Monteverde

I would visit Monteverde again and would probably stay at The Cloud Forest Lodge. 

I would probably rent a car or a moped or stay someplace with a few more eateries around, if only because eating out in Costa Rica can be as expensive as London or the US and taxis cost a similar amount as an entree. 6,000CR up the mountain, 6,000CR down the mountain. I didn't hate where we stayed but it felt a bit isolated. It probably didn't help that I ended up watching Misery on the Arts and Film channel. 

The walk up the mountain from the Co-op and Stella (where I had one of the loveliest cups fo coffee of my life) takes approximately 40 minutes at the apex of the day's heat.  It is half way up the mountain I realise just how much 2023 has taken its toll. Whatever the weird flu that didn't test up as COVID that left me zapped of energy and beyond.

Monteverde reminds me a bit of Boulder, which makes me miss my Camp Mighty girls. Apparently, there is a largr Mennonite community as well a Quaker community. We pass the Friends' Meeting House as we walk up the hill and it give me pause for a moment, a sense of rightness in the world. Meeting Houses are some of the most spiritually moving places I have attended and I find it less disarming than the Lubevitch menorah in La Sabada Park.  I mean, the Jewish community in Costa Rica has Sephardi roots as early as the 16th Century, with an Ashkenazi influence the the early 1900s. 

The air was clean, the mountain vistas took my breath away but also made me homesick for places I won't go back to any time soon. That feeling, of the past out of reach messed with my head in a way I didn't expect and introduced me to a concept that I had not heard of before called 'Limerence.' More importantly, it segued me  into discovering the concept of 'limerencial tendencies' in the ADHD brain. 

The discovery of these concept arrived at a point where I was already confronting - quite intentionally - unhealthy patterning in romantic endeavours and where they are linked to very specific childhood trauma. And of course there is a myriad of childhood trauma. Combine that with travelling with an adult family member that I am very fond of but have never travelled with, along with two children, whilst staying at a place with no immediately accessible outdoor space to wander (gardens or grounds) that is also isolated and I started to feel a bit like I'd unintentionally checked into The Overlook.