We first brought bicycles to Costa Rica in 1993 for our five week luna de miel although we hadn’t learned that phrase yet and were still calling it a honeymoon.

Another term we hadn’t heard because it hadn’t been invented yet was blog, but whether the world knew it or not we also blogged our bike touring experiences.  We didn’t set out to invent blogging but we were both scientists and had access to computers, film scanners to digitize and upload photos and a new invention called the internet via dial up modems long before the general public discovered it.

The blog started out as just a way for my dad to be able to show my grandmother our honeymoon photos and stories online but people started e-mailing questions so when we took our next tour we wrote about that too.

The stories of our bike tours published here have been resurrected from our second website which was created in 1999.  The first website we built was called cyclerica (get it…Cycle and Rica…) and was hosted on a Canadian provider called redrival.com several years earlier so my grandmother could see photos from our honeymoon.

Unfortunately although everyone says “be careful what you put on the internet, it will stay there forever,” between the host going out of business and several computer crashes there’s nothing left of the first site that I can locate.

I’ve tried as best I could to recreate the feel of the legacy site by using the original little maps and graphics as well as the photos scanned in from film.  It was long before we created the Waterproof Travel Map of Costa Rica and I honestly have no idea why I tilted north about 20 degrees off axis on the early map drawings but it is what it is.

NOTE: many of the places we stayed are long gone, things we did have been made off-limits and of course any prices mentioned are probably significantly less than half what you should expect to pay now.  Also, we do not bicycle tour in Costa Rica any more and do not recommend that anyone else do so either.  The roads have become extremely dangerous.  There are a few back routes that are still rideable but not enough to string together an actual tour of the country.

If you don’t believe us check out the facebook page Accidentes en Costa Rica where users post the most recent tragedies on an hourly basis.  Be prepared to see gruesome images of bodies in the road with limbs missing and video of cyclists being launched fifty feet in the air when they’re struck from behind by a speeding driver.