Welcome to Costa Rica! Now I have figured out how to change the blog commands back to English instead of Spanish we are good to go. Thought I was going to have to take a crash Spanish course, which wouldn't hurt but short on time.
Our first challenge of this trip was getting into the U.S. We were pulled over and given the 100 question session with US boarder services. Yippee what fun. Guess they didn't like Bill's answers the first time, funny thing his answers were the same the second time round. I suppose they match and they figured he was telling the truth. If the US didn't have such cheep flights I would swear I wouldn't cross that boarder ever again! I'm not sure we even crossed at the right crossing as the I5 was no where to be found. So I put my trust in our GPS and we eventually made it to Seattle, however not in time to enjoy the Pike Place Market. It was closing as we pulled up and the guys were so tired they were just counting down the minutes until they got to go home. Oh well what can you do. We walked around downtown Seattle and eventually found the Crab Pot restaurant we were looking for. The seafood pot looked yummy but we were not hungry enough to order it so we had the most amazing chowder, calamari and Serena even liked her Salmon pasta, She is expanding her palette.
So the adventure begins. Our flight to San Jose was uneventful as there were no movies, food or free drinks. I guess you get what you pay for. (note for next time). Our hotel in San Jose was clean and quaint. We arrived Christmas Eve at about 8pm so we were lucky enough to find sandwiches to tide us over. We fell asleep to Christmas Eve fire works and awoke to a group of travellers chatting outside our room at 7am. Apparently they were chatting all night but I had my ear plugs in. The girls were in the back and slept through everything. They thought it was pay back that Bill was up all night as he had slept the night before and kept all of us awake with his snoring. We had a lovely Christmas breakfast and then headed up north of San Jose to La Fortuna. Our driver was quiet as he was concentrating on the curvy narrow mountain road complete with one lane bridges.
We checked into our first ever Hostel (Arenal backpackers) It's quite amazing, the girls comment was it's even nicer than the hotel in San Jose. So far I've only seen one unwelcome friend, which I haven't told Serena about yet! It ran under the bed before Bill could squish it and we have no idea where it went. Great, he tells me they like cold damp dark places so it shouldn't crawl into my bed!!!!
It's not as warm as I thought it would be, however we are still sitting in our shorts and tank tops in the hostel bar. (air conditioning doesn't turn on until 10pm so the room is rather humid and the windows have no screens so opening them at night is not an option).
The volcano is inactive and under cloud cover, therefore no night lava flows :( We did some shopping in town this afternoon and had an amazing dinner. Tomorrow we start our first adrenaline rush Costa Rician style. We are canyoning. This entails getting strapped into a safety harness and repelling down a 200ft water fall into the canyon below. Should be exciting. Bill is going to wear his new go-pro video camera so we should get a great view and hopefully some awesome videos.
The next day is a waterfall hike, volcano hike and then soaking in the hot pools.
Merry Christmas from La Fortuna!
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