Were back! A photo blog from Costa Rica...

A picture from the front door of the house we rented on Lake Arenal:


This will be our view when driving from our land to Arenal, not too bad!


We saw lots of hummingbirds:


flowers,


butterflies,


and even a great macaw parrot!


We spent a lot of our time near the Volcano:


Our future home site, and view out the living room:


The view out the back door isn't bad either:


Lots and lots of more pictures on our smugmug account, check them out!

Leaving Tomorrow!

Joe, my mother and I are all set to leave for our flight tomorrow! We are very excited to show my mom around all the places we have been and let her see our future home site.

Some of our plans include a hanging bridge tour, a mountain bike tour, some white water rafting, and maybe a trip to the beach. We'll also take my mom to meet Fred and Amy and show her around their neighborhood. I know we will all have a lovely time.

This year has been moving by so fast, its hard to believe that it is already half over. Pretty soon it will be December and Joe and I will be down in Costa Rica once again learning Spanish. After that, we plan to start building sometime around March. After the Spring Belly Dance Festival, that is. I need to get at least one solo in before our move!

Goodbye Utah. See you soon, Costa Rica!

Quick update...

Sorry for the lack of posts lately, training for our upcoming Great Divide ride is a lot more time consuming then one would expect. Its not just the 3 - 4 hour long rides each day, its the 3 hours mid-day nap and time it takes to eat 3000+ calories a day!

We have come up with a rather simple training plan, on even number days we ride the Bonivile Shoreline Trail, and on odd number days we rack up the road mileage in City Creek Canyon. Today was a BST day, we jump on the Trax train in front of the Gateway Mall and take it to the end of the line just above the University of Utah, but below IHC. A quick 5 minute ride takes us from the train to the singletrack haven that is the BST. The section of the BST starts off with a punishing 800 foot climb around the back of the "U" mountain, from there we climb higher with amazing views of the city below. The trail heads north, then west above the Avenues, and then dumps us out at the mouth of City Creek Canyon. From there, its a quick ride to Memory Grove & Downtown.

Tomorrow will be a City Creek day, we ride from our front door back up to Memory Grove and then straight up the Canyon. City Creek has car days and bike days, on bike days, hundreds of cyclists hit the road, and what a road it is! Non stop for 7 miles, we have read that the last three miles are harder then hell, with a sustained 10% grade. We have not yet made it up to that point, hopefully tomorrow will be our day to hit the top. The last time we tried we ran out of water and time.

Other then riding, we have another Costa Rica trip coming up. We are about a week away from taking off, I'm really excited for this trip. We are renting a car and a vacation house right on Lake Arenal. On Sunday Brian sat down with us and hammered out some more concrete plans for our house. I'll try to get some sketches of it on the blog soon, its going to be an amazing house to live in... I'm also taking my nice camera along with me this time, I'm hoping to return with some amazing images of our future home site.

Thats all for now,