Costa Rica: The Video Montage

Our friend Burke that went with us (the kid ALWAYS covered in sand) made this video the day after we got home and posted it on facebook and youtube so I could share it with all of you on my blog.

So, here's the first installment of my incredible trip. An overview, if you will. Detailed posts to follow. If only I didn't have a stinkin' job...

Pura Vida

What's missing from this picture?

I am.

Be patient and I will supply many a posts to convince you that
Costa Rica needs to be your next vacation spot.

Pura Vida, mis amigos, Pura Vida.

Costa Rica Day 7-- Good bye, my love!

So here we are... the last full day of our Costa Rican adventure. I woke up around 5am and just couldn't sleep anymore. So I got up and went for a walk. I took pictures of our resort, since I hadn't yet.

This is the main area with the pool and the remada.
And if you look straight off into the distance, you'll see the beach and the beach access we had.

I walked all the way down Playa Flamingo and saw my first (and only) sunRISE...

...beautiful, wealthy beach front homes...

...and TWO yellow and black snakes!
(Here's a picture of just one of them.)

I think they were stranded water snakes and poisonous, so I only got close enough to take a picture. That kinda freaked me out, so needless to say, I didn't go swimming in the ocean that day. I guess it's a good thing I didn't realize that there we snakes in the water until the last day!

And I wrote myself a little reminder in the sand.
Pura vida, mis amigos... Pura vida!

I also walked around town for a bit and got myself some breakfast and did a complete transaction at the bank in Spanish. Can you tell I'm proud of what little Spanish skills I have? ;)

Soon after I returned from my private adventures, everyone else was up and we all just went to the pool. After lounging by the pool for awhile, we all went back to the room and packed up and checked out! As part of our check-out process, we decided it was time to take off the MANY wristbands we had acquired during our trip.

It seems that everywhere we went, there was a wristband requirement attached to it. I guess that's how they keep the paid customers separate from the mooching customers!

So all we had to do today was make our way up to Liberia for our early flight in the morning. Check out was around noon, so we had a lot of time to spare. We started out by eating "Outback Jack's", the super crowded place that we tried on St. Patty's day. It was pretty good, but I 'm glad we didn't wait there all night on St. Patrick's Day for the food there. Then we went to Tamarindo on our way out (here's your map...)

...and played all day on the beach, each of us doing what we love most!

Burke played in the sand...

like most little boys do...

And had Becca and Caleb bury him!

Tada!

Caleb slept.

And Becca and I explored the wildlife (people included...)

Becca caught this little crab:

and collected some seashells...

Then while were we swimming, she chased after a baby bat ray that we saw and some 3 or 4 foot long mysterious wildlife that I briefly saw in the SHALLOW waters! I'm pretty sure I saw a baby crocodile swimming where all the people swim! Again, it freaked me out that there was all this "dangerous" wildlife in the waters I had been swimming in all week. It's a really good thing I didn't realize it until our last day!

We also explored the human wildlife life with some good ol' fashioned people watching!
There were cute, tan Costa Rican locals playing a game of soccer (or futbol) on the beach...

and some not-so-cute, pot-bellied old foreign men walking around in a speedo!
(We had Caleb play the decoy so we could get some shots for posterity sake...)

Becca and I also had a picture taking contest, which of course included some jumping pictures. Here are some of my favorites...

Then we all watched our final Costa Rican sunset. :(

Good bye, my love!

Thanks for the sunburned memories!
(PS 3 months after the fact, I still have tan lines from that burn...)

Ok, don't get all sad, thinking it's really over... we still had to make our way to Liberia! We stayed at a nice Hilton hotel by the airport, so we could take a quick nap before our super early flight in the morning. We each took a nice hot shower and I know I felt the cleanest I had felt all week! Then we headed out, pretty late at night, just looking for any place to get some dinner. Well, we didn't just find any place... we found our new favorite place! Look at this yummy casado!

Best meal of the week... By far!

And the boys had big screen TVs to watch, so you know they were in heaven!

And Becca lived, with her back to the TV, yet another little moment of her own personal hell...

Then we headed back to the hotel for a quick bit of sleep in the most comfortable beds ever!
Just ask these bed-buddies!

And that, my friends, was our Costa Rican adventure, Spring Break 2009!

You should all make it a priority to get down there one day.
The people are so friendly! They will serve you not "con gusto"...

...but "con MUCHO gusto"!
There is a difference, you know...

And with that said, I'm out!

Adios, Costa Rica!
Thanks for the time of my life... so far!

Costa Rica Day 6-- Arenal

So, back to my journaling! ;) (Are you even reading all this or do you get bored before the end?) Ok, day two, Thursday at Arenal.

Ok, remember how the previous night, we arrived in the pitch darkness to our little "off the beaten path" lodging? And all we knew was that we were somewhere in Costa Rica with some pretty funny hotel staff? Well, the next morning, we woke up to this:

Technically, we literally woke up to the sun breaking through the clouds (since one whole wall of our cabina was windows) and the sound of howler monkeys and tons of birds! It was like my experience at Tikal in Guatemala all over again! Listen to this:

I LOVE IT!!!!!!

We all just kind of lazily got up and did our thing for the morning. I hung out most of the time on the balcony or the grass below reading my book, thoroughly enjoying the beauty of the morning... the weather, the surrounding beauty, the breeze. What a vacation! :)

We finally got around to packing up and leaving for the day. Although, I could easily spend time at the Arenal Vista Lodge if the whole purpose of my vacation was to do absolutely nothing for a few days.

Four out four traveler's agree... Arenal Vista Lodge was the place to be!

After we got checked out of our little cabina we headed up the road to their butterfly conservatory. They basically took us through three or four conservatory type places that had different breeds of butterflys.

My favorite were these bright blue ones but the things don't like sunlight, so they never held still long enough to get a picture.

In flight...

This was the best we ever got.

Unless you're Caleb... He was quite the butterfly charmer:

Or the tour guide...

He just caught one and forced it to show us its beauty...

The rest of us tried to be butterfly charmers, but pretty much only the moth-looking, super-friendly-to-everyone-especially-if-you-were-near-food butterflies let us hold them.

Becca and I thought our tour guide must have thought we were ridiculous tourists chasing these butterflys around trying to get a picture... but HE was teaching us how to use our cameras better and had encouraged the pictures. I got some good digital macros of the butterflys we saw.

My other favorite was the glass winged butterfly.
You could hardly see it flying around. So cool.

Our guide also taught us about how and where the butterflies
lay their eggs and what the larva do once they hatch.

The egg is that small green dot where the leaves meet the stem.

The larva are the white dots.

He spoke to us in Spanish pretty much the whole time since we all know some. So I learned about the life cycle of a butterfly en espanol tambien! Good thing I had some background context to help me understand.

The butterfly observatory also had a frog observatory as part of it... we saw some cool looking froggies! Some were even poisonous! (But I don't think I got any pictures of those).

(Unless this one above is the poisonous frog... I can't remember now...)

This one is a sleeping red-eyed green tree frog... you know, the ones you always see associated with jungle areas like Costa Rica. Too bad he's sleeping, because it looks like I'm lying.
But I'm not.

Another cool thing about the observatory is that they're set on a hill that has "the best" view of the volcano (according to them...). Not too bad of a view really.

We could even see some of the ash flowing down the sides.

I seriously LOVE this place!

We stayed there for a couple of hours and then had to head out to get some lunch before the canopy tour. Our little cabina hotel had booked us a canopy tour but after talking with the tourist information booth, we decided to go with a different company that had more cable lines, longer cables, one went over La Fortuna falls (where we hiked and played the day before)

and it included a horseback ride back. All for less money too! Good choice for us to switch over.

After a brief introduction of the do's and don'ts of zip lining (like if your hand break slips off don't try to put it back because the cable could severely burn your flesh or even take a finger off... and we didn't have to sign any legal releases to do this... hmm) we got geared up...

Which included these nifty hand breaks:

We couldn't help but pose like the Fonz in every picture, as evidenced below...

Anyway, they lugged us up the mountain on an old bus being tugged by a tractor.

We hiked up 400 feet to our first platform...

...and over this scary bridge...

and they got us in our harnesses and helmets

and sent us down our first cable!

It was relatively short compared to the other 9 cables we did,

but it was a great way to ease into it.

Man, there's nothing to it and it's so fun!!!! Just imagine zipping on the tops of trees like Tarzan with all this beautiful lush dense green jungle below! I LOVED IT!!!!

We even tried getting some video, and here's what Becca shot. She got tired of wearing her sunglasses and the first run she did without them on, (which also happens to be her videoed run) she smashed a bug with her eye like a windshield! Check it out!

(Um... it loaded sideways, so just turn your head to the side...)

Needless to say that was the only run she did without her sunglasses on!

Burke is a bit of a lightweight, so he got stuck on the cable a couple of times and had to hand-over-hand pull his way back to the platform.

I, on the other hand, was told by both our guides that I had perfect form and was getting the best speed because of it. Huh! Pays to work that core every now and again!

Or to have a buns of steel to speed me along...
Or maybe they were just working me for a good tip.
I suspect the latter is true.

The longest cable was 980m long!! Almost a Km! And the fastest we got going was about 50 mph! Seriously, such an adrenaline rush! The only sad thing about the canopy tour was that we only brought one camera between the 3 of us and the battery died toward the end and we didn't get a picture when we finally saw a TUCAN in real life!! :(

When we finished our last cable, our tractor bus was there to take us to a "village" (tourist trap) of some indigenous Costa Ricans, the malekus. They briefly taught us their greeting ("Cali Cali" as you knock on each other's left shoulders with your right fist) and then showed us all their natural crafts we could buy. I'm a sucker and bought one with a tucan painted on it to remind me of the tucan we never got a picture of. Then we saddled up and rode back to the cars.

It was a lot of fun and well worth the $60 we spent on it. Plus I got a free international call and was able to check in with Mom & Dad for 5 minutes!

Anyway, then we just got some food and headed back to Playa Flamingo. It took us just about 4 hours and we didn't have to stop... except when some kind of animal dashed into the road and we HIT IT with our car!!! We don't know what it was... we even turned back to see what we hit and the thing was no where in sight. Weird. Maybe we just broke a limb or something and it was able to scurry back into the jungle. But it was the size of a normal size dog and white, possibly with spots (that's what Becca says at least... I didn't see any spots.) She suspects it was an ocelot. Whatever that is. But we definitely got it good! Poor thing!

In case you can't tell, this was my favorite day of the whole trip! You MUST zipline in Costa Rica!

Oh, and I forgot to post a map...
it's pretty much the same map as the previous day, just backwards.