personal:May 24-26 weekend adventure :)

I’m sure all of you are dying to hear about my amazing weekend. We started off with class that Friday morning, so as you can imagine our attention wasn’t at its best. We made it through class and lunch at the university then we left for Arenal. We got to our hotel, which had a perfect view of the volcano. We headed over to the Baldie Hot Springs. The whole area was gorgeous. There was a waterslide into one of the hot springs and it was pretty intense…thought I lost a contact, but I didn’t! The scenery around the hot springs was absolutely gorgeous. There was also a swim up bar in one of them. Some of us even "manned up" and got into the hottest spring at 152 degrees. I'm not going to lie, it was actually painful. We were all worried about going all the way under and that ended up being the least painful part. They has massage tables set up all around that hot spring, they were really cute and had the towels folded like birds. They seem to do that at all of the hotels like they do on cruises. We ate dinner there and the food was soo good!

On Saturday we went to La Fortuna waterfalls. We rode horses to get to them, and I think this is when my camera broke :( It was an awesome experience and I was able to recover the pictures from my disk. We were oblivious to off limits signs, so we were able to go behind the waterfall, it was amazing. After that we went to Arenal Park where hiked around and saw the volcano. Neither words nor pictures can capture how beautiful the view was from the lava flows. The power went out that night all over town so we had to use candles and flashlights to get around. Because it was dark everywhere, we were able to see the top of the volcano light up. J
The next morning we took a boat jeep to Monteverde. We then took busses up to our hotel on a very bumpy ride. The whole ride was sooo beautiful, I don’t think I have ever seen anything like before. We went on a canopy tour and the zip lines were awesome. The view from the zip lines was also gorgeous...I know I have said this multiple times, but everything we saw was unreal (in a good way). That night we went on a night tour of the reserve with our guides and saw several bats and other insects.

We were up bright and early on Monday for a morning tour…530 AM. I am glad we got up because some of us were able to see the Quetzals which are brightly colored birds of the trogon family. They are found in the tropical regions of the Americas. We saw them in the cloud forest where people might visit multiple times and never spot a single Quetzal. We saw both male and female Quetzals. We didn’t end up going to the cheese factory, but I think we were all pretty worn out.