Day Trip to San Ramon

We had been meaning to get over there for a long time. Our friend Jose has a used book store in the town of San Ramon. We love used book stores! Actually it's a book store / internet cafe / coffee shop / real estate office / furniture store and probably a few other things I can't think of. But mostly it's a charming little shop called "Solo Bueno" in a pleasant small town. Yesterday we went with our friends Emma and Jon to check the place out. The four of us can make the smallest thing into an all day trip. It's part of the fun of discovery here. We'll never run out of places to see.

As always, just getting there is a big part of the fun. We all live in the town of Heredia, but the simple place to meet is in San Jose at the end of the Red & Yellow (bus line), where we have a cup of coffee and a pastry at Musmanni and then walk the 6 blocks to the Puntarenas bus terminal. From there the bus to San Ramon takes about an hour, first through town and then through some beautiful hills where coffee and other things are grown. We didn't know exactly where Jose's place was, but knew that San Ramon is a fairly small town and figured we could find it. Bravo, Jose! Your "direcctiones" were perfect. Once the bus turned off the highway into San Ramon, we traveled about 1/4 mile and pulled the "parada" chain when we came to the traffic light. We could, at that point, see the "Twelve Disciples," the tallest palm trees in the world. The bus stopped at the parada (bus stop) right in front of the bookstore. We recognized the colorfully painted building, with its cigar store sign (ah ha! I knew there was something I was missing in my description of what is sold there!) immediately.
Once there we met Jose's charming wife Joanna, as well as Adela, the manager, who, although we had never met before, greeted us like long lost friends! We all browsed and bought a few books (as well as trading in a few). We admired the beautiful bamboo furniture, which I would love to have if only we had room! There were quite a few people using the computers. Gene tried the coffee and told the rest of us it might be better to wait and have coffee elsewhere. Solo Bueno is apparently the gringo place to hang out in San Ramon these days. If we lived there, I'm sure we would be there often, or at least whenever we needed something else to read!
We ran into Tom, who we had met a couple of years ago (funny how you keep running into people you know in this country) and he offered to introduce us to a good "tipico" place for lunch right across the street.

This adorable place definitely fills you up with their casado. Unfortunately I don't remember the name of the place.

After lunch we walked to el parque, admired the beautiful church (every village in Costa Rica has at least one beautiful church to see), wandered through the market, tried to visit the museum (which is closed for repairs), and ate ice cream in the park. A full day's adventure, and then it was time to catch a bus home. After all, we all had new books to read!