road trip! part one

so, grandpa jerry gave us the keys to his uber-nice condo in costa rica for two weeks right after i graduated. that is very neat. so we packed up the truck and covered everything in husky garbage bags and drove 22 hours (no breaks! 1 am saw some interesting moments, and by 5 or 6... let's just say mebbe we could've planned it better) to bedford, tx to visit the morrill family. we watched the news telling us we would die if we got on a plane and ate a lot of good food with the parentals and bradley, and then we got on a plane and headed to san jose, en route to jaco. it was nick's first legit trip out of the country, and i don't think there are too many places that could be a better place to instigate an intro into foreign beauty:


i think we'll introduce him to the other kind of foreign on our next trip...

even though we got a free condo (thank you, grandpa!) and free flights (thank you, milly!), we're still college kids, so our budget was not quite endless. we still managed to zipline through the jungle, surf--in the broadest sense of the term; it was more akin to flailing and/or drowning, but nick did get recruited by a bunch of 14-year-old kids to try sandboarding with them-- white-water raft the cleanest river in all the americas, and get somewhat tan. yeah, baby. the rest of our time was spent gorging ourselves on gallo pinto on delicious corn tortillas and platanos, nick's new fave, and roaming the beaches and mountains in search of "real live locals!" we found some. imagine that. proof: costa ricans are awesome, especially dona marta here. we met her on our off-roading adventure--you will understand this feat when you understand what we were driving... we also spent an embarrassing amount of [sadly, fruitless] time and effort in search of the local video store's stolen copy of slumdog millionaire in the hope that we would thus cap off our indian experience in costa rica: nick had just finished reading life of pi, and we both read shantaram out loud from beginning to end (936 pages--go us!) during the trip, so we figured... why not? ps, anybody who hasn't heard of shantaram, go get it now! except you may want the edited version, courtesy of my mum. the language of many of the characters is rather, um, non-kosher. mum's black sharpie did wonders, though. all in all, a thoroughly amazing voyage.

oh, and we drove a very compact golf cart, cleverly disguised as a street-worthy vehicle.

yes, we off-roaded. sort of.