Ride Day 182 San Jose to Parrita

I had some medical work done in San Jose and the docs told me not to ride for a month. I made it 8 days before I just had to get out and ride or I would go crazy. The ride from San Jose city center involves a lot of lousy city riding in heavy traffic on narrow city roads just to get out of town. The road to Santa Anna was good once the city was in the rear view mirror.

There is a shoulder on CR27, a new unfinished toll road, and big signs that say no bikes but nobody seems to care or enforce the no bike signs. It is easy to just ride around the toll booths. There is about a 7000' descent from San Jose to the pacific beaches and only a couple thousand feet of climbing in the ride so it was pretty easy with lots of gliding time. The weather was good, overcast with rain predicted and threatening to come down all day. Traffic all played well today with no safety concerns at all on Costa Rica's roads which are ranked as the most deadly roads in the world by the Dutch company that ranks driving safety around the world.

I stopped in Jaco for a second breakfast of gallo pinto and eggs this time. I do like the typico breakfast of rice and beans called gallo pinto and a couple eggs, fried plantain, cheese or sour cream and coffee. The ride from Jaco south was mostly flat with a few small rolling hills. It finally started to rain lightly just south of Jaco but I kept riding. The rain actually felt good and I felt much cooler than I did before the rain started. I had to stop a couple of times when the rain got too heavy for safety reasons. Then when I arrived at Parrita, just 12 miles from my destination of Quepos, the skies opened up with heavy rain, lightning and booming thunder. I love boomers and lightning but not while riding a bike in the rain.

I stopped at a typico soda and had a casado lunch which is a typical lunch a married person eats, casado means married. It is usually rice, beans, a meat. some vegies of some sort and a salad or two. I like eating them since they are pretty well balanced and cheap and fast since all the foods are precooked and ready to be served on a plate. I waited around after eating but the rain kept coming down hard and showed no signs of letting up any time in the future.

I started to stiffen up as I sat around waiting so I decided to just check into a cheap hotel for the night. The hotel is clean, comfortable and has good wifi so I am not complaining about my decision to stop for the day. Tomorrow I will ride the last 12 miles to Quepos and then I will stay there for a couple of months resting up and trying to get healthy enough to keep heading south again.

The pics are from a May Day parade in San Jose and some flowers for my daughter Sally then a couple from the Jaco area and the incoming storm from near a surfing competition that was going on at Hermosa Beach that I stopped and watched for a while...PURAVIDA