A week off...

Continuing with my week off between teams, I went with Shannon and our Costa Rican friend David on a mini-vacation to the province of Guanacaste in northwest Costa Rica. Our first stop was in La Fortuna, home of the Arenal volcano. I guess its pretty rare for there not to be clouds and to actually be able to see it, so we felt very lucky...

After dinner, we went for a nighttime tour of the volcano and got to see lava spewing out and running down the volcano - it was amazing!

(We couldn't actually get any of our pictures to turn out, so this is an online pic, but this is pretty much what we saw!)

The next day we left for beautiful Playa del Coco... here's an interesting fact about the beach-although in Spanish coco means 'coconut', there wasn't a coconut in sight, so I asked my tico (thats what they call Costa Ricans) friend why it's called that. He told me it's because the legend of Coco (the Latino version of the Boogie man) originated here. Interesting.

Anyway, the beach was beautiful, we were pretty much the only ones there, swimming in totally calm clear blue water, perfect. Shannon and I did a little exploring around the beach and found a pelican, many crabs, snails, pink seashells, and electric blue fish. It was wonderful and relaxing.

Tonight the next team arrives in Heredia, a group of 32 people from Canada... here we go again!