The fun must go on....

*For those of you I left off the first couple blogs, sorry!

I know the last blog was short and sweet. The loss of our bag and all of its contents was a definite bummer, but we decided we could not dwell on it and continued with the remainder of our honeymoon! Let the fun go on.......

We didn't have a hotel reserved in Monteverde when we arrived, but we were lucky that the place we wanted to stay (Hotel Montana - thanks for the recommendation Patty!) had a room available. We had our own little suite that overlooked the 'jungle' below. One whole wall was a window, it was very nice....but loud. A combination of the birds and the toads didn't make for the soundest sleep.

Our first day there we went to the cloud forest where we did the Canopy tour (zip lines). I didn't have the highest of expectations as Sonja and I had gone when we were in Chile...but this one was VERY cool. There were 16 different platforms and some of the lines were over 1000 meters long and who knows how high! We went fast! Stupid I forgot to lift my legs at one of the platforms so I managed to slam my shin into the wooden platform. Needless to say, it still doesn't feel so good. However, one little slam into a wooden platform was not going to stop me. I talked Phil into signing up to go Waterfall repelling the next AM. We spent the evening eating some more good food (I don't think we had a bad meal our entire stay) and taking a night jungle tour. This definitely was not Phil's favorite thing - apparently animals + pitch black + jungle is not his idea of fun. : ) This could have been because I had mentioned once that they have jaguars in Costa Rica, and that stuck in his head. We didn't see any jaguars but we did see a sloth, porcupine, the coati, the HUGE loud toads, oh yeah...and a couple of tarantulas. Yeah, that was not my favorite. With visions of animals in the head, we went to bed as the waterfall guy was picking us up at 7:30 the next AM.

We were picked up for our final adventure of the trip bright and early...but I was ready to go! Now as we hiked through the rainforest to find a fairly abandoned area, I started having second thoughts. I started thinking...is there a reason why we are the only people who are here? Is this totally stupid? Phil just kept his smirk on and reminded me this was my bright idea, while the guide ensured me that more people usually come but not until the afternoon. So with our gear on and 30 seconds worth of instructions we were off. We started off with a small (probably 10 foot) waterfall so we could get the hang of how to lower ourselves, get footing, and trust them when we are leaning back parallel to the ground. Next we went to one probably twice as big. In hindsight, perhaps we should have tried doing this on a normal rock (like back at Great Falls when I lived in DC) before doing this on slippery rocks and rushing waterfall going over your head. Needless to say, we lost our footing often on the slippery rock which would smash us into the waterfalls and rocks. That was fun. Especially the time when I got caught in a crevice and felt like I was drowning in the waterfall! The 3rd waterfall was the doozy - it was 112 meters, I think that is around 350 ft. After I had the 'drowning' issue on number 2, I made Phil go first on the big momma and basically freaked out the entire time he was going down...he was a pro at this. He was my little monkey...ok maybe a scraped up monkey! Even though it was one of the scariest things I have done....I am so glad we did it. When not freaking out, it was absolutely beautiful and definitely an experience that the 2 of us will never forget.

After that adventure we decided it was probably best for us to head back to San Jose a day early instead of trying to sneak in one last day and go to the volcano. It was a good thing, as when we went to pack up the car we realized we had a flat. This was the fear Phil had from when we started on the CRAZY boulder filled roads up the mountain. We found a gas station where there was a very nice guy who resealed the tire for us. (It actually ended up that there was a nail in the tire - and not one of the jagged rocks after all) After waiting about 30 minutes for him to fix it - we were on our way back. We took a different (I guess the normal person) route to head back down the mountain to San Jose. These roads still were not by any means a joy to be on...but at a slow pace we did just fine and made it back to San Jose. We checked into a hotel near the rental car place and airport and enjoyed our last night in Costa Rica. I pulled the honeymoon card again and we got a bottle of wine to enjoy. A wonderful way to end any trip if you ask me!

We are now back in Kansas City, we got the extra set of keys made and are glad to be home and back to the ole' grindstone! We bought a USB today to download the remaining pictures we have, so I have included a few. :)

Hope all is well...weather here is great. Hopefully winter is gone!

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