Continued from San Jose Day 3 Part 1.

Kids are excited. It’s chilly up here, feels like a low 60s. And look at those giant leaves!

Just pre columbian gold, unguarded by anyone in the visitor’s center. Or maybe these are replicas?

We are taking a short hike from the yellow 1 to the green crater up top.

Sexy.

About halfway to the crater, it started looking really foggy. This does not bode well for us being able to see the crater today…

I’m still hopeful that we’ll be able to get glimpses of the crater.

Such massive leaves.

Crater right up ahead. My optimism shattered.

We can’t see shit other than an ocean of whiteness. Poo. We came all this way to see cloud…I guess at least we smelled the volcano. Now the kids know volcanos smells like farts.

They’ve got a gas monitoring station here right by the crater. The light blinked blue the whole time we were here.

There’s a volcano crater somewhere over there. I guess since the crater sits down lower, the cloud/fog just settles right into it.

While we were waiting to see if maybe the cloud would clear out, it started raining a little. Cool, maybe the rain/wind would blow some of the fog away? Then a park ranger came by and told us that a dangerous storm was headed our way and we should stay up here for 5 more minutes max before heading down. Soon after that we heard lots of thunder and hid under a purpose built shelter building by the crater. It started pouring rain, and we all put on and zipped up our raincoats.

The rain was getting harder, and thunder louder, it doesn’t seem like the fog will clear up, time to head down to the parking lot.

About a third of the way to the parking lot, it was pouring so hard and thundering so much that we again took shelter at small building that housed restrooms. There were many other people caught out by the sudden rain that are also taking shelter here. It’s not so much the rain by the constant thunder and lightening that has us worried. We measured the distance of the lightening by counting seconds and dividing by 5 until we would hear thunder. They were indeed very close to us, easily less than a quarter of a mile. I guess we’ll stay here until the worst part of the storm passes to avoid getting hit by lightening.

Little KL was pretty anxious while we waited. He kept on wanting to keep walking down to our car even though we told him that we’t can’t leave yet because there’s too much lightening.

We took shelter here for about 20 minutes until the lightening was slightly better and we couldn’t handle Little KL constantly bugging us to leave. Alright, let’s go and let’s go quickly down to our car.

It’s been pouring rain this entire time and the walking path was flooded. Our shoes were soaked through almost immediately.

After about 10 minutes of very brisk walking in the storm, we reached our car safely. We didn’t see the volcano crater, but I hope the kids had a memorable experience of being caught in a thunderstorm on top of a volcano in Costa Rica.

We are all soaking wet and cold by the time we got in the car. But we made it! That’s enough adventure for the day, let’s head back to San Jose and back to the comfort of our apartment. Little KL does that thing with his finger tips whenever he gets stressed and anxious.

Almost immediately after we started driving, I keep on getting a audible ding and a message saying that the passenger rear door was open. We had this same issue very briefly when we first picked up the car and it went away shortly, but it seems like it’s here to stay this time. Every time I took a right turn the car would ding and show the message. And when I made a left turn, the dinging and message would go away. How annoying!!! We tried opening and shutting the door again, but it was no help. Finally after a while we couldn’t take it anymore, we found a place to pull over and I put one of my wet sock that I took off from the rain and wedged it between the door sensor and the door to give the sensor some more pressure. That finally did the trick!

Look at all that coffee.

Unhappy stick person.

Driving by the airport and all these cars are pulled over. And these just airplane enthusiasts watching the planes at the fence line?

Back to San Jose.

Woah, look at that tree trunk!!!!

Look at that rainbow colored tree trunk, no filter. I thought it was some sort of eucalyptus tree, but RL said no. So I asked RL to google rain trunked trees in Costa Rica and guess what, it’s a rainbow eucalyptus tree. Ha!

Can’t be San Jose without traffic jams and Google rerouting us multiple times.

Hoonigan and Stay Humble. Confused much?

This was quite the incline to drive up.

Oh no, a giant bus turned in front of us as we were maybe 3 blocks from home. Then for some reason, these last few blocks too us forever to navigate through.

Ah, it makes sense now. There was a crash half a block from our apartment.

Finally back after a long day of driving and getting caught in the rain storm.

The dirty and wet sock that solved the dinging door sensor. Not an elegant solution, but at the same time, an elegant solution.

It turned out to be a rainy day and would rain most of the afternoon in San Jose.

In other news, we did hear back from our airbnb host regarding the zoo. Apparently it closed down permanently not too long ago. She doesn’t know the reason, but we won’t be visiting the zoo this trip. Would have been nice for the zoo to update their website or their many social media accounts to reflect this. Instead, all web pages for the zoo as exactly as they were before they shut down. Super lame and lazy.

After chilling for a couple of hours in our apartment, it’s time to head out for dinner. Not only do many restaurants not open for lunch until 12pm, many restaurants don’t open for dinner until 6pm either. It’s almost 6pm now so we are walking in the rain in search of dinner.

And the hit or miss Costa Rican opening hours strikes again!! The restaurant we picked was supposed to be open, but as you can see, it’s locked and closed!

It’s raining kinda hard, so we need to find another restaurant quickly close by that’s open. Ugh.

Oh, is this restaurant about to open? Yes, but it turned out that it’s just a bar.

Oh wait, what have we here. This place just opened on the dot at 6pm. I had it bookmarked a a potential dining spot, I guess we are eating here tonight.

It’s a fancy restaurant, and we are in flip flops and rain coats. Surprised they sat us.

Let’s have another special dining experience last we did last night. RL and I decided to go for their tasting menu.

They served the kids some appetizers.

This was the appetizer. It was a savory bite, but the kids didn’t enjoy it too much.

We also got the wine pairing along with our dinner. Excited to do a food/wine tasting here in Costa Rica. Wasn’t on our agenda for this trip, but cool to have stumbled into it.

The whole food tasting menu is based on the chef’s childhood memories. So this is milk and cereal.

Except, it was really ceviche(fish hiding under the “cereal”) that’s made to look like a bowl of cereal.

Lunchbox.

Kid’s food. One order of steak, chicken, and fish. Then everyone shares a little bit of all three.

Kids wanted ketchup, they don’t have ketchup here. They’ve got this carrot based ketchup….the kids weren’t a fan.

Bread with chicken pate.

Salad in the lunch box.

More wine.

During dinner Little KL asked to play Ravens? What? What’s Ravens? It turns out he’s trying to say charades. Sure, we’ll do that again tonight during dinner.

Beef broth soup. Somehow, we are not eating very much food but getting very full very quickly. Maybe it’s all the wine we’ve been drinking along with our meal?

We are very under dressed.

Dessert. Seriously, I’ve never felt so full from eating so little food.

Both RL and I agree that this tasting menu wasn’t our favorite. Nothing tasted super delicious to us, and we were wondering if it’s because Costa Ricans have a different palette than we are used to. It didn’t help that we felt so full so quickly during our meal too. Either way, we still both really appreciated the unique experience of doing a tasting menu in Costa Rica.

Last drink for the drinks pairing, some sort of coffee liqueur drink.

During dinner, I asked our server, who spoke decent English, if he knew why the zoo closed down. He mentioned that it’s because of animal rights pressure. Ah, now it all makes sense.

Love the aesthetic of Costa Rican restaurants. Another fun dinner experience with the whole family in San Jose. Dinner is turning out to be a hit in San Jose for us.

What’s also great is that it’s only a few short blocks walk back to our apartment after dinner.

To be continued at Costa Rica Day 4 Part 1.