Trips, Pics, and Tales

When you're in the rainforest, you learn that there are different types of environments to explore.  You can be down on the ground or up in the trees.  Up in the trees is called the canopy.  In Arenal there are the Hanging Bridges .  There are fourteen bridges suspended up in the trees of the primary rain forest.  We chose to go with a guide so that we could learn about the ecosystem.  This was our first real exposure to the rain forest and boy did we learn a lot!  The hike was about three hours long and it wasn't difficult.  We saw many howler monkeys and we even saw an eyelash pit viper!  It was down below one of the bridges in a ravine!  We saw so many frogs, including a blue jean frog, which was another highlight!  We learned about the leaf cutter ants which was just fascinating!  Our guide pointed out so many different birds.  Doing the hike with a guide was a great idea, we would have missed out on much of the wildlife we saw had we not had the guide.  He found so m

Costa Rica....what was it going to be like?  I'd read so much about this country, done so much research and spent so much time at online travel forums learning about where we'd be staying and things to do while we were there.  But, we'd never been on a vacation like this before!  This was the first time we'd be in a foreign country totally on our own.  We weren't going with a tour and we weren't just going to one hotel as a home base and doing excursions from there.  This trip was all self planned and it was going to be an adventure!  What did we have planned?  Three different hotels in three different regions, renting a car and driving on what some rumors were said to be horrible roads and one flight within the country on a small plane.  Add to that a couple of transfers between the flight and hotels where we didn't have the car and some strict luggage weight limits for the small plane and we were good to go! We were ready!  We landed and got through cu

It was about four years ago that I first started to get the idea to plan our first trip to Costa Rica. For about a year before that I kept hearing about people here and there that had been there, or had known people who and went there and they just had such wonderful things to say about Costa Rica.  The people there were so kind and loved talking with the tourists.  The wildlife - like nothing you could imagine!  The diversity of the types of places you could visit - there's rainforests and beaches, mountains and even volcanos, cities and rural areas.  I heard about the roads - not so great.  I heard you should do a tour and then I heard you can plan a trip on your own.  I was so intrigued! Up until this point, the only foreign trips we had taken were pretty traditional Caribbean vacations - mainly staying at one resort and doing excursions, or staying at all-inclusive resorts in Mexico.  This sounded like a challenge I was ready to take on! I began my truly obsessive research