Day 11 – 6 April 2011

The night went about as perfectly as planned. We couldn't go to the hot springs until 10:00, we only had a bit left to pack, and breakfast was coming at 8:00. Alexis got up around 7:00 and slowly stirred, then stood up in her crib and was babbling a little. She was only about ten feet from where Nicole was sleeping on the bed, so I'm sure she was sending vibes to tell her it was time to get up. I rolled out of bed and started walking to the crib. Alexis got all jumpy when I was getting closer and was so happy to see us. I passed her to Nicole on the bed and she got her ear-to-ear giggly grin.

The next few hours consisted solely of getting ready, feeding everyone, and packing a majority of our luggage so we could go to the hot springs one last time before checkout. We knew that in San Jose we would need to repack to go home; making sure luggage weights were okay and we had everything we wanted to have in our carry-ons.

Now was the good time for taking pictures because there weren't many people there yet, and so we did. It felt great to get in again and my shoulders really do feel a hundred times better after having carried Alexis in the backpack for over ten hours in the last few days. Our time in the hot springs have come to an end, but hopefully just for now. It would be great to come back again when we can both go in and not worry so much about watching Alexis. It's so great to see her having so much fun, but it would also be nice to just watch her have fun…from a few hundred feet away.

Our driver to San Jose showed up around the same time that we went down to check out, so that worked out pretty well. This driver did not speak much English, either. The drive was way worse than Google maps described it. I expected less than two hours and mostly straight paved roads. Unfortunately, it was almost two and a half hours and 80% was winding roads that made Nicole and I nauseous. Alexis slept for a good bit of this one, which really helped, and then ate snacks for pretty much the rest of the way. Thank goodness that was the last road travel (the drive to the airport on Friday is less than fifteen minutes)!

The hotel staff spoke perfect English and even talked to us in English more than Spanish. We made our way to the room, and again, went down to the restaurant for lunch. This lunch was much more our style and we both actually ordered cheeseburgers. We spent much of the afternoon just hanging around the hotel and got some information on what to do tomorrow in San Jose, as well as what was around the hotel within walking distance. Alexis loved to crawl around the hotel lobby and was even caught on camera by the paparazzi (other foreign hotel guests that felt like they needed to take her picture smiling and clapping). She wandered over with me to see the turtles, Pinky, Shrek, Fiona, and Igor.

We wandered up the side street along our hotel and went in to get some smoothies. We now noticed that places around here don't take US dollars, but only colones. I have a few left over from change that I've gotten from previous purchases, but might need to exchange more at the hotel because I wanted to bring some back with us. We stopped in to the Fresh Market which was like an upscale grocery store that compared a lot like Whole Foods back home. They had all kinds of good stuff that would be good if we didn't already have breakfast buffet included with our hotel stay. We also saw a pizza place and a sit-down Italian restaurant that we'll keep in mind for tomorrow, if necessary. It was getting pretty dark by now and Alexis needed a bath. She laughed and splashed, as usual, and loved being in the water again. She was very tired, so went down pretty easily. We relaxed, read a little, and caught up on my blog before also going to bed before 21:00.