Hello, friends, and welcome back to the Bikes for Death podcast.

As always, my name is Patrick, and I'm your host.

And on today's episode, we're going to Costa Rica.

And more specifically, to School of the World in Costa Rica,

where I met up with Falcon Merti at the end of a wonderful week in Hocko, and we had a little chat about our

experience and talked a lot about international travel and all kinds of fun stuff.

This episode deserves a brief background on how it came into fruition.

And that story goes a little something like this.

At the end of last year, with the prodding of my girlfriend, Natalie,

I got my passport for the first time, and we went to Wohaka,

which is in the southern part of Mexico on the Pacific

coast side and on that trip I absolutely fell in love with Latin America with the people

with the culture and since then I've had this insatiable thirst for adventure, for exploration, and for more time in Latin America.

And what I really want to do is get out on my bike and just go.

I want to explore the territory on a bike,

which is my happy place

and how I like to experience the world the best.

But one thing I learned on that initial trip to Waxaca

is that if you don't know Spanish and I don't,

traveling outside of major city centers is challenging. You know, if you go to a touristy area, you're going to probably run into people

that can speak English, but once you get out of those major city centers and out of the touristy

areas, you're not going to probably run into many people that are speaking

...