JUST TO CLARIFY: We did score great waves in Costa Rica. And not only during our four days at Bosque del Cabo, but also in the four days following, in the international surf town of Dominical, about 60 miles northwest of Puerto Jiménez. We got there via four-wheel-drive rental car, puttering through a pastoral landscape of tiny farms, remote fruit stands, and potholes big enough to break an axle. And we stayed at a hilltop villa called Bosque en el Cielo, which had an infinity pool with a 180-degree view of more good surf spots than you could ride in a month. Steroidal cicadas slammed into the windows like kamikaze golf balls, and green parrots lived in papaya trees that grew all around, not because they had all been planted there but because the proprietor—Alex Hruby, an Austrian windsurfer with a killer wine collection—had thrown some rotten fruit into the bushes about six months earlier. The trees were already 25 feet tall.

Once we'd eaten the Starving Surfer breakfast at the San Clemente Bar & Grill among the hundreds of broken surfboards left by wave-beaten visitors, we meandered down to the miles-long beach. I then spent the rest of the day gorging on rippable rights and lefts. Liz had to sit out this time (obstetrician's orders), but Hannah actually let me carry her into the shore break and hold her shoulder-deep in the water. Every time a little wave came, I turned toward the beach and ran as fast as I could, holding her right in the wave's face—a game that quickly came to be known as Big Girl Surfing. And also as the most fun I've ever had.

But as wonderful as all that was, there was something about that moment in the jungle that stayed with me, all the way back to San José and on home. When the howling got close, I grabbed a stick from the forest floor. As I entertained fantasies of defending my family, I heard a peculiar trickling noise, like water splashing, and turned around to see a column of liquid pouring from the trees, not six feet in front of me.

Liz and I exchanged glances, craned our necks, and traced the liquid to its source, then started to giggle. There, up through the branches, was our terrible monster: a howler monkey, no bigger than our two-year-old, sitting on a tree limb and, yep, trying to pee on us. It let out another utterly outsized howl—a brilliant

Every time a little wave came, I ran as fast as I could, holding my daughter right in the wave's face—a game that quickly came to be known as Big Girl Surfing.

evolutionary adaptation that makes a 15-pound banana-eater sound like a cross between a tiger and an elephant. But instead of running, we all broke out in laughter, and the monkey swung away through the trees, bending them and bouncing them as it disappeared.

Whiling away the rest of the afternoon, I knew already that Costa Rica had exactly what I was looking for. And it wasn't just that a monkey had tried to insult us—nor the discovery that those other animals, the ones we couldn't see but thought were killing each other, were actually a pair of scarlet macaws: gorgeous red parrots that mate for life, live up to 80 years, and spend all those decades screaming at each other. It was the fact that, besides everything else Costa Rica had to offer—the food and the surf and the easy living—its natural world felt so palpably thriving and alive. Even a norteamericano surf family like ours could go home feeling that way.