Hotel & Lodge Reviews – Costa Rica

As a lover of travel, I spent my first 5 or 6 years here traveling somewhere different nearly every month! Since the 2021 Covid and my cancer surgery & radiation therapy, It’s been less often, but you can still see that travel and nature photography are my passion in what is posted in most of my blog posts. You can subscribe to an emailed version of the blog. But friends have asked for these hotel reviews, so here goes!

Just remember, “A photo is worth a thousand words!” 🙂 Yeah, that’s right, more photos than words! 🙂 And oh yes, the feature photo above was made from my cabin at Playa Cativo, looking over their gardens to the beach and hearing the surf that puts me to sleep at night. 🙂

My Outline for Each Review

  • Would I go there again?
  • Likes & Dislikes
  • Nature & Other Activities – including those I didn’t do.
  • My Room & Food Evaluation
  • Getting There
  • Links to My Trip Gallery(ies) and Photo Book(s) if done with free reviews of each book.
  • I use more photos than words! But each = 1,000 words! 🙂

GO TO: Hotels & Lodge Reviews CR

My Cabin at Bosque del Cabo

And yes, I realize that this is mainly just for people living in Costa Rica and the few foreigners I know who might travel here someday, but it is worth the work I put in it for me to help those! 🙂 Fun too!

¡Pura Vida!

Cloudy Days Christmas Retreat . . .

. . . was a wonderful experience in spite of the “off-season weather!”

“A cloudy day is no match for a sunny disposition.”

~William Arthur Ward

Christmas Eve Dinner was super good! 🙂
Fountains throughout the gardens.

Read on for more pix and about the grand experience I had with my wonderful friends who run Xandari Resort . . .

Continue reading “Cloudy Days Christmas Retreat . . .”

Winter Solstice Party Yesterday

One of the neighbor couples, Russ & Holly, had their second Solstice Party yesterday and it was cloudy (but never rained) meaning no really good photos, but an example of expat life in Costa Rica. 🙂

Solstice Party, Roca Verde, Atenas, Alajuela, Costa Rica
Solstice Party, Roca Verde, Atenas, Alajuela, Costa Rica
Higher up the hills have wider vistas than me! 🙂

¡Pura Vida!

¡Feliz Navidad! — Merry Christmas!

2nd Edition Hiking Guide!

Becoming world famous for hikers is the coast to coast (Atlantic to Pacific) hiking trail titled El Camino de Costa Rica (WEBSITE link), a 280 kilometer hike through forests, mountains, farms and small villages with many suggested overnight stays in homes, camping or even a few luxury hotels nearby. 🙂

Hiking Guide cover. CLICK image to see the book.
Continue reading “2nd Edition Hiking Guide!”

There is a pleasure in the pathless woods

There is a pleasure in the pathless woods,
There is a rapture on the lonely shore,
There is society, where none intrudes,
By the deep sea, and music in its roar:
I love not man the less, but Nature more,
From these our interviews, in which I steal
From all I may be, or have been before,
To mingle with the Universe, and feel
What I can ne’er express, yet cannot all conceal.

– Lord George Gordon Byron, 1813

9 more photos below . . .

Continue reading “There is a pleasure in the pathless woods”

2023 & 24 Travel Maps

Google sent me this map showing everywhere I went in 2023 and that motivated me to make a little travel map for my planned 5 trips in 2024, which again is a slight decrease from the previous year as I slow down a little – but not too much! :-) I really need to get to different parts of Costa Rica to maintain a variety in my nature photos! Though all of these 5 lodges for 2024 are favorites I’ve visited before, they are all good and will yield a lot of photos! :-) 

I make many of my reservations nearly a year in advance because of the popularity of most of these and they fill up fast! (Especially Christmas Week!) One example is that I tried to get in Selva Verde Lodge Sarapiqui in March and there was no vacancy! But I’m glad I will go back to Villa Lapas near me instead, while it is still locally operated, because in the next year or so it will become a Marriott and thus much more expensive and who knows if it will be better or worse? It is next door to Carara NP and the Tarcoles Crocodile Safari Boat tours that I like and they have now added a jungle tree top bridge and other activities, along with their pretty good birding reserve. We will see what happens in the future with Marriott. :-)

2023 Travels

Including local obviously and the 4 points on the Caribbean side are one trip that include separate flags for 2 national parks, the airport & the hotel. And the 6 flags in the north represent 4 trips. :-)

My Google Travel Map for 2023 above.

2024 Planned Trips

My planned 5 trips away from Atenas for 2024 in the order scheduled.

Somehow I missed scheduling Corcovado, Osa Peninsula or the South Pacific this year, but that puts it at the top of the list for 2025! :-) And to see what my trips and places are like, visit my Costa Rica TRIPS Galleries. If you are planning on a trip to Costa Rica, you can tell a lot about some of these lodges and parks by the photos I post there for each trip.

Buenos viajes para . . .

¡Pura Vida!

🙂

#1 Best Travel Destination AND #1 Best Place to Retire!

No big surprise for those of us who live here, but Costa Rica was named as the #1 Travel Destination for 2024 by Travel & Leisure Magazine AND the International Living Magazine and organization simultaneously named Costa Rica as the #1 Best Place to Retire in 2024! Read about it in Travel & Leisure. Or on International Living website.

View from my cabin at Playa Cativo Lodge, Piedras Blancas NP, Costa Rica. And feature photo is a Keel-billed Toucan in my garden in Atenas, Alajuela, Costa Rica.

For someone who made what a few American friends back in Nashville thought was a radical or crazy decision to move here in 2014, these announcements confirm the good decision I made back then! :-)

And these rankings are a good celebration of my 9 years of living in Costa Rica (as of December 24, 2023 — 2+ weeks ago). And my survival of cancer a celebration of the excellent healthcare here! Plus there is no better place for a nature lover and nature photographer like me! Tell your nature-lover friends to follow my blog to see what it is like to be “Retired in Costa Rica!” :-)

¡Pura Vida!

Birding at Our Dam Yesterday

Taking someone else birding gets me into new locations sometimes and yesterday was my first visit to the very nearby dam on Tarcoles River named officially “Hidroeléctrico Chucás” which was under construction when I moved here. In addition to the expected water birds, the trees around the dam were just full of many small birds and a few larger ones. I got photos of more than 20 species and we heard a Scarlet Macaw, though we did not see him. Well, we heard a lot we did not see. :-) But I’ve always said we are too far from the coast for Macaws, but evidently not! It was a good birding walk before breakfast at Crema y Nata! It may be awhile before I get all those photos processed, but at least I did not erase or lose any this time! :-) Today is the last birding walk which will be at Reserva Madre Verde in Palmares, another new location for me which my neighbors Neal & Judy told me about. A report sometime in the future.

“Hidroeléctrico Chucás,” the dam on Rio Tarcoles in Atenas Canton.

¡Pura Vida!

The Other Side of Atenas Yesterday

My birding friend from British Columbia, Canada, is here this week and we went birding on a former rural road on the west side of Atenas with lots of houses going up of course! Here’s 3 shots of the area and most of my bird shots were not real good because of light and distance plus I lost about 1/3 of them when somehow my computer deleted a bunch from the camera disk. Aghhhh! (I know! It was me hitting a wrong key or something! Grrrr!) Technology will be the death of me yet! :-) But the cows are cute! And that bright yellow tree is a Cortez Amarillo (Tabebuia Ochracea) tree that is blooming all over Costa Rica this time of year and in the landscape shot you can see yellow spots of them blooming. Thursday morning we will try a real country road south of Atenas and then Friday morning we are visiting a nearby nature reserve that I hope will be birdful! 🙂

Vista from a road on the west side of Atenas with my house on the side of that mountain across the valley.

And read on for a photo of a cow & calf nursing and a close up of the Cortez Tree! :-)

Continue reading “The Other Side of Atenas Yesterday”

Christmas Parade Atenas 2023

See all the good photos in the GALLERY: 2023 Christmas Parade Atenas. And to introduce the gallery, here’s 5 shots from the 4 sub-galleries . . .

Saint Nicholas mingles with the audience from sub-gallery “audience shots”  https://charliedoggett.smugmug.com/PEOPLE/2023-Christmas-Parade-Atenas/Parade-Audience-Shots/
Continue reading “Christmas Parade Atenas 2023”