Back to Paradise

After our amazing 4 days at the Finca Manglar, we went back to our beautiful house at Palo Seco.  It felt like home:).  Seriously this beach is amazing!!!!  The skim was incredible!


We ate the most amazing pineapples almost every day.  Ahhhh they are SOOOO good!


This tree was huge and so awesome!  We love the cool plants we see on our walk to the beach.






Because of the recent storms that washed a bunch of logs onto the shore, we decided to clean up the beach a bit and have a bonfire.  The kids love fire:).



It was so fun to be at the beach in the dark because all the crabs came out!  Brig found this huge one.  It was a little eerie at night though - it was pitch black so I couldn't see the kids, only the light of their flashlight.  I could hear the ocean but couldn't see it.  It's a crazy feeling.  We're so used to flipping on lights whenever we need them.  I liked using my other senses, which are probably weak from my reliance on sight!


Along the beach in the dark we saw that hundreds of little blue jellyfish had washed up on shore.  We picked them up to look at them and they were so cool!  Lincoln got a little careless with his and the tentacles touched his chest and stung him.  Ouch it hurt him so bad!  Poor guy!




These toads were always waiting for us on the porch and the kids loved them!!


Do you believe in vision boards?  I do.  I put a picture of a family doing school on the beach on my vision board before the Costa Rica idea even happened.  And look!  Here we are!  Put a dream on your vision board and watch it come to pass!




Endless beach with no other humans.  My type of beach!  (We saw way too much skin on other beaches....).  Can you believe this sand?  I loved that the kids just played and played and played!!!




This skim though!!!  The reflection!  We had so much fun skim boarding.  The kids got really good at it!  We loved the beach so much, but were sad that the surfing and the boogie boarding wasn't good.  The skim boarding definitely made up for it!  Here's Brig.


Here's Lily.




And here's Linc.  We got Jade going too, but she wasn't as into it and I didn't snap a photo.

Mangroves and Our First Snake, Finally!

This is a mangrove.  These places were so beautiful, mysterious and teaming with life!  These are special trees that grow in the esteros or estuaries where the mouth of the river meets the ocean an the salt and fresh water come together to form a brackish water.  This mangrove tour was in Finca Manglar and we had a Spanish speaking but very knowledgeable tour guide named Louis.  It was such a beautiful and perfect day.  We were so grateful for the tour because our first day at Finca Manglar, there was a big miscommunication about the cost of tours and we weren't sure what we would be able to pay to do.  We were so glad that we paid to do this!

This started to become a form of entertainment for the kids when life got dull.  Take 1000 selfies with mom or dads phone.  I'm pretty sure jade kicked off this tradition!  So funny!

All of the little ladies out cruisin!

Three handsome gentlemen.

The squirrel monkeys were so cute!  This was the final species of 4 that live in and that we've seen in Costa Rica.

No matter were we go or what we're doing, if Eliza is tired, she finds a way to be rubbing someone's ears. 

Having a turn with LilyMae.

 We saw these Capuchins up close and personal which was fun.  A lot of monkeys seem to travel along the bank of the river.  "5 little monkeys swinging in a tree," makes a lot more sense now that we saw monkeys and crocodiles in the same area.

 We saw some really rustic living as we traveled along the river.

 The scenery was so beautiful.

 Our guide was so good at spotting Spectacled Caimans and Crocodiles.  We saw 7 or so.  This one was probably around 4 ft long.  Caimans get up to 6 ft max.

 We saw a lot of Iguanas in Costa Rica, but it was always really cool to see giant ones like this!

 It was a real treat to see all of these rainbow macaws up in this tree.  There were at least 15+.  When we passed the tree on the way back, they were all gone.

 Again, our guide, with his good eyes, saw this barn owl.  It took us 3 minutes to finally figure out what he was pointing at.

 A local family out fishing.

 Our first snake!  Hurray!  I'm sure that we are lucky that we didn't run into more snakes, seeing as how so many of them are poisonous.  But we were sure happy to finally see a Boa, even if it was just snoozing away.

 We saw lots of Crocodiles on our way back after the tide had gone down a bit.  We could never get too close though because as soon as we would head over to them, they would just slip right back into the water.   They were so big and so pretty.