A Perfectico Storm

This is part 3 of our first two weeks in Costa Rica, you can read  Part 1 here and Part 2: Two more days in Costa Rica here. Day six: Today we're going back up into the mountains to spend a couple of nights in the cloud forest by the Quetzal National Park. The resplendent quetzal was the bird that most jumped out when I was flicking through our bird book. They are iridescent green, with a red breast and extremely long tails. I'm looking forward to seeing them. I spend most of the morning watching videos on how to fix the rear window on the car. Could be the wiper sensor, motor, fuses, relay or lots of other things. MacGyver'ed a cable to bypass the rear wiper sensor but that didn't fix it. Need to use a 12V battery to wind up the window "manually" until we can fix it properly. Can't remember if I bought the multimeter or left it at home. Drive to mirador de quetzales. Along pan American highway (number 2). Stopped in Cartago at Walmart for a car bat...

For Iris' birthday last year - when she was three - we went to the fabulous  Just So  family arts festival.  We made fox costumes and Tom's parents and my sister Charlotte and niece Amelia came for a day to celebrate Iris' birthday and it was So Much Fun.  At the festival it was super muddy because it really rained the first day we got there, but there was a really good spirit. We went to see the amazing Biscuithead and the Biscuit Badgers - check out their song David Attenborough below - it's SO good. When they sang "David" half the crowd had to stick their arms in the air and when they sang "Attenborough" the other half had to do it. It was brilliant and they are worth checking out. They also have songs about soy milk and one about cheese and another one about a weird uncle! Also one that is just Shut Up! a lot :D Around the field where the stage was, various acts were going on; acrobatics and dance and circus type things. We got drawn to a crowd w...

Before the Pan-American highway was put in, the road past our house in Quizarrá was apparently the main way to get to the south. This is laughable when you know this bumpy, untarmacked "road" (we'd call it a track back home I think), but understandable when you think that when Skutch first came to that area in the 40s, the only way to get in was by plane or by taking a horse over the mountains and through  the rivers. You'd either ride the horse through or wade through yourself and lead the horse over - the former was usually safer as obviously horses are bigger and stronger, and alright at swimming it turns out. (In fact-checking this I came across this very sweet article " Can Horses Swim ?"). I suppose equally it is unimaginable to me that there were ever no motorways in the UK, but they are a relatively new invention and certainly many didn't exist when my folks were young.  Lis & Warren, the owners of that house-sit, told us that for the whole t...

The last time I wrote about Covid back in April there were very few cases here. The government had shut down the borders very quickly (quicker than in the UK) and for a few months things were kept extremely tight and under control. There were only repatriation flights. Only citizens could come in and they had to quarantine for two weeks. The land borders were closed and tourist visas were extended several times and currently up till mid November. We were due to do our first visa run in April, as you need to re-up your visa every 90 days, but we haven’t had to do one at all.  For a few months 10 people total had died and there were a handful of cases a day - and a handful of people getting better and for quite a while (around 3 months) the number of active cases was around 400-600 and dropping. Masks were brought in and there were driving restrictions. You couldn’t drive on some days and after certain times. Bars, beaches and national parks were shut. Churches couldn’t meet. Events ...

In the beforetime - before we left the UK, before *the virus* - when the “packing up our entire lives and going to live in the tropics” process was feeling particularly tough and I wasn’t 100% convinced my marriage or my sanity were going to make it here in one piece, there was an image that got me through... it had sand, sea, sun.  It actually took us a while to get to the beach and our first few beach experiences weren’t really what I’d been envisioning (we WILL get there eventually though!). BEACH #1 - PLAYA JACÓ The first beach we walked on was in Jacó (pronouced "hack-O" to rhyme with "whacko"). We went to Jacó on the way to meet a couple for a prospective house sit. We just went for an overnight. It was in late January which is the middle of summer here and we hadn’t done much acclimatising. We were still getting used to it being pitch black dark at 6pm and really hot and humid at the same time. Boy was it HOT. We got to Jacó as it was getting dark and had a...

Earlier today I was talking to Cousin Ruth (my dad’s cousin). She is self-admittedly not the most computer friendly of people, and even she has made it online to look at our poorly updated blog and I *promised* I would write an update...so here I am. Well. A lot has happened since last I wrote on April 11th - 3 and a half months ago. This post is mostly just about my Mum so feel free to skip out at this point if you wish. More posts about nature and beaches really will follow. I promise that too! . So yes, Mum died. She went into hospital just around the time I last wrote, which is in part why we haven’t written. It already felt a bit wrong to be saying “hey look at all this cool stuff” when everyone was on lockdown mostly having a pretty miserable time, but that was compounded by Mum being ill and not knowing what was going on. She went in with a kidney infection and was severely dehydrated, having been holed up at home in the north on her own (though supported by my brother who brou...