Travel Log: Day 26 (7/23), Jaco Costa Rica

Sun & Beach

Today was our first full day in Jaco. We awoke with a surprise that the sun was shining. Wanting to take advantage of that we quickly ate breakfast and then went to the beach. We checked the UV index before leaving and it was showing low for the entire day. Also we made the assumption the sun would not hold up and the clouds would roll in.

It was great when we got there to be able to finally get some torso sun, so I spent about 30 minutes purposely doing that. Then we started walking to both ends of the beach, only making it to one of the ends because it’s longer than it seems. About 2 hours into the beach day (which I didn’t realize) we ran into a lady offering reflexology services. I couldn’t understand what she was saying and said “no gracias” to the service. She said something though with her eyes wide looking me up and down. BC thought she was calling me fat, but now I think she was saying “Hey dumb whitey, you are burning badly”. When I got back to the condo and looked in the mirror I started to worry because I was really red. The redness seemed to just get worse over the course of the day.

I at least didn’t get blisters or anything, but I’m really disappointed I could be that stupid in the sun. I was just fooled into thinking I wasn’t taking that much UV. We later learned that even though the splash page on the weather app UV index indicated low throughout the day, if you click into it you can see it spike up to 9/10 around noon. I thought that with the UV index being low and the good amount of cloud cover that I’d be fine. I’ll be rededicating myself to either putting on sunscreen or carrying my long sleeve shirt at all times.

Grocery Run

We made the trip to the big grocery store. It must be owned by Walmart because it is very Walmart-like. The haul we came away with was massive so we took an Uber home. It cost around $200, but if you subtract out alcohol ($50) and non-food ($20), it was a reasonable $130 for a large amount of groceries. Unfortunately even this big store doesn’t have whey isolate protein (or any kind of protein powder) or some other things on our wish-list.

Night

JC made chicken fajitas which I think was the best meal since we’ve been in Costa Rica. It was a wonderful distraction from my burned skin. AC rented Maze Runner 2 which was also a good distraction. We got back to our new routine of nobody listening to anything to fall asleep. We have to kick that crutch to the curb.