All Work and No Playa?

We came here to begin working on the casa renovation, but what would a trip to Costa Rica be without going to the playa? And riding horses? And walking hanging bridges? Right - it would be missed opportunities AND estupido!

We'll start with hanging bridges. Our stay here at Heather's casa overlapped with Joe's stay and then we had 2 days with both Joe and Heather. Joe hadn't done any sight-seeing while he was here alone working on his book, so we decided to go to Mistico Arenal Hanging Bridges Park. On the map below, you can see Tronadora circled. Just to the right of it is an arrow pointing to our casa on Chimurria road. To get to Mistico Park (east of Lake Arenal), we have to drive all the way around the lake. The road is hilly and curvy with several one lane bridges and construction zones. You can't go much more than 25 mph so it's about a 2 hour drive to go 35 miles to Mistico.

On the map I circled both Tronadora and Nuevo Arenal - both are "new" towns because the original ones lie on the bottom of the lake. ICE ("EE-say"), the electric company, expanded the size of the lake to make hydroelectricity - the dam is at the end of the lake near Mistico.

The views of Arenal Volcano are simply magnificent if it isn't hidden by the clouds!

Speaking of playa... A couple of friends I had worked with for many years contacted me that they were coming to CR and had rented a place at the beach - Playa Ocotal. Fawn and Don had extra space and invited us over - WOOHOO! On the way we stopped at Walmart (yes, there's actually a Walmart in Liberia) to pick up some food, beverages, and shoes. Since we had come to CR to work on the casa, I didn't pack flipflops or even any regular sneakers.

Sneakers were needed because we made reservations to go horseback riding at Diamante Eco Park. This was to be Sue's second time on a horse, the first being last year near Arenal volcano.

So there we are on our caballos at the Pacific Ocean where the temperature is 100F, and that's not an exaggeration! Good thing Fawn and Don's villa at Playa Ocotal had a pool - a private pool, no less! It was also right on the beach, but we didn't swim there because the waves looked too powerful.

We walked on the beach and searched the tide pools for interesting shells and 'stuff''. We watched birds, and Heather made friends with a White-throated Magpie Jay as you can see in this video.

But the highlight bird-wise was right at the villa - a Turquoise-browed Motmot!!! (I borrowed this photo from Cornell University)

Another big outing we did was a day trip to the Monteverde cloud forest. Tronadora is about 15 miles away from Monteverde as the motmot flies, but it's nearly a 2 hour drive on pretty rough dirt roads. On the way we stopped to view the biggest, most complete rainbow I have ever seen!

At Selvatura Park, we booked a guided hanging bridge walk and visited the hummingbird garden. The hummingbirds would actually sit on your finger!

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The hanging bridge walk with Juan Carlos was amazing! We got very distant views of Three-wattled Bellbirds and a very brief glimpse of a Resplendant Quetzal in flight. Next March we will have to go back to try to get better looks (and photos!).  

Next post will have photos of progress on the casa - stay tuned!