89. The Things We Find Along The Side of the Road

Thursday 7/14- I am so thankful for my flexible schedule Thursdays. This morning I was feeling the urge to get out and move.  What does that mean to me? Well, I wanted to the beach of course, to get some steps in. I was even feeling generous enough to share my beach day with Breeze, so we started the day with some quick coffee and then headed to our favorite secret beach. The 3 of us walked and walked for a while until Breeze started to look tired and thirsty, and then we turned around and brought her back to the freshwater stream and the bottle of water that was in the car for her. We rested for a little while, and then walked some more before being finished at the beach for the day. 

Vultures enjoying the beach

Dana's Instagram Pose! HAHA, Just kidding.  We laugh because we see so many tourist's taking photos for Insta so we had to mimic them.

Since we would be driving past Dominical on the way home, we had a couple of errands that we had to stop for, and when we were finished with those we stopped at One Love Café, where Ramie, Taryn, Steven & Will stopped during their day in Dominical.

Enjoying a good cup of coffee while people watching

This was a very cute little café, open air like all of the restaurants that we go to here in CR, and pet friendly. We each ordered a coffee and Ramie got a cinnamon roll the size of your head, both of which were absolutely delicious. As we sat and enjoyed our breakfast, Breeze was very well behaved, laid down between us, and watched the 4 little dogs sitting at the table next to us behaved absolutely obnoxiously! 

Breeze (lower left and blending in) is waiting for a bite of cinnamon roll

We glanced at the menu even though we didn’t have any intention of eating here today, but decided that we would likely come back for breakfast or lunch one day soon because their food sounds good and the prices are some of the best that we’ve seen in the area. After finishing our delicious coffee, we decided that since we were right on the strip along the beach where all of the vendors sell their souvenirs, that we would go see what was here today. What would you know, this time we found a guy selling paintings. We have never seen this guy here before. Typically its always just the mass produced generic stuff that you would find at any gift shop around Costa Rica and just a few who sell their handmade jewelry, soaps, and things like that. The guy's name was Michi and he had so many to choose from, but only a few that were framed. A lot of them that we liked were just the painted canvas and we couldn't figure out a good way to display them, so we stuck to the already stretched/framed paintings to make our choice from. We have some big walls that need to be decorated and we thought that one of these beautiful paintings would work fabulously in our house, not to mention that his prices were very reasonable, so we decided to buy one.

We have a 50" TV to give you some size comparison

This brings me to a question for you. What’s the most random place you’ve ever bought something weird? 

Here, buying things along the side of the road is actually kind of a normal occurrence. I'm not talking about someone who is just selling their old stuff they don't want anymore. Many of these are legit vendors and businesses that set up a stand or park a truck on the side of the road to sell their items. There are some who are here for a few days, then move down to the next town for a few days and so on, and once a month or so they’ll be back and do it all again. There are others that are set up regularly at the same place. We have bought beautifully painted ceramic flower pots, a fire extinguisher, and small trees from the traveling salespeople. We have bought tapestries, fruit, and carne asada (delicious grilled kabobs) from the ones that are set up at the same places regularly. The reason I think they do this is because vehicles are expensive to buy and own here and many Ticos do not own a vehicle, which makes it difficult for them to travel to go shopping. These businesses that set up on the side of the highway are mobile and will come to the people! So now, in addition to buying a dress on the side of the road, kebobs from a grill set up in a parking lot, and ceramic flower pots from a semi parked on a vacant piece of land along a busy stretch of highway (among other things in random places) we have bought a painting from a guy who was selling them at the beach. I’m not going to lie, all of this just adds more to our adventure!! 

We've stopped and bought the carne asada many times. Its a delicious snack when your out and about

This family sells t-shirts, tapestries & other trinkets to tourists. We've bought a few things from them.

This guy sells beautiful hand painted ceramic pots, we own 3 of them.

The flower pot guy travels around the country in his truck selling ceramic pots

Saturday 7/16- After a long week of work (yes, I’m still trying to get used to working all of these hours, I really don’t know how I used to do it!!) I made sure to have a day with nothing planned. Today we didn’t even leave the house. We hung out at home, did a few chores in the morning, but had a relaxing afternoon by the pool. It’s kind of nice to have days like this once in a while but makes for very little to write about when it comes to blog time! 😉

Sunday 7/17– Friday 7/22- This was another super busy week for me, and yes, I even worked for a few hours on Sunday. In addition to volunteering at the animal sanctuary, Ramie is now spending some of his time helping our part-time neighbors Adam & Katie with their property. Adam & Katie are the couple that owns the house right next to ours that was finished shortly after our house was finished. We learned from them that the property manager that they had originally hired quit, and that they would need some help. They would be down in a few weeks for a “working vacation”, but in the meantime Ramie was helping them find some people to do some work on their house, cleaners, landscapers, and pool guys (luckily we have some connections with people who offer these services). Ramie has learned a lot after coordinating so many of our own things, so he was able to easily step in and help Adam and Katie figure out who to call for the work that they needed done as well.

While work is a big part of my life once again, we definitely try to make the most of our non-work hours. On a typical day, after I’m done with work and Ramie has finished up with his chores and tasks for the day, we usually try to relax for a little while before it gets dark (remember, it gets dark here by 6pm all year round and even earlier if it’s raining). Currently we’re in the green season (rainy season) so many afternoons and evenings we get a fair amount of rain. This means that other than dinner, there isn’t a whole lot to do. What DO we do? If it’s not raining, we might hang out in the pool for a while before dinner. After dinner, we both practice our Spanish using the Duolingo app, and once it’s dark out, now that we have the internet, we spend our evenings watching YouTube & Netflix or Ramie plays video games & I read a book. This really doesn’t sound so different from how we spent our time when we were back in MN. One thing that I do miss, though, is how late it stays light out in the summer in the North. 

أفلام GIFfrom Movies GIFs

Thursday 7/21 afternoon & overnight – 

Yes, it's the green season, that means we get more rain now than we get during the Costa Rican summer (which actually happens to fall during North America’s winter. Confusing, I know!) It doesn’t usually mean, however, that the days are wash-outs. Yes, some days are gloomy and rainy all day, but more often than not, it’s beautiful in the morning and up until early afternoon. I’d say about 50% of the time in the afternoon or evening it will start raining, and then rain most of the night. It isn’t uncommon to get a few inches of rain per week. Today didn’t start out so differently from this, but ended with abnormal results. We experienced some record-breaking rainfall for this area. It started to rain Thursday afternoon around 2pm, which is kind of normal, and rained until about 1am Friday (11 hours), which again is kind of normal, but during these 11 hours we received 9.6 inches of rain at Casa Costa Breeze. Ramie and I follow the Costa Rica Meteorological Institute Facebook page, and they reported that the official highest rainfall for the area was in Dominical, about 13 miles north of us, and they received 10.6 inches during that same span of time.

We have tried planting some squash and cantaloupe in the lower part of our property since it would have lots of space to vine and we had little bitty plants starting to grow, but it sure didn’t last long due to how wet it stays in that area. Maybe I’ll try it again during the dry season. Fortunately, it typically only takes a couple hours for the water to drain away and flow to the ocean after the rain stops, both here at our property and in most places in the Uvita area, although the soil in our yard always seems to be wet and squishy. We get to look forward this kind of pattern from now until sometime in November. I guess that’s just a price we will pay for living in this beautiful area.


Pura Vida!