Day 7: Zip Line and Hot Pots

This day could be the best day so far.  It's hard to say because every day has been amazing, but this day was so much fun!  I scheduled a zip line tour through Anywhere Costa Rica.  We don't have internet, so it was difficult to arrange.  The story is long, so to shorten it I'll just say that the guy helping me over Anywhere Costa Rica dropped our conversation and didn't respond to any of our questions, and ultimately we ended up missing our tour by 15 minutes.  The drive was long and I was so disappointed.  Anywhere Costa Rica recognized their mistake and wanted to make it right, so they paid for us to have dinner at a super fancy all-you-can-eat buffet at Baldi Hot Springs.  YES!!!!  After eating beans and rice for days, we were thrilled to stuff our bellies!  More on that later.

The zip line people felt bad too, so they called in extra guides and took us on the tour.  Wow it was INCREDIBLE!!!  Adam took the girls while I did school with Brigham and Lincoln in the lobby of a hotel (because Eliza couldn't go), and then Adam stayed with Eliza while I took the boys.  The beauty of the surrounding jungle is indescribable.  These pictures just can't do it justice!  The deep, vibrant colors of green, the wet air, the mist rising from the steep mountainside, the fresh earth smells 200 feet in the air....it just makes us happy!  The guide joked that this was their oxygen factory. "See the big pipes?! (pointing to the trunk of a tree)."

I am so glad they let Lincoln go tandem!  We zip lined over a river, past waterfalls, near sloths, and I wish I could put the GoPro videos on this blog!  They are way better than the pictures.

School on the go

Then we drove to Baldi Hot Springs.  It's a waterpark built using the natural hot pots, so the pools are warm!  Totally my type of pool. The kids were soooo happy to be there and we laughed so much!  There are some ghetto slides that are so painful it's funny.  The toilet bowl slide was the best - you zoom down a steep tube slide and then shoot out into a big bowl.  After swirling around it a couple of times, you fall through the hole in the middle to a pool below.  It's a drop of about 5 feet and it's funny every time!  There were also slides that end right in the water instead of letting you drop, so after zooming down at 20 miles per hour, you slam into the pool and do a couple of skidding cartwheels across the water before stopping.  We laughed and laughed (and then rubbed our sore backs!).  There are hot pools with cold pools in the middle of them, so we liked going back and forth between them.  We took lots of funny videos with the GoPro, but not many pictures, so you'll have to use your imagination.

Then we were able to enjoy the delicious buffet meal I mentioned earlier.  The restaurant looked super fancy, so I prepped the kids by telling them they couldn't act like kids.  They had to act like they were kings and queens at a royal banquet.  No running, skipping, laughing loudly, etc.  They did really well (mostly because their mouths were so busy eating all of the delicious food) and I was so proud of them. I felt even better when an older lady came up to me and said, "I can't believe how well behaved your kids are!  When you first walked in I thought you were crazy for bringing 5 kids into this restaurant, but after seeing how well they behaved, I was very impressed."  Yay for teaching!  I'm a firm believer in prepping:).  

On our way home, we were all filled with so much joy.  The drive took 2.5 hours in the dark on windy, bumpy roads, but we sang silly camp songs and felt love and unity.  We have been aching for these experiences!  As I listened to all the kids joining in on the nursery rhyme competition song, I felt like it was all worth it.  All the times I didn't take them to the local waterparks at home, all the times I didn't take them out to eat, all the times we found killer deals on shoes at Savers instead of the department stores...it was all paying off.  We were together and we were happy.  We're living our dream.