After a great lunch at a little shack of a taco place in "town" (less than twenty small buildings) called Tica Mex, we walked across the street for our first real beach day in Costa Rica. After some initial apprehension by Fiona about swimming in the waves, we finally waded out and were bobbing along in the warm Pacific water when Fiona said, "Daddy, something is stuck to my leg and it hurts!" Then Fiona started screaming, April and I both started getting stung and finally, comprehending what was happening, I ran out of the surf carrying a screaming Fiona with April following quickly behind.
Finn got the worst of it by far. We had to pick stinger-filled jellyfish tentacles off her foot, ankle, leg and hand. She looked like she had little red and white zippers wrapped around her where rows of stingers had landed. She cried and cried on the beach blanket while we cleaned her up and tried to console our poor little girl. After about twenty minutes we were down to a low whimper instead of tears bouncing off her cheeks so we packed up quickly and Laura and I took turns carrying her home.
The bright side:
Getting a good jellyfish stinging makes for a good story and checks something off the list everyone should experience once to join the true beach bum club;
Jellyfish stings hurt like hundreds of small bee stings for about 30-60 minutes and then fade pretty consistently over the next few hours and are then mostly gone;
On the way back home we took a direct route that had us wade across the mouth of the very shallow, clear and picturesque Rio Claro ("Clear River") which separates our house from town. We had been told how easy and fun it was to wade across or right up the river, as well as to drift in tubes down it, but had not yet checked it out for ourselves. Now we know it really is crystal clear, warm and shallow right across;
When we got home, April was a great big sister and made a substitute "beach" for Fiona with a palm tree toy in the pool to entertain her while she recovered, and;
Even though Fiona now "hates jellyfish", she painted the picture at the top of this post while she was recovering and it looks pretty friendly.
Lesson learned:
Unlike beaches in the US, no one posts warnings when the wind and surf conditions are making jellyfish a high risk here in Pavones. We also had huge amounts of rain last night which washed a lot of sediment into the ocean making it impossible to see and avoid them. In the future, we will do our own jellyfish risk assessment!
And Laura started yoga teacher training this evening at 5:30! We dropped her off so she didn't have to climb the mountain on her first day of school.
Buenas noches!