Honeymoon (The volcanoes and the trip home)

The next place we went to was the Arenal Volcano area.  We drove from the Pacific beach straight towards the center of the country.  It was a nice, relaxing drive, up and down pretty hills.  Eventually, we came upon Arenal Lake, which is huge and we had to drive from one side to the other.  That was 1/2 the trip.  We stopped at a little cafe and I had an awesome veggie sandwich with avocado. 

Here is a pic of the lake as we came upon it:

We got to our hotel and found out why they said you should have 4wd to get there.  The road in was a bit rocky:

 

And this was the drive to the bungalows from the reception:

 

We spent the rest of the day relaxing on the porch of our bungalow and enjoying the weather:

 

The next day we went and did the thing I most wanted to do of anything: zip lines!  Since L is deathly afraid of heights, it did not even occur to me that he might come with.  But when I went to pay, he said he wanted to.  I asked multiple times if he was sure and he said he was.  So I paid for both of us.  And up we went.  We took a cable car to the top of the mountain:

L looks scared:

 

I look excited:

 

Here we are at the top, ready to go, with the volcano in the background:

 

After 2 test runs, we got ready to do the first one.  I asked (for the 10th time) if L wanted to go back...it was his last chance.  He went, then I went.  It was AWESOME!  It was 45 stories up and you could see the volcano and the lake and trees way below you.  It was like nothing I've ever seen before.  When we got to the end, I looked around wondering how you get down.  It had not even occurred to me to ask any questions.  I was going no matter what.  I had assumed it was 1 zip then you're done.  Wrong.  A fellow zipper pointed out to me that there were 7 more to get to the end.  Uh, oh....pretty sure L wasn't aware of that either.  I was thrilled, he did not seem quite so thrilled.  But I got him to let me take pics of his second zip for proof that he'd done it.  Here is the sequence:

 

 

 

It was seriously the most fun I've had in a LONG time!  After all that excitement, though, L wanted to relax.  So we just hung out and relaxed at the bungalow.  The next day I was hoping we could do an ATV tour of whitewater rafting, but L was still a little shaken by the zip lines and wanted to stay low-key.  We walked around La Fortuna and shopped and ate.

The next day we took off for the airport really early.  We were really sad to go.  We went out a different way than we came in.  And the scenery was beautiful!  Here are a few shots from the road:

 

At one point, we realized that we were actually in the clouds:

 

 

On the map we had, it showed that the road went straight back to the main highway.  So we were very surprised when it forked right before we hit San Ramon.  We weren't sure what fork to take, so we stopped and asked a woman and her son.  They seemed very sure we should take the right fork.  Until they started gesturing the other way and seeming very certain we should go the other way.  I suppose that's what we get for going to a Spanish speaking country and not speaking any Spanish ourselves....  We took the right fork and ended up a a number of T intersections.  We randomly chose what direction to turn at each.  And were THRILLED to see this:

 

How we navigated through that city with no directions and successfully found our way back to the right highway I will never know.  But I'm sure glad we did because we would have missed our plane I think if we had gotten lost!

We didn't miss our plane.  We made it back in one piece.  It was tempting to just not get on, but seeing as we had already paid for the tickets and we'd just have to buy more if we didn't get on, we figured we might as well.  I can't wait to go back!