Hi Alexa!

Congrats on choosing Costa Rica for your trip! I’m sure you and your daughter will love it. 🙂

Thank you, as well, for purchasing my Costa Rica guidebook, Moon Costa Rica, and for using DIY Costa Rica!

There’s a lot to unpack from your email, but I’ll start with your question “Is this too nuts?” In my opinion, no! It’s not too nuts. It’s entirely possible.

What you’re essentially trying to do is fit 4 destinations (La Fortuna, Monteverde, Rincon de la Vieja, and Manuel Antonio) into an 11-day trip. In our related blog post here (https://costaricatravelblog.com/costa-rica-itinerary-10-days-in-costa-rica/), we recommend visiting three destinations with 10 days to spend, so adding in a fourth destination with an extra day is completely doable. We don’t always recommend doing that, because a lot of travelers don’t want to be rushed during their vacation, but since you’ve made it clear that you’d like to do and see as much as possible, even if that means being busy, I’ll start by confirming that visiting 4 destinations in 11 days is 100% an achievable goal.

With respect to transport, while it’s certainly possible to rely on a variety of services to get around, such as a car rental for some routes and shuttle services or domestic flights for other routes, you can usually save time (unless you fly to/from every destination with an airport) and also save money by choosing one method of travel and sticking with it. So, I’d advise either renting a car for the duration of your trip and driving yourselves everywhere, or else skipping the car rental and relying on shuttles or flights to move between cities (and taxi services to move around cities). We usually lean toward car rentals because they provide a ton of freedom and flexibility, especially if you plan to visit places en route between destinations (such as Poas and/or La Paz between San Jose and La Fortuna), but everyone has a different comfort level when it comes to driving in a foreign country, so it’s best that travelers make this decision for themselves. For help deciding whether or not you should rent a car, this article of ours (if you haven’t read it already) may help: https://costaricatravelblog.com/renting-a-car-in-costa-rica/

With respect to your itinerary, if you do plan to drive yourself around, you can certainly do as you propose and follow this trip plan: San Jose -> La Fortuna -> Monteverde -> Rincon de la Vieja -> Manuel Antonio -> San Jose. But I’d actually recommend a small change: swapping the order of Monteverde and Rincon de la Vieja. This way, Monteverde breaks up the long stretch between Rincon de la Vieja and Manuel Antonio, and you’ll save yourself a few hours of driving (assuming you decide to drive). The itinerary would instead look like this: San Jose -> La Fortuna -> Rincon de la Vieja -> Monteverde -> Manuel Antonio -> San Jose. Although drive time depend on a variety of factors (e.g., routes taken, traffic, stops made along the way, exact start and end points), the entire itinerary (from starting at the SJO Airport to ending back at the SJO Airport) would require about 15 hours of drive time.

To help you visualize this possible new trip plan along the lines of your original itinerary, the new trip plan would look something like this:

Day 1 (arriving late the night before): Rent a car in SJ. Drive to La Fortuna/Arenal via Volcan Paos/La Paz Waterfall.
Day 2 and 3: La Fortuna and Arenal
Day 4: La Fortuna to Rincon de la Vieja
Day 5: Rincon de la Vieja
Day 6: Rincon de la Vieja to Monteverde
Day 7: Monteverde
Day 8: Monteverde to Manuel Antonio
Day 9 and 10: Manuel Antonio
Day 11 (travel): Manuel Antonio to SJ in early morning. Afternoon flight out of SJ.

Pura vida! 🙂