Day 5. Day Drinking and Making Friends.

It occurred to me that up to this point, we haven't introduced a very important character in our Costa Rica trip, Caleb's friend Lars.  There is a family next door from California that has two boys, one maybe around 12 and the other is Lars who is about 3 or 4ish.  Every morning around 6:30 Lars walks over to our little yard through the gap between bushes and comes and plays on the patio.  Sometimes Caleb gets up first, sometimes Lars gets up first, and sometimes the howler monkeys wake up first, but either way, these boys get so excited to see each other every morning and to start driving their cars all other the chairs.  Every single time we leave the condo to go somewhere, Caleb looks at me with this hilarious look and says, "where did my friend go?".  Lars is obsessed with Star Wars and there were multiple times on this trip that I looked out of the back sliding glass door and saw a little blonde boy in a chewbacca mask with a light saber marching into the yard.  Very, very funny.

Day Five in Tamarindo started out like many of the others, howler monkeys jumping in the trees, me reading in the hammock, Brandon jogging on the beach, Caleb asking me "where did my friend go?", and Lars marching through the bushes.  Mellow mornings, happy kids, gorgeous weather...it doesn't get any better.  Eventually our hunger took over and we had to rip these boys a part and go get some breakfast.  You are probably thinking, Breakfast Grinds
again you predictable bores?  Nope, new place!  We went to Waffle Monkey, and you know with a name like Waffle Monkey, it's got to be amazing.  For my little egg allergy kid, we were able to order him a vegan waffle covered in bananas and coconut.  Brandon's choice was smothered in Nutella and peanut butter, this was one hell of a breakfast waffle.  We paired our waffles with smoothies and sat out on the beach under the palm trees and laughed on how obsessed Caleb was with his breakfast.  This was actually his first waffle.  I have mastered the art of egg free pancakes, but haven't really gotten into the waffle game.  Poor kid is going to be disappointed at some point in his life to find out that not all waffles are this fabulous.  I have literally never seen him put down this much food before.

After breakfast we took our full bellies out to do some morning swimming to work off our breakfast.  We found a great shady spot to set up camp and spent a couple hours watching the surfers, swimming, and digging in the sand.  Caleb and I have developed our favorite beach game which consists on sitting in the little tide pools between the black rocks, picking up handfuls of wet sand, and then saying "dump, dump!" and throwing it into the water.  Sounds simple enough, but this game entertains Caleb and I until we need a break from the sun.  Every time the next set of waves come in to refill our pools, Caleb will yell "NEW WATER!".  When we get bored, we move to another little pool.  It's a very excellent game.  The only downside is that we both get covered head to toe in wet sand.

After some time at the beach, we had gotten as much sun as we could handle and were ready to move it over to the pool.  This is where things start to escalate quickly.  Brandon swam over to the bar to grab a cocktail and started talking with a couple from Philadelphia.  Caleb was splashing around with me and he is always a good way to start up conversations with new people.  We were having fun talking with them and were watching a giant iguana that was perched on one of the bridges in the pool.  This iguana was HUGE and just a couple of feet from us.  Everyone was in great spirits so we kept the Imperials (Costa Rican beers) flowing.  The iguana eventually jumped into the pool and actually swam across the pool and crawled out on the other side, it was wild.  You could see it's little body shimmying in the water and the spikes down it's back were above the water...so weird.  We met another family that actually also had a little boy named Kaleb.  He had a K, we had a C, but we really hit it off with them.  They were from Portland and had been traveling the past few years all through Central America with their Kaleb.  They had some great advice about traveling with a little boy to remote places and we had a blast exchanging travel stories.  All the while we were chatting, we were floating in the water and drinking cold beers.

Before we knew it, it was around 2:30 and we all needed to go to take a solid siesta.  We slept hard.  It is safe to say that we are fully in vacation mode and fully relaxed.  I woke up with dried drool on my face and saw all the pink outside in the sky.  I looked at the time and shit, it was 5:07.  I told you  that Tamarindo sunsets are not to be missed, but that they are early and fast and welp...we missed this one.  We watched the rest of it from our hammock rather than the beach as we have been all of the other nights.  We got ourselves together and eventually made our way out to dinner.  We followed our ears and our tummies and found Walter's Place.  There was a drum and guitar duo playing all sorts of nice crowd pleasers and we got a table in the sand and enjoyed a couple of margaritas and tacos.  We walked back home along the beach with our toes in the sand and enjoyed the fire dancers that were performing on the the beach.  The beach at night is so gorgeous, there are so many stars.  Caleb in fact said that he could count eight. I think there were a lot more than eight, but you catch the drift.  Another fun and gorgeous day in paradise.