Costa Rica! Days 1 and 2

Clark flew out to Costa Rica for work on Sunday, October 16th. He flew out with his c0-worker, Milan. Milan's wife, Rachel, and I flew out to join the men on Thursday, October 20th. Our flight from Miami to San Jose, Costa Rica, ended up being much longer than planned. Just as we were descending for the airport in San Jose, our airplane was diverted to Managua, Nicaragua because of bad weather conditions. We stayed in the airplane in Managua for about 2 1/2 hours, until the weather cleared up enough to try landing in San Jose again. Thankfully, we were able to land. Instead of landing at 3:30 in San Jose, our plane didn't land until 7:45 p.m. It made for a very long day of travel, we had been traveling since we arrived at the Denver airport that morning at 6:30 a.m. Whew. Poor Clark and Milan were waiting at the San Jose airport for 3 hours. And they had no idea when we would arrive. And there are no chairs to wait at the airport. They had to wait outside on the sidewalk, by the taxis.

After we finally met up with the menfolk, we drove by the San Jose Temple. It is really small. I wish we would have had time to go inside.

The next morning we hit the road and drove about 4 hours north (but it should have only been a little more than 3...) to the Arenal Volcano. The roads were a little scary driving through the mountains. The Costa Ricans have no problem with passing on a double yellow line, around a blind curve, on a tiny road that barely fits two lanes. It was pretty crazy at times. Clark was the designated chauffeur for the trip, and he did an amazing job navigating the streets. However, the GPS sent us on a wild goose chase. We ended up completely circling our hotel, and taking a muddy road through the jungle. We finally reached a river that you were supposed to cross by driving across a scary looking mound of dirt. That was when we decided it was time to turn around. We re-entered the hotel information into our GPS, and this time around it took us to the right place.

Pretty much all the bridges were one lane. This one was definitely the longest one lane bridge (and the most secure looking, during our drive we went on quite a few rickety bridges)

And this was the point where we decided to turn around. GPS was not our friend that day.

And we finally arrived at our hotel, and it was beautiful! We had our own private cabin, and this beautiful garden right outside our sliding door/wall of windows

Here we are sitting on our front porch. Arenal is right behind us, but you can't see it because of the clouds and rain. I loved relaxing on our rocking chairs on the porch. It was great.

And, we had a pretty cool plant in our bathroom.

That night we went to the hotel restaurant for dinner. That ended up being a bit of a disappointment. First of all, dinner took 3 hours from start to finish. Secondly, our dinner was supposed to be included in the package that we purchased from the hotel. Unfortunately, our server, Elmer ("like Elmer Fudd") really did not understand this concept. He ended up chasing us down out the door to make us pay for our food. At the end of our stay, the hotel had to refund us the money for the dinner, because it really was included in the package we bought. However, the front desk didn't even know that when we first talked to them. We had to show them on the hotel's website where it said that dinner would be included in our package price.