Costa Rica

At the temple in San Jose, it was a beatiful temple and we felt really blessed to fit it in our last day right before we flew out.

This is the place where tours are given of the turtles on the beach (yes this is close to the size we saw of turtle we saw)

hanging out in the lounge area of our youth hostel in Montezuma

Eating at the "turtle hotel" the ocean is right behind those trees.

Typical rice and beans, and then their version of nachos. We also had a plate of chips with melted slices of cheese on it. It was actually really good. the white is mayo though (i didn't use that)

For the night of our anniversary we stayed in a hotel that was at the base of a volcano. sadly it wasn't active when we were there. usually you can see the lava coming down from the top.

Zip lining!!!! This was awesome. It was 8 consecutive zip lines. the longest being almost a half a mile long 600 ft. over the rainforest.

The lower view around the area we were zip lining

In our harnesses getting ready to go zip lining

This was on our sky tour. A 3 hour walking tour with suspended bridges that go over the rainforest.

One of the suspended bridges. they were kinda scary to walk across, but they were safe. But they can only hold so many people at a time.

walking tour

this was outside a Catholic church. Some guy carved all of these bushes out and kept them up beautifully. This was his gift to the church. Sadly we got there at sunset so we really couldn't get any pictures. really it was a huge garden area of beautifully carved bushes from arches to animals and just cool shapes.

They are famous for their painted ox carts. We saw this place on "Samantha Brown: Costa Rica" and had to check it out.

So this trip was for our 5 year anniversary. We found super cheap flights and had a flight and a half free from our points so we decided it was a good option. We stayed in a nice hotel the night of our anniversary (which was one of the first nights) and then bummed it by going backpacker style staying in youth hostels the rest of the time. I told ryan next time we should do it the other way around. Bum it at the beginning and stay in a nice place at the end. lol, it was fun though.

One of the things I found interesting about the country was how windy/curvy the roads were. very small, no shoulder....with a cliff on one of the sides often times. and yet they had Semi's driving around everywhere. As soon as we saw the driving there was no doubt we were gonna pay full insurance for our rental. :/ We rented a GPS (we would have been so lost without it) its not a typical freeway highway type thing. Most of the time your driving on tiny roads through a neighborhood to get where your want to go. It was a very kind GPS to alert "ding ding....dangerous bridge ahead" Once we realized all the bridges were "dangerous" (meaning going from a two lane road down to a one lane bridge so you had to take turns) it didn't scare us anymore.

For activites we went zip lining, the walking tour through the rain forest, horseback riding on the beach, to the temple, hot tubbing, but the coolest thing was the leatherback turtle. We paid for a tour to see a leatherback turtle come up on the beach and dig its hole and lay its eggs. You cant use any white lights or the turtle will leave and not come back. So no pictures, but our turtle was almost 6 ft long and 4 1/2 ft. wide. We watched her dig out the hole with her back flippers and then proceeded to lay about 90 eggs. 60 fertile, 30 infertile. (if your wondering where i got my stats from, there was a scientist there measuring and counting. 10 years ago 1500 turtles came to this beach, last year there was only 36. They are working hard to preserve them)

After she laid all the eggs, she started flipping the sand back on and then would gently pack it on. Im amazed how with even a turtle, you can see the gentle nature of a mother taking care of her babies. It was incredible. We were very lucky to even see a turtle, and we had to wait 6 hours for it to show up. It finally showed up close to midnight.

all in all it was a great trip to celebrate 5 wonderful years of marriage. Lots of adventure with a few moments of "eek" . Like the night when there was a machete outside of my door in one hotel, or when we almost drove off a cliff, or when our GPS got rained on and the voice wouldn't work: but came on magically 4 days later so we didn't have to replace it. But hey...those are the things that make great stories.