I mistakenly promised that this post would be out like a week after we got back but the reality of it is these kinds of posts just honestly take a lot of time for me to write. There are so many aspects that go into it which actually makes it more fun to me because it touches on all of my favorite things…travel, clothes and food, not to mention the actual review! So I take my time writing these so I don’t get burnt out and I can actually give you alllllll of the information!
Let me just give you a quick overview of our trip because there is a lot to read! We stayed at Dreams Las Mareas near La Cruz in Costa Rica. I would 1000000% recommend this property for people to stay at. It isn’t like Secrets, so kids are welcome to stay but I never once felt like there were kids everywhere if that makes sense. There are so many pools that it just wasn’t really a thing to be near kids! The property is nuzzled between two mountains and it is just green everywhere! What I walked away from with this trip was a lot of what not to dos but we also had a ton of fun while we were there.
Getting There
We ended up flying into the San Jose airport which I really don’t recommend. Maybe if you are staying in Costa Rica for a long time it would be fine to fly into but if you are looking for a quick getaway or even really anything less than 6-7 days, I would fly into Liberia! We definitely would have flown into Liberia but we booked our tickets too late and they were around $700 a person when we were doing it. We opted to fly into San Jose and rent a car to drive to the resort. We knew the drive would be pretty but the one major sacrifice we made was time. In hindsight, the cost of the rental car and then basically loosing a day on either side of the trip to drive from the La Cruz area to San Jose… it wasn’t worth the money that we saved. Take my advice and spend the bit more to fly into Liberia and have Dreams Las Mareas pick you up and drop you off!
If you are going to drive, I have a few tips!
The first tip is to book the rental car in advance and through a company that you have heard of before. We used Thrifty! We were told that if you book through a local company there could be fees added on that wouldn’t be with a known company. Add in about an hour and a half on either end of picking up and dropping off your rental car. For us, the rental car location was about 25 minutes from the airport. Keep that in mind when you are adding up how much time you need to add before your flight when you are leaving!
The second tip, have your car rental information, passport and drivers licenses readily available when you’re driving. Right now as a safety precaution for Covid, all drivers can only drive on certain times of the week based on your license plate with the exception of tourists. We got stopped at one police checkpoint and they let us keep on driving when they realized we were tourists and only spoke English. Side note: we have been practicing and learning Spanish from Duolingo since we got back! We actually like it and I have learned a lot. Its an easy app to learn at your own pace all while actually retaining the information!
My third tip is for when you are flying in...the tip is to just expect more time than you originally thought. Our flight landed at 1:00PM and we fully expected to be at the hotel no later than 7ish… WRONG. We landed at 1:00pm, finallllllly got through customs at 3:45 and then took the 20 minute shuttle to the rental car location where we got our rental car and then hit the road about 5:00. We also didn’t take into account that it gets dark there around 7:30 so our beautiful drive was cut short and drove most of the way in the dark. So my advice I guess is to try and fly in as early as possible! We arrived at our hotel at about 10:15 and it had been what felt like the longest drive of our lives with the narrow and dark roads, fast drivers and a sprinkle of stress of not knowing where we were going. A second part to this was on our way back to the airport, we actually missed our flight. We left our hotel with plenty of time to actually have 3 hours to be at the airport and we got stuck behind a car accident for 2.5 hours. We made it to the airport as our flight was taking off. Luckily Spirit was really helpful and got us on another flight later that night {we ended up flying into Ft. Lauderdale and renting a car to Orlando}, but nonetheless we got home the same day! But we later found out that in Costa Rica they won’t clear the accident until everything is documented. So we waited for that time, like Dustin took a nap, we got out of the car, walked around.. it was a long two and a half hours! OH and you will have to pay tolls a few times but they took our US dollars without any problem!
My fourth tip is for getting around in Costa Rica. I panicked a little bit before we got there because I knew we weren’t going to have WiFi to be able to have directions to where we were trying to go so I did a few different things to prepare. The first thing that I did was I printed a google maps map out and had that as a back up plan just in case we needed to pull it out. The second thing I did was I downloaded the Waze app and the Google Maps app. The Google Maps App was the most helpful for me because I was able to download an offline map that I could use while we were there. Just make sure you download the offline map BEFORE you start driving! There were’t any live updates. The most updated information was either from when I downloaded the map or when I was last connected to wifi. I’m not 100% sure which one it was but it did work for us and it got us safely to the hotel! If you are going exactly to our hotel, make sure you use the map and go through La Cruz. Its says it takes longer on the map and it does but it is the safest option for your car and it doesn’t have any road blocks.
Hotel Review
We really enjoyed our stay at Dreams Las Mareas in Costa Rica. The rooms were immaculate, the pools were stunning and well taken care of, the views were just breathtaking and we plan to go back 10000%. We had never stayed at a Dreams property so we didn’t know what to expect but we did stay at a Secrets resort and it is a sister property and we love Secrets. If you want to read more about our stay at Secrets Playa Mujres in Cancun, you can do that here! One main thing for me, being gluten free, they did have options for me. That was nice, plus the staff were willing to go above and beyond to make sure I had food that I enjoyed. I do think that the food didn’t taste as good as it did in Cancun. But it’s not something that would deter me from going back at all. It’s just not the reason I would be going back, if that makes sense.
This is from Dreams Las Mareas and Secrets Papagayo Costa Rica regarding testing to get back into the states as of August 15th.
This is the information from Costa Rica about the requirements to get into Costa Rica.
For Covid, when we were there they provided a Covid test for each person. But while we were there we got an email that said starting August 1st, Covid tests would only be provided for free to guests staying for a certain amount of time I am going to put the email that we received off to the side here to that you can get the information directly from them and not me!
It also has information about the health insurance that we had to previously purchase but you don’t have to anymore {as of August 15th, it may change in the future so make sure you check into that prior to leaving!}. We got travel insurance through BlueCross. I will also put the Entry Requirements from Costa Rica.
Looks I Brought
Our Excursion
Because we were really only there for three full days we originally weren’t going to do any excursions for this trip. But the first day we were at the pool a man walked up to us and offered us a really cool excursion that checked off a lot of our Costa Rica bucket list items. After talking it over we decided to do this excursion on my birthday and we are so thankful that we did! We went on our day long excursion with Yeudy Morera from Best Tours Costa Rica and it was a blast! It began a little rocky with some car sickness which was the worst ever and I may have scarred the passengers in front of me but nothing that a little Dramamine couldn’t fix! Even if you don’t get car sick or motion sickness normally, at least take Dramamine with you in your backpack just in case because nothing can ruin a trip faster than some car sickness. Once we were finally there it was such a fun day and honestly we just kept saying “I can’t believe we are doing this!”. Like I said before it was a BIG bucket list check off day! We did 9 zippiness, swam right next to a waterfall, did a small hike, went to a butterfly and hummingbird sanctuary, got in a sauna and then covered ourselves in sulfur mud {basically covered ourselves in fart mud…but still fun!}, swam in hot springs and ate a great lunch! There were so many fun things and when we got home and looked at the website… there were like 10 other excursions with this company that looked like fun! Definately look into it!
Like I said earlier in this post we want to go back so bad. We want to go back to the same resort and just go for a little bit longer! We would love to do more excursions with Best Tours Costa Rica and just get to spend more time by the pool and stuffing our faces with chips and guac! We loved the shows that they put on each night and the staff that were at the pool running the games and the music were a blast! We loved Marilyn and Stephanie, they were hilarious and so fun to talk to! Let me know if there are any questions that you have at all, I am here to help! Plus if I forgot to write anything your questions usually help me remember those. You can comment below or email me at tarynintotravel@gmail.com!