"My Favorite Trip" Costa Rica by lizzytex

We decided to rent a house in CR rather than stay in a hotel, as there were nine of us (including three children). We rented a house right outside of Playa del Coco, on a hill overlooking the Bay of Papagayo. We woke up in the morning, came out onto the huge balcony and watched these amazing parrots fly by our house each morning. Not to mention how amazing it was to watch the sun rise and fall from our balcony every day.

The house we rented was on top of a hill, and at the bottom was a black sand beach. We met a family there who had retired to CR from Belgium. They were running a little B&B on the coast. They had a daughter the same age as mine who was already fluent in 3 languages! She and my daughter got along wonderfully and played at the beach all afternoon. The beach there had amazing waves and quite a strong undercurrent, so I was forced to stay in the water with the girls all afternoon for fear they'd get dragged off to sea!

The view from our house

This was the view from our balcony. We had fantastic weather the entire week, and many days there would be lots of sailboats harboured in our little cove below.

There were SO MANY BUGS!! Of course, it is in the middle of the rain forest so not sure why I was so surprised. When we got off the plane it was about 8:00 at night, and already dark. There was one of those tall lightposts at the airport and it was just covered up in all types of flying bugs. The airport terminal is all outside, so while we were waiting for our luggage there were bugs everywhere. Then when we got to our house, we found a scorpion in one of the bathrooms. That REALLY freaked everybody out! I guess if you live there you are used to it, and one of the staff at our house told us he had been bit three or four times in his life so it probably was not as big a deal to him. So he told us they like to hide in shoes or in sheets, so you can bet that every night before going to bed we were shaking out all the beds and always looked in our shoes before putting them on!! We saw another one the next day by the pool, but luckily did not see any more the rest of our trip.

• Pros:Beautiful mountains and beaches, lovely people
• Cons:Scorpions, snakes and frogs - oh my!