Vacation

Finally, our vacation is on the blog.

We spent 8 days in Costa Rica. The first 3 were our action packed days staying at the base of Arenal Volcano, one of the world's most active volcanoes. While were were there we:

Went on a zip line over and through the jungle. When I say over, I really mean over - the first big line was approx. 1000 feet above the ground! One line was over 1/2 mile long and you got up to 45-50 mph. It was awesome! Tara says it the coolest thing she's ever done.

We also went white water rafting, which is where we got banged up. We weren't in the raft 30 seconds and went down an 8'-10' drop and we both flew out. Ryan hit his eye and then his knee on a rock and Tara landed right on her arm and then on top of Ryan. But our guide was great and he had us both right back into the boat. There were so many rapids that it was the end of the trip before we realized we were hurt. It was a beautiful trip. We even saw a sloth in a tree.

Then we hiked to the volcano and watched it spew car-size boulders. You could hear them before you could see them. The clouds covered the top at night time so we couldn't see the lava, but we did go watch the boulders at night, which was pretty cool to watch the streaks of red going down the side of the volcano.

There are hot springs there with all these fancy resorts that you could pay big bucks to get in to. But Ryan found a tip on the internet just before we left and it worked out. Just downstream from the resorts is a bridge and you can hike down and there's the hot spring, totally free. So, we went down and lay in the spring in the jungle just like the people that live there do and didn't spend a dime.

And on the way out of town we hiked to a really pretty waterfall.

After all that activity we needed some rest, so we drove to the beach on the Pacific side to a town called Tamarindo. We stayed at an awesome hotel, Capitan Suizo. We could go on and on about how much we liked this hotel, but we'll spare you. On the premises were a family of howler monkeys and two baby orphan monkeys, 4-5 iguanas, raccoons, skunks...all kinds of critters. We walked up on a skunk on our front porch one night, which kinda startled us. We spent the next 4 days relaxing by the pool and playing in the water. We did drive about 30 minutes to two other beaches that are famous for surfing and did some boogie-boarding (we were probably being laughed at by all the surfers, but we didn't care). And we kayaked out to an island one day. But other than that, just chilling. We each read two books. We would just lay around and then walk to town along the beach at night to watch the sunset and eat supper.

We would recommend this trip to anyone. It was easy and a lot of fun. And the food is great! So, that's our 8 day vacation in a nutshell. Pictures are below.

The view from the front porch of our cabin.

Ready, set...

Gooooooo!

This is at the end of our white water trip. Didn't take the digital with us on that one, so this is all the proof we have!

Our injuries. You can't see Ryan's eye here, but it turned purple and then yellow for a few days. Another picture will follow where you can see Tara's bruise a few days later. It's just now going away after two weeks.

Some of the monkeys at the beach hotel. Howler monkeys don't sound like what we think a monkey sounds like. It's almost like a bark.

We had some "friends" that would come hang out next to us by the pool. You can see the ocean in the background.

Our room.
This is actually a restaurant on the beach. Can you see the surfer in the middle of the picture.

This is the main activity of the 4 days at the beach.