When we first decided to actually go to Costa Rica we didn’t entirely know what we were getting ourselves into. We had seen the pictures and videos that everyone else had, and decided that should be the first place that we should go. Before we set off to start really looking at what we wanted to do there, and where we wanted to do it, we came to the agreement that we wanted the vacation to flow organically and not have every hour of every day preplanned. As this was our first big vacation together we didn’t exactly know how to make this dream a reality, but Jess immediately went into ‘Research Mode’ and created a shared drive where we could all start pinning activities and places that we wanted to go. This would prove to be an invaluable tool while planning our vacations, as it allowed us to share ideas in a place where we could all edit the itinerary. We didn’t know what was going to work and what wasn’t yet, but we plauded on.

We decided to balance what was planned and what wasn’t; and by this I mean that we had certain days where we booked certain adventures that we knew that we wanted to go on. Although we later figured out better ways to plan our trip that ended up being more organic as illustrated in the blog “Best Method to Research an Organic Vacation” this still ended up working out very well.

Another thing that we all sat down and discussed was how long do we want to spend in each destination city. Did we want to spend a day or two and move to a different city, pretty much turning the vacation into a backpacking vacation. Or did we want to hunker down in a central location and from there travel to the different locations we wanted to visit, pretty much turning each day into a day vacation. We decided on doing something in the middle ground that worked out extremely well, and that was choosing two different locations that we would stay out and from there travel to each of our destinations.

But how were we going to travel to each of our locations? Did we want to rent a car and drive everywhere, or rely on some type of public transportation, and plan on having a taxi take us everywhere. We had heard that driving in Costa Rica was pretty terrible, and a lot of the posts we reddit all encouraged people not to drive. However, we ended up renting a car from “Rental Place Name” and it ended up being one of our best decisions. Having a car gave us the freedom to stop where we wanted, to bring whatever we wanted on our adventures, and really gave the whole trip a lot more of the organic vibe that we were looking for.

Driving in Costa Rica can be defined with one word, AGGRESSIVE. If you are unable to drive aggressively that I probably wouldn’t drive in Costa Rica. The roads are extremely windy, and it is rare when there is more then a half mile of straight road. The roads curve and curve and right when you think they’re not going to curve anymore, they curve more. And around all these curves there are cars, trucks, motorcycles, and buses. Everyone is passing the buses, and if you cannot pass the buses, well then people are going to be swerving around you and the buses, and it’s going to get pretty traumatic if you are not prepared. So if you drive there you need to be able to keep up with the pace of traffic, if not then they will swarm around your vehicle like you just kicked a hornet’s nest.

Choosing a vehicle to rent was also a process. Should we get a little car that easier to navigate through the crowded areas, something that was bigger to make traveling more comfortable, or something with 4×4 to ensure that we wouldn’t run into any issues? We decided on a small SUV with AWD. This ended up being a great decision. The 4 cylinder engine in the Suzuki we rented definitely was put to the max going up some of the mountains, and we did indeed need the AWD on some of the dirt roads.