re: Costa Rica - Any advice?

Montezuma is awesome. We stayed there with our two kids for a week. Could just walk from our AirBNB to everything downtown. Great surfing as well if you're into that. Also some great yoga resorts and such there. It's a very hippy place. It's nickname is MonteFuma because of the amount of pot smoked there. Some of the better food we had in Costa was there as well.

If you're doing Tamarindo, it's a bit of a scene as well. Lots of surfing, but it felt a little touristy for our tastes. I also had people trying to sell me drugs in front of my kids, which was a bit annoying. A place that's close to Tamarindo but a little more low key is Playa Brasilito It's gritty but really cool. If you go a little north of there, a really nice "upscale" resort that has paddelboard rentals and sweet mountain biking trails is Las Catalinas. I like that whole area from Playa Brasilito up to Las Catalinas.