Costa Rica

We had a wonderful time in Costa Rica! We stayed at the Paradisus in Guanacaste, which is on the West Coast/Pacific Ocean side. It was an all inclusive resort, which means we ate way too much food. We do have to say though, they probably have had the best food out of all the resorts we have been to! It was great! The only bad part was that it was rainy season, so off an on every day it would rain, but we seemed to catch the weather just right for most of our activities!

Flamingo Town - which was right down the beach from us.

Costa Rica, as most of you know, is known for it's exotic wild life and flora. Here is a beautiful flower!

One of the most rare to us, but very common animal to them are monkeys. We saw them every where. This picture is actually from our first shuttle ride in from the airport. Our driver pulled over to let us take some pictures! We then saw more on our ATV tour, rainforest hike, and just hanging around in the trees on our resort! These turned out to be the best pictures we got of them though.

This is a white faced monkey that we saw at the end of our Canopy Tour.

More wildlife....butterflies...

Crazy little animals on the side of the road, they told us what they were, but I can't remember! They were really hoping we would feed them...

This bird actually flew up and landed here along with a few friends while we were having lunch at the resort. The animals are definitely not afraid of people. Dogs and cats roamed the beaches and sometimes our resort looking for food. They were all very tame, but wild.

This is a picture of the rainforest. We went on a hike through the rainforest around the Arenal Volcano. Which is one of the 10 most active volcanoes in the world!! Sadly, we didn't get to see any action, but it was still steamy and beautiful! This rainforest is where we saw more monkeys. Howler Monkeys and Spider Monkeys. While we were watching them the spider monkey stole the baby howler monkey away from his mother, it was very interesting to watch them fight!! Lucikly though, the howler monkey ended up getting her baby back! Nature is cool!

Here is a picture of us in front of the Arenal Volcano.


After our hike through the rainforest and viewing of the volcano, we took a two hour break in the natural hot springs! It was amazingly beautiful and probably one of our favorite parts of the trip.

One of the other adventures we went on was an ATV tour. We rode through the streets of Costa Rica, which I might add were mainly dirt or broken rock. It was a rough ride. We took the ATV's from our hotel for about an hour and a half ride through the streets and up the mountain, where we then took a canopy zip line tour.Riding through the forest on our ATV's!

Up in the canopy, swinging around like monkeys!
Lex went upside down on one of the zip lines...And I flew like superman!! :o)
It again was beautiful!

Every morning we tried to walk on the beach. We saw this crab one day...

And this beautiful rainbow the next!



Here we are after dinner one night. As you can tell, I think Lex had a little too much wine :o) But hey it was free!!!

Our resort had a gorgeous golf course surrounding it, this is what you saw when you drove in. Here is a picture of our pool. We spent many hours here!

Here is our room. It looked just like the picture we saw online!
The resort was so big that they would always have these shuttles driving around to pick you up and take you to the other parts of the resort! Very convienent!
Lex by the pool!

Here is a neat picture from the plane. You can see how undeveloped most of the land is around there. A lot of mountains and rainforest!

I had to take a picture of the Liberia airport too. Look closely, Lex is the only one in there. Our resort made us go 3 hours early, so we were the first ones there. But also notice that this is an open air building, with a large fan to keep us cool. They only had these two terminals and two others. While we were there, only two planes landed, one of those was ours!

Good bye Costa Rica, hello real world!