Costa Rica vacation adventures

I'm in the Holiday Inn Express San Jose Airport on our last night in Costa Rica. I want to write a little now because I know it will be busy when we get home and I won't remember how it feels here.  I'll do a more complete post with pictures when I can.

This has been the most wonderful family vacation ever, even though it began with some craziness.  The night before we were supposed to fly to Jamaica (and later Costa Rica) Jon and I finished packing and went to get our passports but they were nowhere to be found!  We searched for 4 hours with no luck.  So the next day we cancelled our flights and Jon went to work figuring out another plan. Amazingly he was able to get us on new flights with a few days in Dallas (instead of Jamaica) where we could get new passports in a day. He was also able rearrange our hotels. Totally a miracle!  So we left a few days later for our newly scheduled vacation and got a few awesome days in Dallas with Emily and her family before our flight to Costa Rica with our new passports. (By the way,  a little bit ago I got into a small pocket in our luggage and guess what was there in a practically hidden zipper pocket--our old passports! We couldn't believe it! So we had them all along. But it all worked out anyway and it must have been meant to be!)

We have had so much fun as a family here. My favorite part was Manuel Antonio where we saw three types of wild monkeys, but I really loved everywhere we went. Costa Rica is such a beautiful country and the people are so friendly. Our driver Rolando was great. On this trip we also saw iguanas, lizards, leaf-cutter ant colonies, a sloth, a red macaw in it's nest, a poison dart frog, toucans, crocodiles, blue morpho butterflies, basilisks, a turtle, and more--all in the wild! We swam in the ocean, went on a chocolate tour, swam in hot spring waterfalls, and hiked in beautiful tropical forests. Jon and Jacob went on a night tour in Monteverde and saw bugs and other creatures and Megan and I rode horses in the hills around Monteverde. So much fun!

It is sad to leave, but I'm excited to see Mandy when we get home :) I better get off to bed so we can catch our early morning flight, so more another day!