Dec 28 ’08

Dec 282008
 
Barcelo San Jose Palacio

Our Hotel

The tour starts with a meeting tonight, so we have the whole day to ourselves. The guys slept until 1 pm, hopefully beating back some of their colds. Quesadillas for lunch around the pool, and then Sarah, Eric and I headed out for some touring of our own. Kevin stayed back at the hotel to keep fighting off his cold.

We took a cab to the National Museum and learned some of the history of Costa Rica and Central America. The highlight, though, was visiting their butterfly garden – an enclosed area with about a dozen different butterflies, interesting native plants and some exotic spiders and other insects thrown in.

Odd Tree

I’m not sure what kind of a tree this is – the plaque under it said Jacaranda, but I don’t think they grow these beans.

Huge Caterpillars

These giant caterpillars are about 4″ long. Sorry, don’t know what they become.

Morphos Resting

The underside of a Morphos butterfly

Morphos Wing

The top of a Morphos wing. It was lying on the ground like that, honest!

Yellow Aphids

Yellow Aphids. I’m used to green ones.

After the museum and butterfly garden we took a walk around the plaza. It was a busy Sunday afternoon, but we were happy to grab a cab and head back to the hotel.

More napping, relaxing and hanging out ’til dinner, then our intro meeting with Paul the tour guide. It looks like there will be about 46 people on the tour, from all around the US.

Dec 282008
 

Back in the room, Sarah and I were flipping around the TV channels, half in Spanish and half in English. We ended up watching the climactic chase sequence from one of the Dirty Harry movies on TMC. Clint was racing around Oakland and San Francisco offing bad cops in the process. After fifteen minutes Harry sent one of the cops into the San Francisco Bay – peering over the edge of the aircraft carrier’s wood runway he delivered a classic Dirty Harry line… only we couldn’t understand it. Fifteen minutes of Dirty Harry, and we didn’t know it was in Spanish!