Playa Carrillo on Boxing Day

Today was an all around wonderful day.  This morning, without waking up Ann, I walked down to the beach via a better shortcut that Craig found.  From there I ran a nice slow 5 km along the beach.  It was different / interesting to see the free range horses at one end of the beach.  I walked the hill back to the house as fast as I could and when i got there, all sweaty and gross, I took off my shoes and jumped right in the pool.  It felt great!

Later this morning, we packed up the car with our beach stuff and then drove to the little village of Carrillo, a few miles south of here.  We found a nice "soda" for lunch and we had a lot of fun there with our pretty and patient waitress who graciously let us practice talking Spanish with her. Craig made my day when he told me that he could see a big improvement in my Spanish with my brief exposure to the Rosetta Stone program.  The food here was inexpensive and fantastic.  I had a rice and octopus dish and I really hope to have it again.

After lunch we drove to Carrillo Beach and spent the whole afternoon enjoying this extraordinarily beautiful place.  It is one of the nicest swimming beaches that I have ever seen.  One of the neat features of this beach is that you can park your car no more than 40 ft from where you park your towel on the sand.  You don't have far to pack all your beach stuff and you can keep an eye on your car.  The whole length of the beach has palm trees around the perimeter and so you can always find some shade.  One of my highlights of the day was when I purchased a hammock from a guy on the beach, without Ann seeing.  When she looked over from her beach towel on the ground, my new amigo was hanging the hammock between two palm trees.  She jokingly gave me heck for the purchase and I let her know that that was fine and that she could not use MY hammock and I promptly crawled into it and had a nap.

We stayed at the beach all afternoon and watched the beautiful sunset before heading back to the house to clean up before going out to supper.  We found a nice vegetarian restaurant in Samara run by an Italian family.  It was a real gem of a place and the fragrance of pot in the air added an interesting ambiance to an already charming establishment.

Soda Plaza in Corrillo where we had lunch

Eventually, I let Ann share MY hammock

Ahora Si restaurant, where we had Supper tonight