Well, we had good intentions of uploading pictures more regularly on our trip, but as you can see, things did not work out that way!

Our trip was AWESOME!  We spent some time on the beach/pool area, J did some surfing, we spent a good deal of time driving and exploring the country, we saw, bulls walking the street, iguanas, monkeys, toucans, and loads of birds and beautiful flowers,  we spent time in the mountains, and did a zipline near Arenal Volcano, got to explore the rainforest, relaxed in the hot springs at the Tabacon Spa, and ate very well the whole time!

Here’s some pictures to recap:

The surf was great at Playa Grande, not so much at Playa Tamarindo.  I loved watching J surf.

The beach in front of our hotel in Playa Flamingo was beautiful.  The sand is different in C.R. than here, more like dirt than sand at alot of the beaches, but the beaches are still just beautiful.

This was our last morning in Playa Flamingo before heading over to the volcano.

This is 1 view of Arenal Volcano.  One of the few still active.  The white that you see coming down was lava.  We got to see it spilling over the morning we did our zip line canopy tour.

This is us getting ready to zipline.  We went even higher up on a skytram before we started, and you see how high up we are here…

This picture is so deceiving!  We were 2000 feet in the air, and flying 30-60mph across this line.  This was our 4th zipline, so I was finally starting to smile.  It was so scary, I couldn’t even look down for the first few. 

J said this was one of the highlights of the trip for him.  

The hot springs were the highlight for me!  You walk through the rainforest up and down different paths, and just get in and out of different hotsprings.  We would just walk until we found one that no one was in, and sit in our own private hotspring.  (it’s blurry from all the steam…)

My heart broke looking at the living conditions in some of the towns we drove through; it caused some serious self reflection…We were the minority here, did not speak the language at all, and yet we met the nicest, friendliest people.  With as little as many of them have, they were just smiling, and waving, and genuinely happy.  (at least the people we saw were)

We drove 3 hours to get into San Jose to fly home.  We passed probably 8 waterfalls as we drove down the very, very, windy, steep mountain roads. 

Our a/c broke here at home while we were away.  Grammy and Grandpa not only kept the kids safe, and happy (very, very happy, they did loads of super fun stuff), but managed to get our air fixed before we got home.  We owe them so much.  Thank you doesen’t seem sufficient when you are able to get out of the country for almost a week, and not have to worry about your kids.  We are so blessed to have them do this for us!  It was a relief to finally kiss and hug the kids, we missed them terribly.  (I was bummed a little when Brady woke up this morning calling ‘Grandpa’ through the monitor, and not Mommy!) 

We have a video from the zipline that one of the guides took that we will try to download later.  I hear kids calling…