Costa Rica!

We had a wonderful, warm, sunny vacation to Costa Rica last week. I knew nothing about this country and was worried about how the kids would do on the long flight. Turns out I was worried for no reason.

Costa Rica is beautiful and the people were super nice and helpful. They have a democracy but no military. The main income is from tourism, coffee, and bananas...three of my favorite things.

The kids got many compliments on their excellent behavior on the plane. And they charmed everyone they met on the trip. Here's the scene out our window the night before our departure:

24 hours later we were doing this!

The colors were a shock after the gray Boston winter...

We had lots of animal visitors, especially around breakfast, lunch, and dinner!

This beautiful and friendly Magpie Jay visited us often. He jumped right on the table, took a carrot, and flew off! Ben named him (or her) "Necklace".

This was one visitor we were not happy to see...in our car! I knocked it out of the car then hit it with a rock. Thought it was dead but then it scurried under the car. We all jumped in and took off...then I saw that I had run over it. Definitely dead that time. Frankie required me to do a "scorpion check" every time after that before she would get in the car.

Ben decided to draw a picture of fierce hummingbirds fighting scorpions.

Then we went on a wildlife river boat hoping to see lots of birds on Ben's list. We did see birds, and monkeys, and crocodiles, and iguanas, and Basilisk Lizard (the ones that run across water). That made their day!

The Howler monkeys only eat leaves, which take a long time to digest. So they seem really lazy but they're just waiting for the leaves to digest. They howl to defend territory since they don't move around much.

We saw lots of small crocodiles but this was a pretty big one...glad it was nap time!

A really cute Capuchin Monkey mom and baby.

Little brown bats roosting on a tree trunk.

The Basilisk Lizard!

Parrot at lunch stop...

Of course we had most of our fun at the pool and beach. This was definitely Frankie's kind of vacation.

Small fishing boat in the distance.

 Stripe twins.

Some of the local scenery (away from the tourists).

This hawk (eagle? Osprey?) also came to visit a couple of times. Lost of birds liked to get a drink here.

I tried to catch some little tropical fish trapped in a tide pool, but they were too fast (or more like I'm too slow).

There's an amazing, beautiful wife, mom, and baby.

Poor little sea snake didn't make it back to sea before low tide.

 

 

Adios, Costa Rica.