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Two weeks in Costa Rica part 3: Two days with the Quetzals

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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...
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Mourning Mum

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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...
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Y una mujer!

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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...
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