Extreme Vacation, Family Style

(with apologies to the Costa Rican Tourist Board)

I think every family should take a vacation together at least once a year. Family vacations are a time to get away from the day-to-day routines and stresses and reacquaint yourselves with what makes your family special. They’re also a time when our children are particularly well-behaved since we still have them convinced that if they aren’t, we might just leave them at the side of the road at some point on our journey.

In our house, my husband plans our vacations. I only have one rule: he can do anything he wants with the first four days; the last three must be spent in a resort hotel.

This compromise has worked out pretty well for me. While the kids were young I could always count on him selecting hotels with pools, microwaves, Kid Clubs and room service. As the kids got older, however, I began to be subjected to vacations that required a little more “participation” on my part. These included RV motoring, camping, working farms and dude ranches. One year, my husband was inspired to vault us into a category I call “Extreme Vacation”.

It began with the travel brochures for Costa Rica. They were beautiful: Lush jungle; sparkling, blue oceans; a variety of wildlife only seen in magazines. He was hooked.

Let’s just say that Costa Rica was not for the faint-hearted. Imagine my surprise when I was asked to load myself into a five-seat Cessna for a one-hour flight to our first destination, the eco-lodge. This required heavy medication because the pilots, after telling you that 25 pounds per person is the limit on luggage, immediately loaded everything we had into the plane– without bothering to weigh it. They must have had weekend jobs that included crop dusting, tree trimming and aerial stunt flying because they incorporated all of that into our one-hour flight. Our daughter, 11-years old at the time, immediately requested an air-sickness bag. Landing was fun. Only the pilot, flying by touch apparently, can find the landing area which materialized as a strip of earth about the size of a Band-aid®, but only after I had assumed the crash position and given myself last rites.

Upon landing I watched as our luggage was carefully and lovingly loaded onto a donkey cart which then started off down the pristine beach. We were not so fortunate. We got to hike to the lodge after the donkey cart, about two miles, in searing heat and humidity.

I soon realized my first mistake was failing to look up the definition of “eco-tourism” or “eco-lodge” before agreeing to the trip. I assumed it meant you recycled your empty alcoholic beverage containers. Did I mention you sleep in tents? On cots? With screens instead of windows? One communal bathhouse that is up a hill away from your tent? Turns out we had electricity only two hours of each day. None of it in our tents.

We headed up to dinner at the sound of the conch shell. There we got a brief orientation about all the things that could kill us. Turns out, just about everything can, or at least make us very sick. The guides are particularly knowledgeable. They tell me there are over 500 varieties of trees in the jungle plus exotic birds. I wondered how many of them can kill me.

As night fell, bats come out and frogs, large ones, began to croak in the forest. Other things began to make their sounds, too, but I wasn’t sure I wanted to ask what those were. 

After dinner we started back down the hill to our tents with our flashlights. At some point I became lucid enough to notice that the ground was parting in front of me like the Red Sea. This was not because ocean breezes were blowing through waving grass. It was because every insect and reptile was hurrying to get out of our way. At one point, my trusty flashlight beam picked up a spider large enough to require a license plate. My 12-year old, exhausted from the first day of travel, immediately became hysterical. I had soiled myself, but maintained calm as I still hoped to convince the kids they could sleep in their own tent by themselves.

Being in Costa Rica was like being in God’s Pick-A-Part lot. It’s as if God said “Gee, I have all these extra insect parts, now what can I build?” Every insect reminded me of the toys from under the bad kid’s bed in ‘Toy Story’. The aptly named “Halloween Crab” is purple and orange with bright white spots on its back. At least that’s what I remembered before I started screaming.

That night we took our ridiculously small can of insect repellent and sprayed it liberally around the screens, doorway, and steps of the kids’ tent. It was like using whipped cream as a roadblock for a Humvee, but we convinced the kids they’d be fine. And they were. I, on the other hand, stayed up all night trying to convince my bladder that I didn’t have to pee. I resolved not to drink anything after 4pm for the rest of the time I’m there because I was not going to walk up that hill to the bathroom in the dark.

The next few days brought adventures for which I was completely unprepared. There was hiking, horseback riding and jungle canopy tours and I dutifully participated in all of them.

My husband arranged a hike in the national park. Education, apparently, is real important in the jungle because as you paid the entrance fee to the park rangers and went in, you passed a table of large and small jars that contained specimens of, again, everything that could kill you.

I learned a lot. Capuchin monkeys, for example, although real cute up close, can shred your legs like string cheese- particularly if you insist on taking flash photos of them. “Poison dart frogs” are called that for a reason and unless you want to see what medical care is like in Costa Rica, it’s best you resist the urge to touch them. Wolf spiders really do have teeth. “Jesus Christ” lizards really can walk on water but you’ll also find yourself saying “Geez-US” every time you almost step on one.

Every now and then during these adventures my husband would holler back at me to ask the time to which I would reply: “Time to swat another INSECT off my arm!”

Special attention should be paid to the jungle canopy tours that gave us another angle from which to view wildlife. There were two types. We chose the one with less bodily harm liability. Ours merely required us to sit in a sling while the guides winched us up 120 feet into a tree. And left us there for an hour. We also took a “zip line” tour. The kids must have annoyed us because we sent them alone on this one. It was pretty much the equivalent of strapping yourself to a thin cable at the top of, say, the Matterhorn and letting go. Our kids slid along the cable at breakneck speed from one platform to another. We also were offered the option of spending the night on one of these platforms. I’d see you in Hell, first, before I spent a night alone, on a platform, in the jungle, without a bathroom.

And so it went for four days. My legs took on the misery of bruised Jello from all the exertion. At one point they were shaking so badly I couldn’t tie my shoes. At the start of every new adventure my husband would look at me and say: “Honey, it’s a three hour tour”. Every time he said that I began to sing the ‘Gilligan’s Island’ theme song.

But, as promised and as is tradition, we eventually made our way to the resort hotel. I realized that I was relaxed. The Costa Rican brochures had already come alive for me; Beautiful beaches; lush, tropical scenery, unparalleled sunsets, spectacular views; great people and wildlife; and some of the best food anywhere. To celebrate my resurrection I immediately ordered a massage and a tall, cold, frosty one. Unfortunately for me, it was someone else’s resurrection–the start of the Easter week holiday and all alcohol sales were banned for the remainder of our trip.

People tell me our vacation sounds wonderful and that, with time, I’ll have a great perspective. Our pictures show a fabulous adventure that our kids remember to this day. My husband wants to plan a return trip; our kids want to tackle surfing and sport fishing. I figure I’ll have just the right perspective in a few more years. As long as we go on any week but Easter week.