Costa Rican weekend

We're still here in "rockin awesome" Costa Rica. I want to keep up on my posts so I don' t get home and get overwhelmed at all I need to write about. The last couple of days have been great! On Saturday Rick and I drove to Liberia (the town) about an hour away to meet up with our tour guide. We followed him up to the Miravalles volcano. We hopped on some horses and rode up to the rainforest. We hopped off and hiked into the jungle a ways. It was AMAZINGLY beautiful. We hiked to four different waterfalls. The first one we had to cross a suspension bridge that was about fifty feet above the river with the waterfall directly off the side. REALLY COOL! Interestingly enough the jungle was eerily silent. I was expecting to see animals but other than a couple of butterflies there wasn't really much.
After our hike we hopped back on our horses and rode to the volcanic mud baths. We ate some Costa Rican food for lunch (YUM) there at the restaurant and then changed into our swimming suits for the mud bath. Rick really wanted to do this and I wasn't quite sure because these thermal pools smell like sulfur which isn't too pretty. I figured I might as well enjoy life to the fullest so I did. First we got into a thermal sauna (which smelled like boiled eggs x's 50) to "open up our pores" and then we walked to the mud hole and slathered ourselves with volcanic mud. Crazy! Normally I would have felt pretty silly doing something like that but hey, other people were doing it. The mud is suppossed to be fabulous for the skin. that's funny......it's mud. Anyway after that we cleaned up and than got into three separate pools to 'close back our pores'. it was definitely something you don't do everyday. after our experience there we drove back to Tamarindo (a quaint town known for their great surfing) and watched the sun drown in the Pacific. Nice!

Y?yesterday was Sunday so we took it easy. We drove to Santa Cruz (about 40 minutes away on dirt roads........there are a lot of those and those that do have pavement are mostly patch work. It's all an adventure here!) for church. Church was WONDERFUL! the people are so kind. One little lady walked up to me and kissed me on the cheek. I thought that was sweet. Rick made sure I understood what was being said throughout the meetings. On our way home from church I wanted to stop and get a picture of a mango tree so we did and Rick gave away a copy of the BOM to the nice man that lived there:). We headed back to our room and made sandwiches for lunch and then took a nice long nap! In the late afternoon we took another drive into a town called 27 de Abril ( yes the town was named April 27th.) Funny, huh? this town was really cute. there were people out cooking, kids playing soccer with makeshift goals, people dancing in the bars, people walking and riding bikes. it was just really neat. it will be an excellent memory for me in years to come. Oh yeah, we spotted about 10 howler monkeys on our drive. They put on quite a show, those monkeys! Costa Rica is truly amazing!

PS I'm on Rick's iPad so my typing is not very good:)
PS. I'm on Rick's iPad so my typing is not very good:)