Yesterday our task was to find a cord so that we can once again roll up the shades after the morning’s blinding sun has abated. The cord we need is very specific, and its not sold here in Tamarindo.
Like Lake County, California,
sometimes the need for the simplest item is excuse for an excursion, but unlike Lake County, we can’t order the item we need from Amazon and have it drop shipped, so off we went.
Rural Costa Rica offers a tapestry of small scenes, each beckoning
for more than just a glance from a car window. I saw a man holding back a team of yoked oxen harnessed to a cart; roadside stands laden with melons, coconut, and papaya; scores of children in tidy white tops and blue bottoms; Tamarindo trees blossoming
pink and white in defiance of the dryness of the season. The sugar cane we saw a few weeks ago has been harvested now and already the fields are alive with new plantings. We stopped and filled a bag with mangos that littered our deserted country
road, only the cows, the wind, and the birds breaking the quiet that surrounded us.
Ultimately our unplanned route dead ended at a place called Rancho Gesling, where against all odds a friendly woman in an empty restaurant offered to fix us a casado,
the national food of Costa Rica. We were starving and ate the black beans, rice, plantains, tortillas, cabbage salad, and fish enthusiastically. Afterwards we took a dip in the nearby pool while palm fronds swayed in the wind overhead.
We still don’t have the cord we need to pull up our shades, but tomorrow is another day.