Good Friends, Gourmet Food and Golf!

Tico chefs

What a whirlwind of activity, travel and parties the last two weeks have been for us! It’s hard to know where to start on our various adventures. There was Francis and Brian’s excellent backyard party mentioned in my last post. We enjoyed dancing to the live music and nibbling on our friend Marcial’s delicious Italian sausages, grilled to perfection by a couple of happy Ticos, plus chicken, veggies, beer and wine. Lots and lots of wine! We met so many of our Santa Eulalia neighbors and several hours into the event, Daniel, my publisher from The Costa Rica News (TCRN), joined us at the festivities. After the music ended and we were satiated with food and wine, Daniel and Layne and I returned to our house for another hour of convivial chat. Oh, and more wine.

Earlier this week we joined a crowd of expats at Mark and Nancy’s lovely home in Guacimo where we enjoyed more good food and wine and made lots of new friends. Then last night we taxied into Atenas with Marcial and his lovely wife Sadie to Colinas del Sol for a wine tasting party featuring the excellent imports of our friends Shannon and Rolando along with delicious appetizers from the restaurant and Marcial’s great sausages again. We saw so many friends there, including our dear former landlords Odie and Eduardo and our former upstairs neighbor Linda. It was a festive evening!

But the high point of recent days was undoubtedly our visit to Hacienda Pinilla, a stunning 4500-acre beach resort and residential community near Tamarindo in Guanacaste province on the Pacific Coast. If you think the place looks nice on their website, you should see it in person. The long-time owner, a North American from Georgia, has developed the property with a commitment to keeping as much of the land and beaches natural and environmentally pristine as possible. They plant thousands of trees each year, preserve acres and acres of the land in its original condition and in many ways, encourage ecological practices in the hotel, the restaurants and in the building practices used in new construction.

The Beach Club

Our bedroom 

Recycling at La Posada Hotel, Hacienda Pinilla

A mention of golf in my column in The Costa Rica News some months ago led to our visit. Their charming young sales director Cynthia apparently read my article, then contacted me and offered a complimentary stay so that we could experience their golf course and other amenities first-hand. How’s that for a stroke of good fortune?

Putting on the 15th hole

And speaking of strokes, I think the Adams Golf clubs that Hacienda Pinilla loaned us for our round took at least a stroke per hole off my game. I was hitting them long and straight. Although I prefer my own Cobra driver (which is, unfortunately, in a bag in Portland, Oregon, at the moment), I really liked the hybrid 5-iron for fairways shots. Over and over, I turned to that club for distance and accuracy. I was also pretty wowed by the putter, which helped me get a par three from a lie just off the green probably seven yards from the cup. Between the broad open fairways and smooth true greens of Hacienda Pinilla and those Adams clubs, I almost felt like a “real” golfer. And when we came to the spectacular oceanside 15th hole, we could imagine what it’s like to play Pebble Beach.

After golf we returned to our big, comfortable suite and were delighted to find a bottle of champagne and birthday greetings for Layne, courtesy of Cynthia, since Saturday the 10th was his big day. Later that evening we enjoyed sipping the bubbly as we gazed up at a full moon above. So romantic!

Then there was the food. Oh. My. Goodness. Gourmet hardly tells the tale. As usual when faced with a huge selection of appetizing options, making the decision of what to eat at each meal was the hard part. Although a tough choice, I’d say my favorite was the Herb-crusted Tuna with Ginger-Basil Aioli that I had at lunch at the Beach Club the first day. It was just delicious. Layne took the chef’s recommendation, Garlic Sea Bass, also excellent. We both so enjoyed the Fried Calamari appetizer with its delicate batter and spicy dip that we had it again the second day.

The Conchal Hotel pool 

Simon and Hilda

When we reluctantly left Hacienda Pinilla, we drove north about forty-five minutes to the tiny beach town of Brasilito and spent the night at the Conchal Hotel, a charming little boutique lodge just a short walk from funky Playa Brasilito, Run by a delightfully low-key couple, Simon and Hilda, it was the perfect place to unwind and relax after the busy two days at the resort. And while we thought the food was good at Hacienda Pinilla, we were simply amazed at the fabulous fare at the Conchal’s cozy Papaya Restaurant. Chef Hilda serves a marvelous array of gourmet seafood and vegetarian dishes. Our one night there was not nearly enough to enjoy all the area offers; we certainly hope to go back soon for a longer visit.

So now we’re home and trying to settle back into our routine, with the feria tomorrow morning, the organic market on Saturday and my TCRN column due next week. But we made enough memories in the last week to sustain us for a while. Pura Vida!

Hot Golf, Cool Baseball, Green Dreams

My mom's parched backyard

Only a few days remaining in our stateside travels before a most welcome return to Costa Rica. It’s amazing just how good the “green season” sounds, even with its promise of thunderstorms, after a couple of weeks of West Texas weather: bone dry, boiling hot days of 100+ temperatures and long, slow-roasting evenings in the 90’s. How do people live here, I ask myself over and over. In fact, I’ve asked a few residents and no one seems to have an answer. They get a silly grin on their faces, roll their eyes and shrug their shoulders.

        

But live here they do and incredibly, they even go outside during the day and survive -- grocery shopping, going to work, visiting the library, running errands. They even play golf!

         

Goodwill golf clubs

Which leads me to my topic for the day, my new golf clubs. Layne and I had transported our good clubs and bigheaded drivers from California to Portland last summer, thinking that with all the family golf players in Oregon, we’d probably get the most use out of them there. Climate change has made us re-think that notion since during most of our June visit this year, the weather was rainy and chilly -- not exactly my idea of good golf weather. We had a few nice days and managed to make the most of them with nine holes at King City one day and eighteen at Tri Mountain another. But we also had in mind putting together a set of clubs for use here in Texas so we could play when visiting my mom and perhaps even transporting some down to Costa Rica as well.

         

Since I’m not a terribly serious or skilled golfer, it had occurred to me that I might find an inexpensive set of clubs here in Texas on Craigslist. Indeed, there were some offered but none that fit the bill. I needed women’s clubs and didn’t want to spend much. But I never expected to find the clubs I needed at Goodwill.

         

Mother and I had gone to an enormous thrift store in town, Christians in Action. They had huge racks of clubs, organized only by size -- all 4 irons, 5 irons, etc. jammed together on stacked wooden frames. To figure out which were women’s clubs was a gargantuan project. Although the clubs were bargain-priced at $2.39 each, I was overwhelmed by the sheer number of clubs and the undertaking I faced in finding what I wanted from the hundreds there.

         

So-called "fairway" on the 5th hole

So on we went to Goodwill to see what they might have. What a surprise to find only a small number of clubs, easy to sort through, standing in a large open box. I quickly noticed “First Lady” on an iron and realized it was a woman’s club. It looked in pretty good shape so I continued looking through the selection and found the entire set was there, from the driver to 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9 irons and a wedge -- all of the same brand, all in darned good condition. The price? Wait for it… 99 cents each! And if that wasn’t bonanza enough, I also found a nice bag, in better condition than my own, for $2.98. I got the whole set for about $12.

         

That’s the good news. The bad news was the condition of the municipal course I played on. Fairway? What fairway? Oh, you mean that dried out corridor with scraggly grass here and there and hard dirt everywhere else? Given the desperate drought conditions hereabouts, however, one could expect nothing else. So I’ve played twice now, early in the morning to avoid the heat, making the best of the course conditions and finding myself quite satisfied with my new irons. The driver leaves much to be desired but that may just be “operator error.”

         

It seems the secret to survival in this weather is to find something fun to do inside an air-conditioned building. To that end, Mother and I jumped in her air-conditioned car and drove a few blocks over to the air-conditioned Quartermaster Building at Fort Concho where a fascinating exhibit is on display depicting the history of women in baseball. Linedrives and Lipstick: The Untold Story of Women’s Baseball dispels the myth of women’s baseball as only a brief phenomenon of the 1940’s when the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League was in its heyday, later celebrated in the movie, “A League of Their Own,” starring Tom Hanks, Madonna and Geena Davis. Through photos, original posters, framed postcards, game programs and magazine articles, the exhibit reveals the birth of women’s ball in the mid-1800’s through the onset of the sport at women’s colleges, such as Vassar in 1866 and Smith College in 1879, and on to the present day crop of outstanding athletes swinging bats and hurling balls. Organized by Mid-America Arts Alliance, which takes their exhibitions into just 100 small and medium-sized communities each year, the exhibit in San Angelo is the only stop for the show in Texas. If Linedrives and Lipstick comes to your area, don’t miss it. It was well worth going out in the heat.

         

Now it’s on to Costa Rica and the luscious tropical weather I love. Pura Vida, here we come!