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Published: June 10th 2023
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It’s just not possible to sleep in when the birds are so active and singing beautifully through our open windows. So we wandered the grounds just a little before another lovely breakfast cooked mostly by Heather and Mike (and cleanup as usual by yours truly 😊) before our ride Marciel picked us up at 9:15.
The 6 were taken to the Original Canopy Tour zip line event, and David & Jean were dropped off at nearby Santa Elena, where we discovered familiar territory. We had simply not remembered, or understood, that our stay with the McClungs last year in Monteverde was actually in this town. We also learned (or were reminded) that Monteverde itself was barely settled until the 50s, when a group of Quakers (presumably from the US), settled to start dairy farming. They immediately set aside large tracts of land as preserves, and the rest is history.
David & Jean enjoyed a leisurely coffee and a tour of the orchid garden – all native species – amazingly informative. Evidently Ecuador and another nearby country have more native species, but C.R. has more per square mile. Some are the more typical “Walmart” variety, and some are so tiny
we were provided with magnifying glasses for the walk. Some smelled very nice. We discussed the fact that we’d toured another orchid garden in Singapore, and our young guide knew that Singaporeans loved to create new species of hybrids, and that Vietnam was a huge producer (yes, the Cleveland Botanical Garden puts on a lovely display of orchids from there). The rest of the family got a free drop off from the zipline – had a great time but no photos like we’d had last year, so we won’t get to enjoy it with them ☹ However, they did see a coati on the way up. Heather stopped very short on the long one and had to be rescued. It was starting to rain so we had a leisurely lunch at Taco Taco Mexican restaurant and then walked to the giant Ficus tree – up and down lots of hills but actually it probably only took 20 mins. Megan enjoyed having a black dog accompany us the entire way. We had fun souvenir shopping and picked up some more groceries before leaving with our ride just before 5.
Everyone was tired!! But it seemed wise for us to walk
down the way to the pottery shop to pick up our purchases, and to introduce Megan to the process. She bought an ocarina (indigenous people’s round flute with 4 holes) and Andrew showed off his new football jersey.
Then David, Jean, and Megan got into the hot tub – ah, the aching knees!! And our trusty chefs got to work again on spaghetti, meat, sauce, and zucchini which we didn’t eat until 8. We were very very lucky all ‘round with the weather – just a bit of rain on our way back from the ficus tree. This was recommended to us as a free but worthy little park - the tree was amazing. It only rained enough to dig out the ponchos to cover the camera backpack. Our second backpack is in fact a rubberized thing. David’s boots still haven’t dried out from yesterday!
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