Couscation I!

 First Annual Couscation was a success!  Laila and Mia came back home with us to spend a week in Austin.  It was a great opportunity for us to be tourists in our city and show them the best of Austin.

Our first morning, we went to our favorite local hike at Red Bluff.  Good view of the city and a nice way to ease into our upcoming adventures.

Snake!  This one was dead and greeted us at the trailhead.

Post swim snow cone treat at Casey's!  We all had them Costa Rican style with sweetened condensed milk.  Sugar Bomb!

It wasn't all fun and games.  L&M worked on summer assignments during naptime each day.

We also put them to work taking care of the chickens.  Mostly they enjoyed chasing them around the yard and picking them up.  They did help us give them a bath later in the week!

We loaded up the bikes for a ride around Townlake and over the pedestrian bridge.

First trip for the cousins (and Parker) to Barton Springs!  

Mayfield Park and peacock hunting and hiking.

Cara worked with L & M building an owl box for them to take home to hang in the amazing trees in their backyard.

Evening kayak/SUP to see the bats!

This was our fist time to watch the bats from the water.  It was great!  We'll surely do this again.

Innerspace Caverns field trip.  Mia and I rode the zipline while we were waiting for our tour.  Laila would later go with Mia.  Nana met us for the tour.

Plenty of room in the Cactus Killer for all the cousins.  Looking forward to Reid joining us next time.

We ended the week with a quick trip to Canyon Lake with Nana.  Dave and Ellie were going to join us the next day, but plans were canceled when Aunt Ellen went to the ER for a gall bladder infection.  Thankfully the surgery went well and our great week came to end.  Looking forward to making this a yearly summer tradition.

Costa Rica "Best Of..."

 In standing with our sporadic tradition of wrapping our trip with a list of the things we want to remember and celebrate about a place, here is our family "Best of..." list for Costa Rica. They are listed in order of age, from Parker to Mike. 

Best...

• Food: 
• Jugo naturale/batido - watermelon (P), pineapple/banana (S), cas (C), watermelon/banana (M)
• Snack - batidos, patacones, and plantain chips (everyone)
• Meal - anything with french fries minus the anything (P), refried beans in a bag w/tortilla chips (S - below), casado con pescado (C)

• Tropical fruit - mango (P), cocao fruit & granadilla (S), guayabana (C), papaya (M)

 

• Nature: 
• Animal siting - beach snails (P), Coatimundi & Iguana (S), Blue Morpho & red-eyed tree frog (C), Capuchin monkeys (M), toucans and scarlet macaws (everyone)
• Tree - Rainbow Eucalyptus (C)
• Beach - Playa Espadilla (everyone)
• Hike - Sendero Fumeroles, Pocosol Biological Station

 

• Pig impersonator - 2 toed sloth

• Travel:
• Hotel/lodging - Valle Escondido in Monteverde (everyone)
• Place to go back to - Pocosol Biological Station, Bosque Eternal de los Ninos
• Pool - Vista Ballena (P & M), Baldi Hot Springs (S & C)

 

• Spanish word/phrase - "unintelligible gibberish" (P), "donde esta el bano?" (S), "buenas" (C), "con gusto" (M)
• Place to take the extended family (looking at you Nana CC/Opa/Nana) - Arenal Observatory Lodge 

• Activities: 
• Way to wait out the rain - do whatever Sybil says (P), play house/school with stuffies (S), doodle in travel journal (C), read (M)

• Way to spend a night - playing family charades (everyone)
• Way to wake up at 4:30 a.m. - scritch-scratching of squirrels on the roof (P), alarm birds (S), goats on the balcony (C), cuddles from S & P (M)

It's not lost on me what a tremendous privilege it is to have the good health and resources to be able to travel to other countries. We try not to take advantage of the responsibility that comes with visiting another country and culture, and we do our best to learn from the people and experiences. I'm always grateful for the new perspectives I come away with after seeing a tiny snapshot of life in another place on planet Earth. I hope our kids find it as mind opening, valuable, challenging, and fun. 

We learned that Costa Rica has tremendous natural beauty and comparatively easy access to a mind blowing array of flora and fauna. The tourist infrastructure is a well oiled machine, and the roads aren't nearly as scary to drive on as everyone says (though expect to go slooooow). Rainfall is measured in feet, not inches, but Ticas (people from Costa Rica) never seem to look wet. The costarricenses we encountered were kind, warm, and formal, and understandably a teeny bit over tourists and the saying "Pura Vida". 

We're heading back to Houston tomorrow morning. We're excited to get back to a regular sleep routine and see friends and family, but all of us agree that we could spend more time here and love Costa Rica. The summer adventures aren't over yet, however! We spend a few days in Houston before returning to Austin for a week to host our nieces Laila and Mia, then we head out to New Mexico and Colorado for our typical summer camping trip. 

Uvita Bonita

Our final stop had us exploring around Uvita and Dominical, the Costa Ballena region.  Our first stay was at Vista Ballena, a beautiful hotel up the mountains from the coast with a beautiful overlook to the ocean and the namesake landform.  The Parque Nacional Marino Ballena surrounds a sandbar/landform that looks like a whale tail when it's low tide.

Mostly I was excited that they had a pool shallow enough that Parker could swim/play without us having to be within arms reach at all times.  Sybil is a strong enough swimmer now that she can venture into the big pool alone with just our eyes on her.  

The Vista Ballena view was why infinity pools were created.  We were living it up!

To take a break from the beach, we decided to have a waterfall day.  We brought suits with the intention of some natural swimming, but El Pavon (not surprisingly with all the rainy season rain) was a bit too powerful/unsafe for us to venture in.

How'd that boulder get there?  Nature is awesome.

The girls did a great job managing their disappointment of not swimming, and with our heads up on the way out we saw a waterfall we missed on the way in.  This one was perfect for climbing and exploring.

Still at Vista Ballena enjoying a picnic lunch and chips in a can.  We had our first grocery stop because our room had a mini-fridge.  We had held off on buying any snacks because we had no way to store them in our previous rooms.  We quickly discovered you can't leave any food out overnight because it will be covered in tiny ants by the morning.  The mini-fridge proved to protect our food for at least 48 hours.

This beauty of a frog was posted up on a column at our hotel sitting very still to wait out the dry morning and the coming of the inevitable afternoon/evening showers.  The girls (and me) enjoyed gently petting it.

Back to the beach!  In the morning we visited Playa Ventanas for some wave jumping and frisbee throwing on the beach.  We came as high tide was rolling in.  There are two ventanas (windows) through the bordering mountain of this cove that can be walked through during low tide.  At high tide you get a great show of seeing the waves crash through with awesome noise and mist.  Other highlights were watching the hundreds of crabs digging holes, sifting through the sand for food and scurrying about.  And Sybil and I had a toss with a beach friend from Britain.

In the afternoon, we went for a beach hike to the Whale Tail.  Our third national park of the trip!

The best time to visit these beaches is at low tide which allows you to walk out to the whale tail land formation.  

Beautiful beach and tropical forest.  Every once in awhile the clouds would part and reveal the tall mountains just off the coast.  How drastically the mountains rise up from the coast reminded us a lot of Hawaii.

Our next stay in the area was at an apartment style bungalow.  The girls have been enjoying downtime listening to The Descendants, Oliver, Wicked, and Encanto songs.  During the nap we were woken up by two goats on our second floor porch peeking into our window.  The girls had fed them carrots and banana in the morning, and they escaped their pen and they came knocking for more.

Final beach of the trip.  Parker and I walked from our final hotel, Villas Rio Mar, to Playa Dominical.  We didn't spend much time here, but we hope to be back for a future trip and some surfing lessons.  These seemed to be the most consistently awesome waves.