moments like these helped reflect a lot of the awe we felt when we had first explored and fell in love with these places.
The other incredibly gratifying memory we'll take from this trip was how quickly and thoroughly our children befriended each other. The last time they had played, Junebug and our friends' kids were toddlers. This time around, they spent countless hours playing beyblades and board games, discussing everything under the sun, giggling madly, and making memories they too will be old enough to remember.
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