Fifteen hours of PADI e-learning. Eight pool dives over two Saturdays. It all came down to this: stepping onto our dive boat (the Ballena, which I hoped would be a good omen) and steaming off through Drake Bay toward Isla del Cano National Park and the first of our open water certification “checkout” dives.

There was a whole party’s worth of adventurers on the boat: four scuba divers (Steve and me, and our new best friends Garry and Donna), two couples planning to snorkel, the boat captain, a guide for the snorkelers, and our PADI-certified divemaster and instructor, Quique.

Quique’s relaxed demeanor put us instantly at ease – he clearly knew every inch of the dive sites we’d be visiting, and he was friendly and calm. I liked him immediately, and breathed easier knowing we’d be in his charge for our first dives. In addition to guiding us around the dive sites, Quique would be testing Steve and me on our dive skills and deciding whether or not we’d pass our checkout dives and become officially certified open water divers. I hoped I’d impress him – at least enough to pass.

Suiting up and ready to giant-step into the water. Begin (BCD), With (Weights), Review (Releases), And (Air), Friend (Final Check) – and we’re ready. I left my camera on the boat for the first dive – wanting no distractions and no extra gear to keep track of. I figured if the first dive went well, I’d take my waterproof camera down for the next dive. And the first dive did go well. I calmly flooded and cleared my mask – a skill I was worried about, since I wear contact lenses – and demonstrated retrieving a loose regulator. The skills and the dive were over before I knew it, and we were reuniting with the snorkelers for a surface interval on Cano Island. As Steve and I sat on the sand in a carefully selected spot (Quique was much more nervous about us being brained by a coconut than he was about losing us underwater, for some reason) we agreed – we could definitely see how people could get addicted to this.

The surface interval (necessary so our bodies could clear nitrogen before we headed back underwater) felt like it dragged on forever – but it ended eventually and we were back on the boat, and soon, back under the surface.

Is it just me, or does my hair look freaking amazing?

I made it my mission to never, ever, EVER lose sight of Quique.

Quique led us expertly around the dive site. I felt like I was never quite where he wanted me to be. He had such perfect buoyancy that he could hover an inch above sensitive coral without touching it. Me, on the other hand? Not so perfect buoyancy. The last thing I wanted was to hurt a coral or damage sensitive seafloor, so I was erring on the side of swimming higher above the reef. Quique kept motioning to me to come down. Eventually I did get my buoyancy more consistent.

In addition to guiding us around the dive sites and testing us on our open water dive skills, Quique was invaluable in blowing bubble rings (seriously so impressive) and pointing out wildlife. See what’s down there below my fin?

How about now?

I love sea turtles, and I could barely contain my excitement. I thought I’d be hyperventilating with panic at the idea of a fish brushing up against me, but the closest I came to hyperventilating was out of wild joy. Swimming alongside a sea turtle was – hands-down – one of the coolest experiences of my life.

Oh, and there was coral too.

And my dive buddy!

The visibility wasn’t awesome – apparently it can be a bit variable and this was pretty much as bad as it gets – but the cloudy water was the result of a lot of plankton and other tiny creatures that the fish and other animals fed on. Can’t begrudge them a meal! And honestly, cloudy or not, our first ocean dives were such an incredible experience that we couldn’t have wished for anything more.

Only thing that was a bit scary: a few stingrays, including one that definitely did not like us being there. He flicked his tail up in a definite GO AWAY, and we skedaddled.

(It was not this guy; it was one of his cousins. This guy was much more chill. But still – I gave them a wiiiiiiiiiiiide berth.) Kind of surprised myself by being as anxious about the rays as I was; we were surrounded by fish and even saw a few reef sharks, but it was the rays that really unnerved me. Go figure.

Absolutely incredible experience, being in this alien and yet familiar world.

We went through a few more skills and paused for a safety stop under Quique’s watchful eye. (He had an iron grip on our BCDs during the safety stop. As Donna quipped later, “He would have had to do so much paperwork if you’d gone popping up to the surface…”) And then before we knew it – and definitely before we were ready for the dive to end – we were breaking the surface of the water and switching from regulators to snorkels.

And already so stoked for our next day of diving!

Next week: a surface interval at Isla del Cano National Park, one of the most beautiful spots on the planet!

By the time we had settled in at our Osa Peninsula hotel, it was mid-afternoon and we started looking around for something to do. It was hot, and we didn’t have enough time before dinner for a full-scale expedition somewhere (even if that had been an option, which it wasn’t – excursions all took place in the mornings, to avoid the hottest part of the day). But we were itchy to start adventuring, after two days of mostly sitting around on planes. Kayaking was the obvious choice.

We dumped our bags in our room at the inn (reached by a flight of about eighty – no joke – outdoor stairs), changed into swimsuits and sprayed ourselves liberally with reef-friendly sunscreen, and we were ready to go. Grabbing kayaks from the dock couldn’t have been easier; we just sauntered up to the hotel employee working the area, and we were paddling off into Drake Bay in moments.

It does. not. get. more. gorgeous.

Longtime readers may remember that I am a summer person. I love the sun and am almost never uncomfortably hot. Steve isn’t a sun-worshipper, but hey – in February, mid-eighties feels like pure luxury even if you usually prefer cool temps. Or at least, it does for him.

As we were paddling around, exploring the nooks and crannies of Drake Bay, it occurred to me that even though we are avid paddlers, I don’t think either of us had ever kayaked in another country before. (I may have, one time, in Mexico when I was twenty – but I’m pretty sure I snorkeled instead that afternoon.) So – our first international kayaking! Exciting stuff.

(Don’t mind the big water droplet on my hat. I was experimenting with my new waterproof camera.)

Drake Bay was gorgeous and the sunshine felt incredible, but eventually we had poked around as much as we wanted to – and there were a few bigger swells as some of the larger boats passed us by, which made Steve a bit nervous, since we weren’t wearing life jackets. I’m a little more relaxed about that sort of thing; I figure if I fall off a sit-on-top kayak into deep water what’s the big deal, really, I can swim and I’m not going to hit my head on anything… but his point was fair and I wanted to honor his comfort levels, so we turned back toward the hotel. I hadn’t seen anyone else out kayaking, so I mused aloud that I’d noticed what looked like a little river spurring off from the smaller bay where our hotel was located, and what about exploring that?

Ahhhhh. Deep green waters, hanging bridge – now this is classic Costa Rica, right here.

We paddled upriver, mindful of the receding tides and on the lookout for crocodiles (didn’t see any – this time). As we slowly meandered along the shoreline, Steve stopped paddling abruptly and pointed excitedly at a tree on the bank.

OH YES, MY FRIENDS, THAT IS A TOUCAN.

I am a gigantic bird nerd, as everyone knows (because I literally talk about birds all the time, ALL THE TIME) but I’d never seen a truly exotic bird in the wild. This was a huge treat! The only thing that kept me from falling out of my kayak was the knowledge that we were paddling in croc-inhabited waters.

Seriously, does kayaking get better than this? Between Drake Bay and the river off our hotel grounds, we had a treasure trove to explore. We reluctantly turned our kayaks downstream and headed back to the hotel once the river narrowed and became impassible.

As sad as we were to hang up the kayaks, we had a week of exciting adventures ahead of us – so the first afternoon’s adventuring boded very well indeed. And the day got even better from there: after we’d washed off the sunscreen and gotten into presentable outfits for dinner, we wandered back down to the previously deserted dining pavilion and found it hopping with our fellow hotel guests, who were all chatting in a group. Steve and I got ourselves drinks and started to dissect our afternoon’s adventure between ourselves, but were quickly roped into conversation by a gregarious hotel guest who explained that the dining was communal and everyone bonded over dinner, and she was adopting us. She asked what we had planned for the next day, and we told her we were going scuba diving. At that, our fellow hotel guest perked up and told us she had to introduce us to the couple we’d be diving with, because they had been wondering who the other divers on the boat would be. She gestured to a man who seemed to be about our age, and told him she’d found his dive buddies. He immediately broke into a huge grin, and introduced himself as “Garry – and my other half is Donna.” Garry and Donna (who quickly joined her husband) had eighty dives under their belts, which blew our minds. We confessed that we were newbie divers, planning to do our certification dives for our open water course on this trip, and we hoped we wouldn’t hold them back too much. They laughed and assured us, kindly but obviously sincerely, that they hadn’t been diving for almost three years between life and COVID, and that a nice shallow, easy dive sounded like exactly what they were looking for, and we’d be very well-matched indeed. The dinner gong sounded and we followed our new dive buddies to the group table, where we sat until everyone else had gone to bed, chatting furiously and discovering that we were exactly aligned on everything from cocktail preferences to salty senses of humor. The next day’s dive suddenly felt much less scary, and much more approachable with our new best diving friends.

Did they survive their first day of scuba diving? Check back next Friday!

As I promised last week, I’ve got more travel posts coming – Fridays will be for travel for the foreseeable future, actually – and now that we’ve said goodbye to the deserts of Utah and Colorado, it’s time for something completely different: the rainforest!

Longtime readers may recall a dropped hint or two about a major adventure that Steve and I had planned for February to March of 2022. This is not that trip. We had big plans to hike in Patagonia and then kayak in Antarctica. The research was done, the trip was selected, booked, and fully paid for – and then it got postponed, thanks to COVID. We spent a few weeks trying to figure out a way to salvage our Antarctica trip, but in the end the trip the company was able to offer as a replacement was so radically different from what we had planned that we decided it made more sense to postpone it for a year and get the trip we dreamed of, just twelve months later. So Antarctica will still happen, but not until 2023, and to assuage our disappointment (fully recognizing that we are extremely privileged to be able to go on that trip at all, let alone to pivot so quickly to a different adventure when plans changed) we started talking about a “consolation trip” somewhere else. I tossed out the idea of Costa Rica, and after researching a few other possibilities (Botswana and Thailand, primarily) we decided that Costa Rica made the most sense.

Costa Rica is an incredibly beautiful country with a huge variety of landscapes and wildlife, so we planned a trip that would allow us to fully experience its biodiversity. Our first stop was to be the Osa Peninsula – a spot that National Geographic has called “the most biologically intense place on Earth.” Because Osa is quite remote – definitely the most “off the beaten path” part of Costa Rica – we discovered that the best way to get there would be to fly into the capital city of San Jose, spend a night, and then shove off early via a domestic flight. It ended up being perfect. We spent an afternoon enjoying poolside cocktails and this stunning view (above!) from our hotel room, and then the next day it was back to the airport – this time to the domestic terminal.

Now the adventure really begins!

The domestic terminal was tiny! The boarding passes were laminated slips of paper showing our destination and boarding order. While other travelers boarded their flights to Tamarindo and Liberia, we waited our turn and eventually crossed the tarmac to the tiny plane that would take us to Drake Bay Airport.

Steve and I had boarding passes numbers one and two, so we got the money seats – right behind the pilots! Watching them go through their pre-flight checks and fire up all of their instruments was fascinating.

Not going to lie: although the pilots were clearly extremely competent and experienced, flying in a tiny prop is always going to be a bit of an adventure. We took off and I crossed my fingers that no birds flew into our propellers. (Spoiler: no birds, all good.) I was expecting major turbulence as we flew over the mountains, but the flight was surprisingly smooth. And the views were staggering.

It’s a short flight to Osa – just a hop, skip and a jump over the mountains, and before I knew it we were cruising over crystal blue seas and past white sand beaches. The flight itself felt like part of the adventure, and I was almost sorry when we touched down at Drake Bay Airport.

Our hotel – Aguila de Osa Rainforest and Marine Adventure Lodge – had a car waiting for us. We tossed our luggage in the back and soon were bumping along the dirt roads in town, through stream crossings, and all the way to the beach for the next part of our ride.

Like many of the hotels and lodges on Osa, ours was not accessible by road. It’s possible to hike in, but when you are toting big backpacks full of clothes and gear, boat is much nicer. Along with a few other carloads of travelers, we were dropped off on a pristine beach, where a line of boats waited to take everyone to their respective destinations. These guys were our ride.

Ready for wind and waves!

Like the flight, the boat ride was over almost too soon! After two long days of travel, I was enjoying the clear blue water and the refreshing breeze and was almost sorry when we pulled off the main bay into a little cove. But then this loomed up in front of us:

Gorgeous! One of the concierges was waiting on the dock to welcome us. She guided us up to the dining pavilion, handed us welcome drinks, and settled in to chat with us about Osa, the wildlife we would see, and our plans for the next few days.

The property was beautiful – all open-air except for the hotel rooms, with mosaics lining the walkways and warm wooden buildings. I explored the whole place over the next few days, and every detail charmed me.

Of course, there were two spots that we spent most of our time on shore: the PADI dive center, and… the bar. More to come on both counts!

Next week: we waste no time getting paddles into Drake Bay!

Continuing on our epic day-before-Thanksgiving drive into Utah, Dan and Danielle steered us to our next stop: Dead Horse Point State Park. They promised sweeping views, a nice spot for our picnic lunch, and “Uncle Dan’s Potassium Lecture.”

And delivered on all three: here’s the view from our lunch spot (right?!) complete with potash pools (see above, icy blue pools in the canyon). Dan treated us to a dissertation about the chemical properties of potash and the history of potassium in the United States until Steve and I ruined it by singing Borat’s national anthem. #IYKYK.

Kazakhstan, number one exporter potassium, all other countries have inferior potassium, bum-ba-dum-bum-bum-bum-bum.

We’re sorry, Dan. We promise to listen next time.

Eventually, Dan gave up on his potassium lecture and pointed us to this incredible sight: I’d always wanted to see a horseshoe bend!

Lunch spots don’t get better than this!

Next week: last Colorado post (for now; we’ll be back!) and it’s a fitting conclusion to an epic trip.

Before we headed down from Colorado National Monument (bound for pizza at The Hot Tomato, a famous spot in Fruita) Dan pulled us all off the road at an overlook to take in a really astonishing view. A hanging canyon! I’d never seen one before.

The vistas were just spectacular. I’ll let the pictures speak for themselves.

Can’t get enough.

I could have stayed for hours, drinking in this view.

Sadly, kids’ tolerance for spectacular vistas doesn’t quite match adults’ – and eventually, reluctantly, we had to tear ourselves away to feed the little critters. But the good news is: I can close my eyes and get right back to this spot anytime I want.

What’s your favorite scenic overlook?