The coati on our block

A coati looks and acts like a raccoon.

Preprandial activities

Juggling with the beach ball with our neighbors, and practicing gymnastic poses against the wall. Our neighbors made the trip to Ostional tonight, and are probably seeing tens of thousands of turtles right now. But their car has a snorkel (you can see the bottom of it in the photo, the black pipe running up along the windshield on the driver side), so they can cross rivers twice as deep as the one we made it across yesterday. Anyway, life goes on even if the US Government is going to shut down operations...

Our First Surf

This time we went to the beach, we brought the surfboard--of course, to go surfing. Gabriel tried first, then Simone. It was hard, but after a little while, they managed to stand up pretty well. It was fun, except for when we were waiting to go surfing. Dad didn't really stand up at all. 

(By Simone)

PS: Dad was too busy surfing (plus helping Simone and Gabriel) to take pictures, and mom was too lazy. (Or maybe we just forgot the camera.)

Trip to Ostional

We went to Ostional today, to see what the trip was like, so we could go back when the 100,000 turtles land in a couple of days. To get there you need to cross a couple of rivers...

Some of us crossed the footbridge:

We got to Ostional and went to the beach. It was nice. (We didn't see any turtles, but we did see a couple of empty eggs. They looked like ping pong balls.)

On the way back we saw some guys get stuck in the same river we had crossed. We could maybe have dragged them out, but we didn't have a rope or chain.

So we drove back across the river and back to Nosara. It was a pretty drive.

What we do when not oohing about nature

I'm drinking a fruit smoothie, G is waiting to play volleyball, S is swimming the length of the pool underwater...

Snake!

Our young neighbor, Nadav, was riding his bike on the road about a hundred yard away from our street when a coral snake rose up in front of of him. He rode home, and the snake was killed. Here's its headless body in a jar:

A butterfly in our car

We are still new enough here to be impressed by the nature. When we went to pick Gabriel up from after school Spanish, we saw this:

What we are missing...

(The weather report for Barnard, VT calls for snow tonight...)

Sunset

Some photos from the walk we just took. Now, 20 minutes later, it is pitch dark...

Large bug

This was on the counter in the gatehouse. It's not as impressive in the picture, but it was about five inches long (that's my finger) and looked cartoonish in real life.

Making coffee

A few years ago when I was camping I brought coffee but forgot to bring a French press. So I used a sock. It worked pretty well. I was pleased to find that when making coffee in Costa Rica (and maybe elsewhere?) people use a contraption like this:

It works well!

Time to Go

(Written by Eric, 9/13/13)

When we sat down with the computer tonight, we asked ourselves, "What  should we call the blog?" After a bit of fumbling around with the obvious ("Our Year in Costa Rica," etc.), Simone suggested, "Time to go!" and we all kind of liked it--but for different reasons. Nadia and I thought it was about how this year was our time to go to Costa Rica. Gabriel and Simone both thought it was time to go in the sense of time to leave Costa Rica forever.

As I wrote that last paragraph, I was bombarded by edits from all sides.  That, and the different perspectives on "Time To Go", serve to represent our time here so far.  So it is now, for this post, time to go.  And now Gabriel has just told me that I should just delete the whole thing, and we should play a game of "Ticket to Ride."  Now he tells me that I don't know how to make a post...

OK, time to go. More informative and more illustrated posts to come.