costarica2

Nov. 26, 2001
    HAPPY BIRTHDAY MOM!!
   Thanksgiving went really well. Emily and i cooked the ham for like 5 hours and got up at the butt crack of dawn (well 8am is the same thing for us) to start the pumpkin pies and Turkey. By evening we had more than enough food for the 15 or so people that showed up. It was great! The Yummy Potatoes were the favorite by far (thanks mom).
   Well let's see, this weeks pretty exciting. Today we're supposed to get hooked up with free cable by the landlord (PRAISE GOD!!) And even better Shayla arrives at about 9pm this Thursday. (oh crap! We better start cleaning the apartment NOW!) Emily's Birthday is on December 1st and so Sat. we'll have a Birthday welcome party. Emily wants us to take her to T.G.I.Fridays for birthday dinner. And then next weekend we're going to Guanacaste to celebrate Steven's Birthday on the 4th. Well If you can't tell I've kinda revamped the website and I've been in here for about 3hours now. I think I'll trot on home and see if we have CABLE!!!
Dec. 12, 2001
   Ok ok, I know I've been promising to get better at the updates but we've been keeping busy around here. Plus I'm lazy. Well, Shayla arrived on the 29th of Nov.safe and sound and with cable finally hooked up at the house. The party we had at the apartment that night I'm pretty sure almost got us kicked out of the apartments because of the crazy german lady upstairs. Some people just don't appreciate loud music and laughter at 3am in the middle of the week! I swear!
   Well Shayla's been keeping us in line. We're actually keeping the apartment half way clean and the dishes get done after every meal. (not that we really have a choice since there are only 4 placesettings)
   This next weekend (right before Christmas) we've finally been able to persuade our friends to go camping. We're going to show them camping Oregon style!!! Hotdogs, marshmellow, chips, beer, tents, fishing, hiking....ect ect. Hopefully we'll be camping near lake Irazu so there will be swimming too. Then the following weekend for New Years we'll be camping for several days in Tamarindo with Nela and her roommates and a bunch of their friends.
   Today we got up around 9am to go walking. We're trying to make it a habit during the week so we actually get a little exercise. We walked about two miles to the far end of the San Pedro area and picked up our Christmas Tree!!! Jorge. (thats' what they wanted to call him) so we spent the first several minutes trying to decide which corner to stuff him into and about an hour later, with the house compleatly rearranged we agreed on a spot we liked. The apartment actually looks really good now. One whole wall will eventually be covered in photos, but for now we have a good start from pictures we brought from home.
More to come SOON!! I promise!
SHAYLA: Hey guys just wanted to say hi and my flights went fairly well.... a little bumpy. I was so excited to see the girls and our apartment. I was very surprised when I saw how big and cute it was. Things have been going very well ( which means we haven't killed each other...... yet) We plan on getting some pictures developed soon from my arrival, and Emily and Steven's Birthdays. I love you all, take care, SHAYLA
Dec. 18 2001
   Not too much going on right now. I think tomorrow we are going to be making a couple of shopping trips to pick up stuff for the up coming camping trips and we also just realized that if we're going to make Christmas cookies for people we have to do it tomorrow or Thurs. because then we leave on our camping trip and then its christmas. Yesterday we walked to an outdoor shopping area. Its a strip of booths all full of handmade items from really cool hippie clothes to jewelry of every kind. Shayla had a heyday and bought some really cute stuff including a pair of dark purple cotton pants with bright orange tiedied circles. She says shes going to come back a true hippie.
   We went on Sat. to the Festival of Lights. However I did not say we SAW the Festival of Lights. Mostly because we thought it started at 6pm so we go there at 4:30 to insure a good spot. then around 6:30 when it still hadn't started we were ready to leave but then they put on a good fire works show. Finally around 9:30 we decided to go home and watch it on tv. We weren't that far from the apartment but by the time we got home we got to see the last float and some cheerleaders. (If they would have actually dropped her when they threw her in the air it would have been all worth it.) But no big loss. Carnival in San Jose is the 27th and the 2 week long festivals in Zapote start the 26th. With a fair and tent after tent of music and bars and my personal favorite, the bull runs. Which may not be as exotic as the runs in Spain where people dressed up in the tradional garb run the cobblestone streets to avoid the raging bulls However watching a whole bunch of really fat drunk guys falling over eachother in a bull stadium to avoid being gored by a pissed off bull is still quite amusing. That and the ride at the adjacent fair called the TAGADA which may very easily be more dangerous than drunk guys and bulls put in the same arena. It's basically a cross between a human washer on spin cycle and a human popcorn maker. And God forbid you ever get on at the same time as one of the stupid girls in a skirt because I gaurantee the ride will be longer and harder than usual if the ride operator is a male.
   We hope to get pictures developed soon and I'm positive we'll have a couple rolls after Christmas! I'll post a note when we get them online.
HAVE A VERY MERRY CHRISTMAS!!!!
Jan. 4, 2002
Well It's been alittle while since we last wrote. I had forgotten most of the country shuts down for about 2 weeks during this time of year, including the internet place. But we're back! a little more bruised and sick for the trip but with good pictures and memeories. The weekend before Christmas (22-23rd) we went on a 'Costa Rica camping trip'. "This should be interesting" I thought. And was it ever! We had a three car caravan. An old 2door Colt, an old 4 door Accord, and a classic Volkswagen Beetle. NONE of which was ever engineered to navigate the 3hours of 'off road vehicle strongly recommended' roads we got lost on. We did come across a beautiful little river up in the mountains somewhere. We stopped to check it out and got some great pictures of people hopping from rock to rock and steven fully clothed standing in one of the waterfalls there and another one of him carrying Shayla on his back across the rapids so her shoes wouldn't get wet. Emily slipped and twisted her ankle really badly so from there we reloaded and moved on. About 5 hours into the mountains I imagined us being miles and miles from any living human. Just our group traversing the breathtaking mountain ranges of southern Costa Rica and then with one turn in the road we were abruptly dumped onto the interamerican highway that runs from Canada to Chile. So much for solitary deep jungle adventures. But it was 3pm and we'd started drinking rum and cokes somewhere around 11 in the morning so this small turn in events hardly dampened the spirits. We pulled over and cranked up the music and danced on the side of the road as the guys tried to figure out exactly where we were in relation to the great camping area we'd been promised since John and Nelson had spent the previous weekend there and couldn't stop talking about how cool it was. It turned out we were only about 10 minutes from this place. So we excitedly pulled into a driveway that turned into an uphill road. We finally pulled into what seemed to be someones farm. I figured they had gotten us lost again and were asking directions untill i saw them pulling camping gear out of the other cars. It was a cow pasture. I was so baffled, bewildered, breathless and a lot of other 'B' words... we couldn't believe it. And i promise you I would not have slept in a cow field if it hadn't been getting dark already. So by the time it got dark it had started to rain so we kinda had a fire (nobody listened to the girls when we said we should bring wood or lighter fluid) but it didn't really matter since someone forgot the hot dogs.And we kinda had a tent but there were 30 or more unmarked pole pieces so it only got put up part way plus it was wedged, facing the wrong way between blackberry bushes so most of us were cut to ribbons by morning. The tent had all but compleatly collapsed on us during the night so we were up and ready to leave by about 6:45am. Still bad memories make the best stories. And on our way there we got to stop at the Baca Flaca (skinny cow). An old cow farm turned bar/restaurant in the middle of nowhere that draws huge crowds on the weekends for the music, kareoke and incredibly cheap and tasty food. The coolest thing is that it's made entirely of wood all of which was from the farm. It got its name because the cows all died from starvation. I believe I understood that the last one to die is the one stuffed sitting out front to greet customers.
Luckily our next camping trip (for the 29-30th) went much better. We had about 12 people, the tents all went up perfectly, we had a great bonfire all night, and we remembered the hotdogs. We ran around the forest and admired the city lights from atop the hill we were on and even made a rope swing. Unfortunatly the swing went right into a barbed wire fence and dropped steven down the side of the mountain but fortunatly he didn't break anything.