On June 9 we got up at 4:30, ate a quick breakfast and drove to a meeting point near the Breckenridge Airport where we met the pickup van for Colorado Hot Air Balloon Rides. Eric, our driver, was a fountain of information about life in central Colorado. Breckenridge gets over 300 inches of snow in a normal year and has about 4000 year-round residents but adds about 20,000 workers for the ski season and up to 100,000 skiers on any given holiday. About an hour's drive south, near Fairplay, where we had our balloon ride, it is much drier, with only about 40 inches of snow. Land prices follow a similar pattern, with a half acre in Breckenridge going for $50,000 and 5 acres south of FairPlay for $4500. Heading south we drove through several tiny ... read more

We left the Quepo market and headed for our next destination, San Gerardo de Dota in the Talamanca highlands. First we drove south toward Dominical, still in the hot lowlands along the Pacific coast, and soon we hit a traffic jam caused by an accident. This brought us to a dead stop for about half an hour. I though it was very sensible of the Costa Rican drivers (especially those a without air conditioning) that they turned off their engines and walked over into shade or even drove off the road and parked in any shady spot, including private lawns! Finally we reached Dominical and turned inland, hit another traffic jam (it was the beginning of Easter week, so many people are starting a vacation), and eventually got to our lunch stop, Finca de Don Tavo. ... read more

Our second full day in Monteverde began with a walk on the hanging bridges, a set of five suspension bridges several hundred meters long through the canopy. It was a still, gorgeous, sunny day, and we enjoyed the views out over the top of the forest. It was surprising how few birds we saw up there, so we concentrated mostly on plants: the bromeliads and other epiphytes that cover the tree branches, the tree ferns, mosses and liverworts. We had lunch on our own in Santa Elena and had a hard time choosing a place, mostly because we've been eating so much. We finally settled on a Chinese/fast food place which had really bland Chinese food, although Wayne did well with a huge burger that looked like a double Whopper. Anyway, after this fortification we boarded ... read more

In the early mornings while at Hotel Tucano, we met with our guide Esteban in the parking lot at about 6:15 am for some excellent birdwatching. Even though it was misty or rainy most of the time, we had some good views of scarlet macaws, collared aricaris (toucans), kiskadees, various tanagers, and Montezuma Oropendolas, because they are nesting in trees bordering the parking area, and we could watch them from covered walkways. On Saturday we made an excursion north to the border with Nicaragua and had a three-hour boat ride on Rio Frio at Los Chiles. Along the banks we saw howler monkeys, sloths, three kinds of kingfishers, anhingas, several kinds of herons, a sun grebe, passerini tanagers, a basilisk lizard, and caimans (like small alligators). The cutest birds were tiny mangrove swallows that liked to ... read more

This last portion of our Scotland/England trip consisted of a five-day guided tour to Devon and Cornwall with Rabbie's Tours. There are twelve of us on the minibus, from the USA, Martinique, Hong Kong, and Italy. My interest in seeing this part of England was sparked by the novels of Rosamund Pilcher and by the beautiful scenery on the TV show Doc Martin, filmed in Port Isaac, Cornwall. It is a part of England known for very mild climate and charming seaside villages. First project: getting out of London. On a Saturday morning the streets of London itself were quite deserted, but once we hit the major artery heading southwest, it was clear that many other vacationers thought it was a good time to head for the beaches, so we sat in traffic quite a bit, ... read more