Time For Some Catch-up

January 2009, Part 1

We all know how bad I am at blogging and how far behind I am, so who knows if I will actually follow through with my goal to do a few REALLY old posts so I will have a few things written down in order to remember some of the fun memories we have had before they are gone, but I figure it's at least worth a try. 2009 was a pretty busy year, so I decided to start there. The beginning of January, Jake and I were lucky enough to have the opportunity to go to Costa Rica with his business partners. It was a BLAST!

When we got there, a shuttle bus service was waiting to take us to the resort. They strapped all our luggage on top of the bus, and crammed all of us into the shuttle bus that had a little Toyota engine comparable to the engine my old Mazda3 had. Add eighteen people and all their luggage for a week, and you can imagine it didn't go up the hills too fast. The terrain in Costa Rica is extremely hilly, and we drove on one lane roads which curved back and forth and went up and down the entire way. Literally, when we were on the up hills, I'm CERTAIN I could have jogged faster than the bus could go! We finally made it to the resort, which seemed to be in the middle of nowhere but was the most BEAUTIFUL place ever! Each room was it's own separate building, and our group took up most of the resort, so we had a few good games of pool volleyball while we were there. We saw lots of wildlife, monkeys, toucans and other beautiful birds, the most crazy looking iguana, frogs, crocodiles, beautiful blue butterflies, and many more. We went on a little ATV tour one day, on a zip line tour another day (my favorite!), went to some nice dinners (although the food there was NOT the greatest), did a little shopping in the markets, had a spa day, and relaxed on the beach a lot.

The beach was awesome because there was hardly anyone there, and if you walked out at low tide, you could find sand dollars everywhere! The only other place I remember getting sand dollars was on the beach in California when I was a little girl, so it brought back fun memories.
The thing I loved the most about Costa Rica had to be the people. The people there are SO incredibly nice and very proud of their country. When we would call a taxi driver, he would come to the resort and pick us up, then drive us for 20-30 minutes to the town where shopping/restaurants were, and he would either wait for us or make sure he was back to pick us up at whatever time we wanted to go back. We had the same taxi driver both ways. We learned while there that the country of Costa Rica has chosen to put lots of money into education, and they are very proud of their education. In fact, they don't even have a formal military because they chose to use that money for education. Most of the country's money comes from tourism, and we could tell that being a tour guide was a much wanted job, our tour guides were very knowledgeable of the country and everything around them.