Impromptu Road Trip and ARCR El Residente - Costa Rica

Recently, we took a little impromptu road trip around the area where we live. There are so many winding and hilly roads leading who knows where that it’s always fun to explore them. You never know where you will end up and what you will see. If we get lost, we just punch our home address into Waze. Waze is the best navigation system around as routes are constantly updated by actual drivers and it lets you know of congestion, police road stops, accidents, etc.

So we started out from our house at Hacienda El Paseo, headed to ruta 1, then to ruta 715 and drove as far as we were comfortable with and then turned around and went back on ruta 715 and onto ruta 710. This led us back to ruta 1 until a turnoff which took us back to our house (follow the red arrows).

The following enlarged portion of our route shows where we turned around on 715 near the Rio Grande River because the road suddenly became unpaved and very rough - it was already quite narrow. We speculated that it probably led to a deep river canyon and a Bailey bridge which we were not inclined to check out. Lance did an excellent job of turning our vehicle around in a very tight space.


The scenery all around us was, as usual, beautiful. This is the way to see the real Costa Rica. We drove through lots of small communities, waving to people and they would wave back.

Horses in a field:

I’m not sure what was growing here and the purpose of the white markers - perhaps vegetables.

Hectares and hectares of coffee plants - all neatly planted in rows.

Young coffee plants:

We have been members of ARCR - Association of Residents of Costa Rica - since 2010. Their lawyer, Romulo Pacheco, and his staff have done all our legal residency work for us from the beginning. They produce an excellent magazine - El Residente - that can be read on line. The magazine provides so much useful information as well as interesting and well written stories.

Here’s the front cover of the latest issue - the photos are amazing:

And here’s the link to this latest issue - July/August 2020.