Tuesday Catchup

Our last and final day had a lot of excitement.  The boys and I had another early surf out at Langosta.  Alex was really dragging today after yesterday's surf adventure, plus he's been on Benedril for his bug bites and it's sapping all his energy.  We came in for breakfast and decided what we were going to do for our last day.  The kids decided to go back to Playa Conchal and go jetskiing again with all of us.  Alex decided to stay home and rest.  As we were leaving, Christina saw the howler monkeys right outside the door in the trees. We had been hearing them and their kind of eerie, deep howls early the past couple of mornings.  When we saw them earlier in the week down in the ravine they were pretty far away, not close enough to get a good picture.  But this time there were like 30 ft away from us and just resting in the trees.  There must have been at least a dozen of them.  We sat there and watched them for about 1/2 an hour before we decided we better get on with our day.

We spent a couple of hours at the beach and Smally and I went out on the Waverunner with me driving.  We were going good when we took a sharp turn that sent us both flying off the ski.  We got back on and it wouldn't start back up so we had to wave to shore for a rescue.  They towed it back in but couldn't get it started back up so they refunded our money and we got one of the other ski operators to rent us one.  They said the snorkerling at shell beach was good, but it was pretty murky, like a rough day on the Sunset reef.

We came back to town and finished up our souvenir shopping and got back to the house around 4.  Christina wanted to go out surfing one last time so Aaron, Christina and I went to Tamarindo Beach.  I had to go exchange a T shirt at one of the surf shops so I dropped them off and told them I'd meet them at the beach.  I was driving back to the beach and I see them walking on the road.  I asked why they were done so quickly and they said they paddled out a saw a crocodile just a few feet from them.  A big one!  Aaron told one of the surf school dudes and he confirmed the sighting and pulled his kids out, but there were still a lot of people in the water.  I guess it's a somewhat normal occurance, but still... It's a good thing it was our last day, not our first day that we had a croc encounter.

Last dinner was steaks from the local meat market at Adam's suggestion, and a couple of pizza's from a place we had been to earlier that had bomb pizza.

Oh yeah, we stopped and took the board back to Adam's brother and he was telling us about the development that he and Adam have money invested in.  It's right out at the Tamarindo rivermouth and will eventually include a beach club, private villas and a hotel on the hillside.  He invited us to go look around the villa sites which are about to undergo construction.  The panoramic view from the hillside was nothing short of spectacular.

One last early morning surf on Wednesday morning at Langosta.  We're really going to miss the warm water.  We almost cut our departure too close, but we made it and so did our luggage.  Being unaccustomed to int'l travel, we didn't know you had to pick up and recheck your luggage after you clear customs.  We almost didn't do it until I figured it out at the last moment.  That, and we saw our board bag going round the carousel.

Our Houston to LAX leg was an hour late and when we got to LAX we found that our board bag didn't make the trip.  They tracked it for me and it was on the next flight in that was scheduled for a 10:10 arrival.  We had gotten in around 9 so we had to wait til 10:20 before the bag showed up.  Needless to say we pulled in late last night at almost midnight.

All in all we had a great trip to Costa Rica.  A huge shout out to my buddy Adam for his generosity and for making our trip possible.  I may never be able to give you enough strawberries to repay you!

That's it from Costa Rica.  Hope you enjoyed following our adventures as much as we had living them!