Costa Rica {Day 4} – Bogarin Trail

Today we enjoyed a leisurely morning as we had nothing set to a schedule. We decided to hang out at our resort and actually get some time at the pools and waterslides during the daylight hours. Before heading to the pools we walked along the little nature area that the hotel has and checked out the butterflies, aunts, crocodile, turtles. It was much more impressive than I had imagined and I’m glad we did that together.

Iguana 

More leaf carrying ants

A couple kids finally tried the slide into the cold (i.e. normal) temperature pool. It was one and done for these two.

While sitting pool side a large iguana meandered up next to me.  Totally took me by surprise!

We decided to eat lunch at the hotel bar.  

The girls ordered themselves a smoothie

I love that many places in Costa Rica served their fries with both ketchup and mayonnaise – I love me some fry sauce!

I thought this was a fun picture of some of the wild swimwear we spotted today.

We had a little visitor during lunch

This was the only day it rained on us, but thankfully it let up in time for us to go to the Bogarin Trail and go on a nature walk. We learned about this trail on TripAdvisor and the creator of the trail, Giovanni just so happened to be our guide today. He spent the last 18 years creating an environment that would entice some of Costa Rica’s most incredible creatures to call it home. Giovanni was a wealth of knowledge and it was so interesting to listen to his story. He was living in Costa Rica back in the 60s when the volcano erupted and his family lost everything. They moved away but when he was a young adult he decided to come back to the area and told his father he would make the volcano pay, and he created this area that we got to enjoy today. 

This “blue jean” frog is poisonous

Being the expert, Giovanni was able to locate three different sloths for us.

Giovanni had a scope device with him that allowed us to take some cool photos and see the sloths up close. So fascinating! 

The male sloths have this bright patch on their backs

We also saw lots of different birds and what Giovanni referred to as a rat. But it is the largest “rat” I have ever seen in my life. It looked more like a large possum (sadly no picture). 

This is a huge beehive covering the outside of this tree!

Giovanni tried REALLY hard to get this turtle come out of its shell for us

Abigail had the idea of going to the grocery store and picking up a bunch of random food for dinner. We did just that and enjoyed a smorgasbord of chips and salsa, Oreos, baguettes and donuts on our patio. 

Costa Rica {Day 3} – Adventuring

Today we had a full day at Sky Adventures. Costa Rica is famous for ziplining and we were so excited to be able to do it together as a family.  We arrived at 9 AM and everyone was suited up with gear.  We rode a gondola up the mountain where we would start zipping our way down.

There were seven ziplines though the jungle and it was incredible! Unfortunately, we made the mistake of not wearing anything that had a zipper pocket for a phone so besides the GoPro that was attached to Abigail‘s helmet we didn’t have the ability to take any photos of or videos during the excursion. I’m such a documenter and lover of photos that this justified my ordering the pictures that the crew took on the first line of the ziplining tour. 

Drew and Katie were too light weight to do most of the zip lines on their own and even on a few that they could’ve done on their own they preferred to have a guide ride along with them. The guides were fantastic.  They were so fun and great with my littles.  That made it much more comfortable for me as a mother to send my six-year-old across 1000 foot cable in 1000 feet up in the air. 

Had I known I would be buying these photos perhaps I would’ve tried to look a little more relaxed – Ha!

We all loved ziplining! We thought we’d have a few hours before our next adventure however because we were done in time they were able to get us started earlier. Justin and the three oldest kids were doing the “Limit” activities which entails repelling down waterfalls, additional zip lines, and other more intense activities. I went with Katie and Drew on a 3.5 mile nature walk. Both excursions ended up taking the same amount of time so it worked out perfectly. We learned a lot on our nature walk and got in some good exercise. We saw a lot of leaf-carrying-ants which were fascinating to watch.  You can see long lines of ants carrying leaves down trees, across paths to their home where the they make fungus out of the leaves.

Drew likes to lead when we go hiking so it was hard for him to remember he needed to stay behind our guide.

We walked across several hanging bridges.

Lots of cool vegetation…

We had some cool views of Lake Arenal which is a man-made lake created after the last big eruption of Arenal.

We also saw a bit of wildlife…

can you spot two lizards?

a tarantula!

We were lucky enough to get to a waterfall just ask Justin and the kids were repelling down it. So I was able to get some fun pictures and videos. 

Carly was the last one down and the guide asked if he should put her in the waterfall. Abigail quickly answered “Yes!” Good thing Carly is a good sport.

While they continued adventuring we continued on our hike.

We were able to catch the rest of the family at the end of their activities as they were coming in on a zipline superman style.

They weren’t able to take many pictures during their adventures, but Abigail has some fun videos that she’ll include in the family video.  Just this one lonely picture of Carly on the Tarzan swing.

We wrapped up all of the activities around three or four in the afternoon. We hadn’t had anything to eat since breakfast so we were all ready to eat. We found a little pizza place by our hotel that we were able to order and eat back at our room and then it was back to the pools.  

There was a very interesting and loud bird in the tree just outside our balcony.

We picked up some ice cream for a little treat before bed – yum!