Living La Pura Vida

Feb. 7th 2009 - Had a bit of a rough start to the trip. It rained all the way from SD to LA. Traffic was weird and then came the cascading PMS! First Andrea, then me and later on that night her aunt. We arrived in Venice and walked a round a bit with Andrea not feeling well at all. We stopped for lunch @ a fun spot called Mao's Kitchen with vintage Chinese Communist posters on the wall and $1 vegetarian egg rolls. It cheered us up a bit.

I love visiting Venice for the non-LA feel to it and its high concentration of modern and contemporary architecture. This trip was only a few hours but there was still a lot of interesting residences to gaze at.

The night was spent in Andrea's aunt's smoky bed. Well, anything is smoky when you're a non-smoker. Her Aunt, Annette Harper, is an LA Actress. Her vanity plate reads "I M SO LA", she has Ellen DeGeneres cell in her phone contacts and you can see her makeup room to the left and her last movie here.

Feb. 8th, 2009 - Annette had to make two trips to the airport because I invoked Murphy's law and left the passports in my car causing us to miss our hopper flight to Phoenix. Andrea doesn't get mad at me and why, I don't know. In fact, she's so sweet about it you would've thought I'd just presented her with a silver bowl of strawberry ice-cream and VIP tickets to the Roller Derby. Meanwhile, I'm ready to throw myself onto the 405 Hwy for being so dumb. We make our connecting flight to San Jose without further adieu and spend our first night in Central America. Oh, and US Airways has become a money vaccuum! no complimentary drinks during the 5hr flight and it's $2 for a coke or water. Watch out, they'll start charging for bathroom visits soon.

Feb. 9th, 2009. - Stickerface looks so beautiful in the morning, at night, and in another country. We take a cab to the San Jose municipal airport and board a twin prop for Quepos. This is my first ride in a small plane and except for a little motion sickness I'm loving the immediacy of it! Climbing up the steps right off the runway, watching the guys throw backpacks into the nose and rear of the plane, hatch closing and engines reving with no instruction on seatbelts and oxygen masks and then we're up like a carnival ride but with pilots instead of carnies.

Thrills and all, I am glad the flight only lasts 25 minutes. We land in the middle of an African Palm plantation and it feels like we're in the middle of nowhere. Here's Andrea, running down the runway...

In Quepos, our first excursion was on a jungle path behind our Hostel, to a clearing, past a cow, through a barbed wire fence, then another fence, down a road and then out to a small beach. I get my first adventure scar from the barbed wire. The sun is starting to set and the light is so warm and so soaking, it soaks right into you. Andrea's green eyes morph into an Amber color from the setting sun, or maybe it's the Howler monkey spirits taking over.

We hang out at the hidden beach and entertain ourselves with the miniature crabs whose mobile homes are made out of every size and shape of shell. They're very sensitive to movement. Their legs instantly retract and they go rolling to a stop.

The sun slips out of sight and we walk back, crossing paths with two women we'd met earlier, one Italian and one English. They know the way back and lead us through the jungle path in complete darkness.