Life on the farm

Now I don’t want to be a big baby or anything like that – but I really don’t want to go home. And I’m not joking. I’m not sure if it’s because we had a stressful fall/winter this year with the crops and medical issues, or because I’ve never stayed at a 5 star hotel – much less on a private beach in Costa Rica before. But whatever the case is, this vacation was perfect.

Daryl in the Lobby

So what did we do today? Well, we started out the day eating of course. We even got to be pretty good friends with the buffet manager. And now that I’m thinking about that, I think that’s kind of funny! We even took our picture with him and he gave us his business card to look him up the next time we’re back. After breakfast my brother and sister in law went to the hotel shops to check them out and Daryl went to check us out of the hotel. I was just kind of hanging out in the Lobby and thought to myself, ‘what in the world are you doing inside’?  So outside I went. I found a good spot in one of the lounge chairs and sat down. HOLY COW it was warm! My legs just kind of sizzled in the sunshine and I  really wanted to just toughen it up and stay in the sun. But for some reason just sitting in the sunshine waiting for our van to come was so different than laying on our chairs in the pool with drinks just the day before. Yea, it really wasn’t the same and I had to move to another spot to get out of the sun. The weather was still in the low 90’s and great though. After our concierge told us that our van was waiting to take us to the airport, we also took our picture with him. We met with him quite a bit over the week and we almost had him talked into going rafting with us the other day. He was so funny and I think he would have had a good time with us if he would have went.

Our Very Good Friend – Melvin

I took a couple more pictures around the hotel before we had to leave.

Coconut trees were all over the grounds

And soon we were in the van going back to the airport. We laughed so hard when we saw this one guy fixing the electrical wire in the street. The guys were holding the ladder while he was repairing the wires. After we had some paperwork to fill out at Customs, we had to hang out at the airport until our flight was ready. When I saw this one guy making cigars I really wanted to check it out. I had bought a cigar press about a year ago and had no idea what it was at the time. Now that I saw him use it, I’m thinking I should have only paid 1/2 as much for it because I’m missing the whole other side that belongs to it. Oh well, I think mine is still kind of cool. It didn’t take too long and we were in the air flying home. We decided to take a look at the rafting pictures and seriously I thought we were going to die from laughing. We were on the late flight which meant pretty much everyone was sleeping, it was between 11 & 12 pm after all. But us four were the furthest from sleeping. What a hoot! We landed at midnight in Minneapolis and it was cold. No … it was freezing!! The temperature from this morning to now was around 110 degrees difference. And not in the good way you know. The car was parked at our hotel that we stayed in before we flew out and was covered in snow and ice. And for us? Yea, we were FROZEN. It was literally too much of a shock. As we stood by the car to throw our stuff in, we were shaking so much that I thought that I would loose my balance. It was bad. So we headed back into to the hotel and camped out by the fireplace for a little bit to get warm and to let the car warm up. Once we could feel our fingers and toes again, off we headed south to home. We pulled into our driveway around 4 am on Thursday morning and the farm looked good. It looked cold and snowy, but it still looked good.

It’s getting so close to the end of our adventure that I can hardly stand it! I mean we just got here right? The internet isn’t the best in our room but I was able to get a message to Kyle to make sure that everything was going good at home. He said that there wasn’t any issues so that’s good.

Today we plan to spend the morning on the beach, and then go on a catamaran ride that is for the afternoon and sunset. We stopped for a couple of photo op’s at the pool first. This first picture is a girl who was helping Daryl learning new dances. He was getting pretty good with them as the week went on, and the dancers kept giving him a hard time to join them on stage. And this one is us hanging out in the Infinity Pool

When we were heading down to the beach we saw what I thought was a huge iguana, but one of the other guests said that it wasn’t that big. Now I don’t know if they just thought that the ones that they have  are bigger or what, but to me.. it was big. You could tell that he was used to being around people though because he wasn’t so scared.

Once we got to the beach we had someone bring over some chairs and drinks. I sooooo can get used to this! But I’m afraid once I step on the scale that it’s not going to be good! We hung out at the beach for awhile and looked for shells and cool rocks. We had the morning to kill and it was very relaxing. I laughed when I looked at my feet. So often you see pictures that people have with their two feet together at the beach. OK, check out mine. Can you tell that mine are on the left of the picture?  We had some grilled food from the pool for dinner and then off to the ocean to meet up with our catamaran for the rest of the day. It was a double decked boat and it worked out really well. The sun was hot for the first couple of hours and it gave you a chance to get out of the heat if you wanted for awhile. After picking up some other people to join us on the other beaches, we went to a small cove to do some snorkeling. The water was so choppy but it was awesome! It’s been awhile since I snorkeled and I guess it’s just like riding a bike. How to do the mask and breathing came right back. We laughed so hard when we saw the beach though in this small cove. It was literally covered with all different shells and coral. My sister in law even was saying that while she was in this one spot that the shells would move a little bit and then stop. What they found out was the whole area was hermit crabs and when they felt someone move they all stopped. My brother was trying to see if he could coax one of them out of the shell, but even though they’re small.. they’re tough! As we were driving around we saw where Michael Jordan has his house but couldn’t find Madonna’s. We also found the Monkey Rock and it sure seemed like a good time to take a serious picture.

Then we saw some whales swimming not too far from our boat. I don’t know if what we saw was all the same one or not, but every so often you would see one come up and shoot water. It was so crazy how fast the sun went down and then we were back to our hotel again for the night. We all really enjoyed the ride and it was almost as relaxing as the beach was this morning. We needed to get cleaned up pretty fast because we were going to the fanciest restaurant at our Resort tonight. We weren’t sure if we were going to get in or not, but luck was on our side and we did get seated. There is only about 50 people that can eat there at one time and they have only two seating’s each night.  I’m positive that we were out of our element but we gave it our best shot. I mean, how many times are you served caviar to start out the meal? It was fun to try the food that they were serving because since we had an all inclusive package, it gave you that chance to see what it all tasted like. Otherwise, yea.. I’m thinking that I’d be wayyyy too cheap to even think about ordering it. But like I said we gave it our best shot and we laughed so hard that our bellies hurt.

To end the last night at the resort we found ourselves at the entertainment at the other hotel and had a nice dance.

When we get back to our room at the end of the night, our housekeeper comes and makes designs with either towels or sheets. She does a great job and we even saw one day at the pool where they were in training on how to make them. So I added a couple of pictures of what she’s done for us. I also took some of the flowers from one of them and was messing around with some pictures one day.

Our mission today was to check out the Monkey Bar. It sounds like everyone knew or has been to this one bar and it wasn’t too far to walk from our hotel. You followed the beach and then it was a path into the woods.  So off we went. We weren’t sure if we would be able to find it or not because it’s tucked into the forest, but it wasn’t a problem. There was a big sign that showed us the way. The new friends that we met when we first got to Costa Rica were also going later and we were planning on having a few drinks with them. The reason that it’s called Monkey Bar is because there are so many monkeys around in the trees where the bar is. You can see them all in the trees. But they were the ‘good’ monkeys, the Howler ones. Not the white faced ones. When we sat down at the bar there was a couple sitting next to us that wanted to know if we wanted the rest of their fish. They went out fishing that afternoon and after the fish were cleaned this bar cooked it for them. They had so much that they were sharing to get rid of it. The fish tasted fantastic. I’m not sure just exactly what they were, but I do know that they were about the best fish that I’ve ever eaten! But if you weren’t lucky to have some people beside you that was sharing, you could always order food. This was the menu.After watching the monkeys for awhile, back to our hotel we went for the afternoon. Every night there is entertainment and we’ve either gone to it in our hotel or the neighbors. The way that the hotels are set up is that they were both owned by the same company, but we could go to their hotel and eat, swim, and see the entertainment, but they couldn’t go to ours. Tonight’s entertainment was Vegas and you can tell that it wasn’t the first time that the dancers did that routine.

After the entertainment in the Resort, we found out that one of the weddings today was having fire people at their reception. I’m so surprised how many weddings there are at the Resort. Sometimes there could be a couple of them a day!

Off to the beach we went to see if we could find a turtle. Last night we went and got my cell phone and a red shirt to dull the light on the beach. But with the moon being so bright these past days, we didn’t think that we would need one. You have to dull the light and never shine the light in their eyes. Some of the local people said that if you do it temporarily blinds them and could blind them forever. After walking around for awhile, guess what? We did see one! It was so cool!! My brother was careful to take the picture from behind the turtle so the light wouldn’t get in her eyes. By the time the turtle was making it’s way up to a nest, there was way too many people there and she got scared. She didn’t lay eggs that night and ended up we think going back to the water for awhile. I have to admit though, I never had seen anything like that before and I can’t think that I ever will again.

We wanted to go some place where you could hold some monkeys. Now granted there were a lot of monkeys around our hotel, but they weren’t something that you should be grabbing to hold. I mean, we never did get any travel shots so we wanted to be careful. Our tour representative gave us a suggestion to go to this local zoo. There we could hold some snakes (yea, that wasn’t going to happen) and also they have tame monkeys to hold. Great idea! So after we ate breakfast, off to get the camera. We took a shuttle bus and once we got to the zoo, we realized that it wasn’t really the type of zoo that we were used to. It kind of looked like it was maybe a private one and we did find out that only two guys were running it. But we started to look around and found quite a bit of stuff to look at. I think our guide at the zoo really liked the snakes because he talked a lot about them. I wanted to say the best day for a snake for me is underneath the lawn mower, but I’m thinking he might have gotten offended. After we looked around for awhile, we found ourselves in front of the white faced monkeys and the spider monkey. We’ve been hearing that the white faced monkeys are really mean, and it didn’t take long until we found that to be true. Daryl was trying to take a picture of some of the little babies of the white faced monkey and a couple of monkeys just took off full force and charged at him. Daryl laughed, but it was one of those nervous kind of laughs so I’m thinking that he got a little scared. I know that I did! Then we got to hold Lulu. It was a boy monkey and only a couple of years old. They got him when he was only 2 weeks old from a local when the mother was killed by an electric wire. They fed him with a bottle and he was really pretty cute. I was expecting him to smell bad and I picked out some monkey clothes if they stunk when we were done, but it wasn’t bad at all.  He absolutely loved Laura though. The rest of us tried to hold him but he always wanted to go back to her. We learned that Lulu had to be away from the white faced monkeys because they bit his finger off. OK, they ARE mean! We were all having a good time with Lulu and he was starting to play a little bit more. Then he bit hard enough to draw blood. Do you think it’s too late to get those shots? We really had a good laugh the rest of the week about the monkey bite and was hoping that no one was going to get monkey pox. But secretly, it’s probably not a good thing to get bit do you think?

We got back to our hotel around noon and we ate again. (are you seeing a pattern?) then off to the adjoining hotel to visit some new friends that we met earlier. We met them in our hotel the very first day going to the airport, we hung out with them at the airport when we learned that they were on the same two flights as us to Atlanta and Costa Rica, and then they were right by our hotel. We had a fun afternoon hanging out at both pools just having some drinks and soaking in some rays. The temperature we heard was around 96, but it sure wasn’t bad at all. After we got cleaned up and ate supper…. off to the beach we went. Since we had a private beach, we heard that some of the guests at the hotel were seeing turtles coming up at night to lay their eggs. How cool would that be? So off to get our water shoes on with our dresses, yea.. not a good look. But we really wanted to see if we could find some turtles. It was so unreal. The moon was almost full, it was midnight, the temperature was wonderful, and as we stood on the beach hearing the waves, it was so hard to believe that we were in Costa Rica looking for sea turtles laying eggs. Crazy isn’t it? We did see some tracks in the sand, but we didn’t see any turtles tonight. We’re going to look again tomorrow night. Hopefully we’ll have better luck.

Sometimes when you hear the old saying, ‘A picture is worth a thousand words’ you never really realize how much that could be true. So I’ve put just some of the rafting pictures on this post to show you just what type of an adventure we got ourselves into. To be honest, we really had no idea just what we actually were getting ourselves into. But you know what? Maybe that was a good thing 🙂

We started out pretty good…

And then – well, check it out

More rapids along the way

And then another ‘challenge

But this time we didn’t tip

The biggest of all the falls, the 12 foot one. Now you might not think that this would be so bad… but holy smokes! 

We were all ready to be dunked again, but Score! We must have learned something along the way because we never tipped. I think we were just as surprised as our guide. 

At the end we were feeling pretty smug and relieved! We also learned what a level 4 white water rafting means.

What a fun, fun day!

This is the view from our balcony every morning. And this morning we could hear the monkeys in the trees making grunting sounds. There are two kinds of monkeys in the area, the howler monkey and the white faced monkey. The ones by us are the howler type and that’s good because the white faced ones are supposed to be mean.

The dark spots are the monkeys

Today our adventure was to go white water rafting. And since we had our new shoes we were set. We left early this morning because it was kind of a drive we heard. We didn’t see any locals herding cattle this morning but we did have a chance to drive in the longest road in the world. The road is the Pan-American Highway and is 29,800 miles long and goes through 18 countries. Cool!

Just one of the volcanos that we drove by today

Once we got to the first stopping point on our adventure we had to change vehicles but we weren’t sure why at first. But we found out in a hurry! The ‘bumpy’ road was absolutely horrible. It was like if you wanted to drive in our road ditches or something! But we were heading towards the volcanoes and rain forest so I guess we had to just live with it. But the funniest part was that a couple of our guides rode on top of the three rafts that we were hauling. All you could see once in a while was legs bouncing around. We got the the part where we stopped by the river and once we saw the water, it was a little more tense. The water was just rolling where we were and seriously we didn’t think that this is where we would be getting going right? Wrong. Our group was just us four and the guide and soon we were off. We didn’t tip right away but our guide was sure trying to make us! But it wasn’t long and we were upside down looking at the bottom of the raft while trying to stay calm. We laughed (later) when we remembered the training. Feet first and swim to the right. Yea…we just tried to stay above the water. Then the biggest challenge. The water rafting was at a level 4 that day and we found out that there are only 6 levels so we did have our work cut out for us. But towards the end of the ride, there was a 12 foot drop. Now normally you would think big deal right? Yea… Not! This drop had two drops to it and when you saw the raft ahead of you just disappear, you just knew that it wasn’t going to be good. But guess what? We made it without tipping. Even our guide was shocked! And so were we! We were all ready to ‘swim to the ropes and cave’ if or when we tipped. After feeling pretty smug and really good about not tipping our adventure came to a close. Looking back at the day,this morning I wasn’t so sure that it was such a good idea, but at the end… It was Tons of fun!

We did get pictures of the ride and you’ll just die when you see them. But they are on a CD and I don’t have a way to switch them over. I’ll post them later when we get home. I’m just wondering how sore we all will be tomorrow 🙂

Well as you can see that I’m up and running again with the internet. Thank goodness! I think I’m one of those people that need to be ‘on the grid’. What I found out was that our room was too close to the other hotel and I kept picking up their signal. And when that hotel and our hotel clashed… Well that meant no service. So I’m down in the lobby now and it’s pretty late, but at least I can connect again!

So what a long (or short day) we had. I think we got around maybe 2 hours of sleep last night and then the alarms started to go off and we found ourselves all packed up and ready to go. We laughed so much last night that my stomach still hurt this morning when we were pushing our luggage carrier out the room. But soon reality hit and it was snowing. And not just that fluffy little snow. I mean up North Snow! Then it wasn’t so funny. We were all sure hoping that our flight wasn’t going to be delayed and after a couple of scares when they started to de-ice, we were finally in the air. But now of course those small delays meant cutting it way too close to our connecting flight. And after making a mad dash to the next flight we did make it.

Islands by Costa Rica

And when we landed? Our luggage also made it. Who would have thought? We had a good laugh how some of the luggage was brought to the hotels, and glad that ours was ‘inside’ the van. Now we did the responsible thing when we were packing and had some other stuff in our carry on. But really… who wants to have to use them if you don’t have to right? After clearing customs, off we went to find our shuttle to get to our hotel. When we left the airport this morning in Minnesota they were in a blizzard warning and when we landed? Yea, warm! 90 degrees and climbing warm. I did for a second feel bad for others who was in the cold back home, but honestly it was only for a second or two. When we were driving from the airport to the hotel we saw some farmers in the fields. Some were baling hay, and others were working in the melon and sugar cane fields.

Working in the fields after the melons were starting to grow

The farmers cover the melon fields when they are just planted to help with insects

Working on the sugar cane

Typical sight on the side of the road

Then a short ride and then the hotel was in front of us. It is Huge! As we were walking into the front lobby, I swear we stood for more than a minute to just stop and stare and then as we got to look around a little bit more, I know I just couldn’t believe it. Now maybe you’ve stayed in a place like this before, but never did Daryl and I. And by the looks of the week to come, I’m thinking I could get really used to it!

After an orientation with our assigned travel guides, Melvin and Cynthia, off to check on our rooms. We met back with Melvin to set up some excursions grab some drinks and supper. What a fun week this is going to be!