The final day

Hello from Monteverde!

Hopefully this work, the wireless internet is very sketchy, email is working apparantly, but we can´t connect to any websites. Curently I am in some  ïnternet cafe which is really like somebodry´s bsement surrounded by locals with no english- I needed a pen and paper - fortunately I remebered the the word escriber for to write, as no one was understanding my hand motions! I needed a pen and paer so I could write down the @ symbol, as I am using a spanish keyboard and I couldn´t find the symbol which I need to log into this blog... if you are cutious, you push Cntrl and Alt and 2 and @ appears. This is slightly intimidating as I can´t find some of the punctuation, but there are ssome cool ones ...ñ ¿ € Ç and I´m afraid to push some of the others.

But I digress.

Everybody is doing very well. The ride to monteverde is a tortuous twisting narrow gravel road, the spped limit is 25km an hour, and the bus never hit that once I think. It took over an hour to go the last 20 km. There are sheer drop offs with no guard rails or anything, washouts, potholes... we had 2 suffering from car sickness by the time was reached the top of the dirty dusty drive.

Most of us went on the coffe-banana plantation tour, and also saw pinapples growing, sugar cane processed, made our own toffee from the sugar  and drank some terrific coffee. Oh yeah, BTW... most of the kids are hard core coffee drinkers now, though most of them atre double double which is not really enjoyiing the flavor in my opinion!

Today we all went up to the Cloud Forest reserve, and enjoyed zip lines and the Tarzan swing. Liz was the most shrill screamer, but Emilie gets marks for laughing the most after the initial shreik. Paige needed to put on her "rugby face" for courage on the ziplines, and Lisa  wanted to kiss solid ground by the time we were done.

We toured the reptile house and saw all the snakes and gheckos etc (although the crate full of rats to feed the snakes seemed tro really fascinate a lot of them,) and some of us went in the butterfly preserve, and got great pic of the butteerflies landing on the kids and watching them hatch from cocoons.

After lunch we split into two groups fro a guided 2 hr walk through the forest on all the hanging bridges. It not unexpectedly had a light mist or rain through most of the day, as 1or 2 hrs of sun is all they average in a day. i think they will all slepp well tonnight!

Anway, my time is running out. The kids are getting some souvenirs right now, then we are leaving at 530 am for our 4 hr bus ride to the airport, so I expect next time you hear from me we will be in US territory somewhere! I´ll try to let you know as we land and we will see you soon!