Everything we’ve read said it takes a while before it feels like a way of living and not just a vacation.  It’s been said that it takes a few months until you can really truly unplug; until you don’t know which day of the week it is, and until the hours of the day are only a concept used when you’re at work so you know when office hours stop and happy hour starts.  What they don’t say is that the process of finding this travel nirvana isn’t a casual walk through the park; until it is….

First let’s preface this all by disclosing upfront that in no way, shape, or form is this a complaint for the lifestyle we’ve chosen to adopt for the indefinite future.  End disclosure. 

It took a full day of planes and airports to arrive at San Jose, Costa Rica‘s Airport at 2AM, glad for a room ripe with dampness bordering on mildew, and a clean enough pillow and bed.  The next day required an all day thrill ride through narrow twisting mountain roads complete with buses that had missed their turn and luckily found the ditch on the uphill side of the mountain.  We found the hostel in Quepos without too much trouble and settled into what would aptly be later dubbed “the jail-cell”.  In every sense of the word, burnt out from the trek and the heat, we settled into our first night’s rest in paradise; sweating relentlessly on a mattress so painfully uncomfortable it must have actually been a box spring. 

The next morning we admired each other’s newly acquired boxspring bruises, downed a bottle of bathtub temperature water, and hightailed for the beach in search of a breeze and cooler water.  It wasn’t until the snap-pop of the first quasi-cold Imperial, while watching the local surf camp get steam rolled by the swell, that this started to feel like vacation, and not a TV special of some busted version of The Amazing Race.  An early dinner in town put us back in the jail-cell  asleep before our west cost friends were done with happy hour. 

it wasn’t until the next morning that we realized our box spring was in fact just an upside-down mattress.  Weather it was a sick joke, or an attempt to cover up someone else’s mishap, our rightsized mattress was a little bit of movie worthy foreshadow. 

We made our way down the road to the national park only to find a sunbaked hour plus long line waiting for us.  A local promised us swift entry into the shaded forrest for a small premium; which fifteen minutes later left us sweltering at the bus stop outside the park gates, fairly sure we’d been hustled.  At minute sixteen, and not a minute too soon, our telescope toting, Tanqueray green clad guide appeared to usher us past the crowds and through the gates into what would be the first taste of our aforementioned travel nirvana. 

We’re only just beginning the journey but this particular walk in the park brought us step after step closer to forgetting the hours and days and closer to finding our own jungle rhythm.   

The photos that follow were taken by us in Manuel Antonio National Park (if you visit here we can’t recommend enough hiring a tour guide!)