Continued from yesterday”¦ Of the three of us, this time Christi went first. Being strapped in was scary in and of itself because they have you hanging over the edge while they strap in the harness. There were three people holding onto Christi as they worked, but still, hanging over the edge before the harness was on was a little heart stopping. Even when the harness was secure, it still didn’t feel totally safe. With the zip lines, there are two cables you are strapped to, so if one breaks, you still have the other to keep you from falling. But with the Tarzan swing, you are only attached to one feeble looking rope. OK, actually, the rope is pretty solid looking, but still, there is only one.

Christi took a deep breath and waited for the signal. They said go and nudged her a little. She thought “This is insane”, and suddenly she was in the air, screaming at the top of her lungs as she initially swung down towards the ground, then went flying up towards the highest branches of the trees surrounding us. She clutched onto the rope for dear life, praying it didn’t break right then. The staff had a hard time getting her slowed down and stopped. She kept flying back and forth for much longer than most everyone else. Finally, they got her stopped and unhooked.

Then it was Eric’s turn. Out of nowhere, the wind picked up and it started to drizzle a little bit just as he was getting harnessed in. When he jumped, he let out a loud yell that resembled George’s scream from “George of the Jungle”. It was a bit garbled because he had a hard time overriding the instinctual scream that rumbled up from his gut. But most everyone in the group knew what he was attempting and it got a laugh from the spectators. As the staff grabbed at his feet to try to get him to slow down, they yanked one of his shoes off and it went flying into the jungle behind us. That got another laugh from the crowd.

Then it was Mike’s turn. And it right then, the drizzle turned to real rain. Of course, the rain didn’t affect anything. Here is Mike looking contemplatively at the rest of us below.

Mike jumped off the platform and quietly swung away until the staff stopped and retrieved him. Here he is swinging happily.

Christi and Eric were surprised that he didn’t make a peep. Mike tried to look on the ground for Eric’s shoe, but trying to focus on the ground was making him a little nauseous, so he abandoned the effort. Once Mike was down, the group was herded over to the next zip line, the longest one yet. Eric hung back and waited as a couple of the staff members went searching for his lost shoe. Fortunately, they found it. When they picked it up, they found a small frog inside it and showed it to Eric. Check out the cool colors.

We all really liked the Tarzan swing. We thought it was an awesome change of pace. There were four more zip lines, two of them being the longest runs of all at 984 feet (300 meters) and 1410 feet (430 meters). On those two, the runs were so long that you couldn’t see the ending platform from the starting platform. You just jumped off, hoping that there really was an ending platform somewhere out there. On those two runs, we also got to incredibly fast speeds. They were awesome! All in all, the adventure park was a fun experience and we are all eager to go again. Here is Eric nearing the end of the longest run of all.

We took off our harnesses and piled into the bus. On the way back to the hotel, the bus driver spotted some Howler monkeys in the trees and pulled over so we could watch them. There were at least four of them, and they were the most active Christi has seen yet. They were all jumping from branch to branch and climbing up and down the trunk. We got really good looks at them and enjoyed watching them. But, again, they weren’t howling.

When the bus dropped us off, we checked out of hotel and got lunch in downtown La Fortuna. Then we headed southwest towards the town of Turrialba, which is pretty close to San Jose. We decided not to go back through San Jose and instead took the mountain roads around the big city. The clerk at the hotel had assured us it would be faster and easier to avoid San Jose and its traffic. We estimated the drive would take 4 hours. We left La Fortuna at 1400, figuring we would arrive in Turrialba at about sunset. Once again, Eric was driving by instinct and sense of direction instead of using a detailed map. His instincts had been spot on yesterday and the day before, but today they weren’t quite as sharp. We made a few wrong turns that combined cost us quite a bit of time. At one point, we were driving along towards what we thought was a connecting highway. When the highway didn’t materialize, we turned around and drove back about ½ hour, only to find out we had turned around just a mile or two shy of the highway. So we lost a full hour with that detour.

At another point in time, we noticed that we were being followed by a truck full of late teen boys, so we pulled over at a store to let them pass. They parked behind us. We killed time by asking the locals outside the store for directions and chatting with them for a few minutes, asking them if they knew the boys who were following us. The boys eventually drove off.

While we took completely different roads today than we did yesterday, on the whole, today’s drive was quite similar to yesterday’s lots of undeveloped land, some farms, some residences, and a few small, non-descript towns. Just like the rest of the country, the quality of housing varied drastically. For part of the drive we were on fairly straight roads, but a big chunk of drive time was spent on steep, winding mountain roads. Fortunately, there was no fog, though it was cloudy and did rain on and off for most of the afternoon. This is a nice picture we got of the countryside.

It got dark while we were on some of the windiest of the mountain roads. While it made navigation a little harder, driving at night was fine. The highways don’t have sidewalks, and there are often pedestrians walking on the roads. One of the reasons why they warn tourists not to drive at night is because of the potential hazards with hard to see pedestrians. There were, indeed, people walking on the road after dark, but they were careful to stay off to the side of the road. At around 2000, we finally pulled into Turrialba.

Like Heredia, the streets are one way with visible signs, but the streets aren’t as logically organized in a nice grid as Heredia. Because the streets were difficult to navigate, we had a hard time finding the hotel. We looped around downtown several times before finally figuring out where the hotel was, and more importantly, how to get to it via the one way street system. We got to see a lot of town as we drove and it reminds us a lot of Heredia. The buildings are all packed in close together, and are mostly older, but well maintained, and 1 3 stories tall. There are bars on every window and door, though there isn’t as much extreme stuff, like razor wire, as in Heredia. Also, there seems to be less residential mixed in and amongst the commercial here. Pretty much everything in town was already closed. We suppose it is safe to say this isn’t a wild party town! Something that struck us as odd is that there are a lot of shoe stores in this little town. You’d think we were in Italy with all the shoes.

Once we got to the hotel, we dropped off our stuff. The clerk at the hotel told us to take our car over to a nearby fenced parking lot with a 24 hour security guard. There was a truck in the parking lot with livestock, which we found amusing. We walked around in search of a restaurant for dinner. We hadn’t noticed much as we drove, so we pretty much settled for the first place we came across that was open, a small bakery. We scarfed down some empenadas (meat stuffed in a puff pastry) and headed back to the hotel. Tomorrow was going to be another active day with an early morning start, and we needed our sleep.