Let the adventures begin

Our first beach of the day!

We all loaded into a van..... like 11 of us and a driver. Our first adventure of the day was when the top blew off the cooler on the roof. A bunch of Tica's yelling in Spanish. Funny stuff. The driver backed up until we found it.

We stopped at a coconut stand where a guy with a machete chopped to tops off some coconuts for us. I've never cared for coconut milk but this was some seriously good stuff.

We went to a beach on the Caribbean side. It had black sand. In this picture Don still has his glasses on. It's the last we ever saw of those glasses. When we were at Myrtle Beach years ago Don was out in the water with his glasses. I said Don I don't think it's a good idea to be in the ocean with glasses and he said, it's fine just as a wave hit him and knocked off his glasses. This time he was standing in the ocean with his expensive bifocals on (he's older now) and AJ said Don look out for that wave and that was the end of that. He did save his $5 clip on glasses. But he can't wear them because there is nothing to clip them on to. He was blind the rest of the day. On Wednesday we went to a local optometrist and he got an eye exam for $8 and he got a box of contacts. He can now see far away but he can't read. Seeing the sites is more important!

The biggest honking spider I think I've ever seen!

Black sand on the face! One of the really nice things about this beach is that they are next to the rain forest so you aren't sitting out in the hot sun, there are lots of trees to sit under.

Volcano, Check. Beach, Check. Monkey, Check. OK, we've seen everything that we promised Sean we would see. We saw Spider monkeys, Howling monkeys and white faced monkeys. Sean compared so many things to TV. When we saw the howling monkeys he told us how he saw those on The Cat in the Hat. When we picked up hermit crabs he told us about he hermit crabs on Dinosaur Train. It was cool to watch monkeys in the wild swinging around the trees with their babies.

Don and Sean spent a long time bouncing on this fallen coconut tree. Watching Sean play in the Caribbean made me think about how different his life is. Here's a kid born into poverty, drugs, habitual petty crime and just in general a crappy situation and here he is bouncing on a tree in the Caribbean and watching monkeys swing from the tree. Equally amazing is how different Don and my lives are because of him. Don would have no one to bounce on the tree with and we would be boring! He is a fun little boy. His Spanish has also grown this week. The light bulb went on that Spanish is actually something people use to communicate and not just a fun game at school.

This is the picnic area at the beach.

AJ and Steph sitting in the sand unaware of the danger lurking over head!

This coconut fell out of a tall tree and landed right next to them with a huge thud. Scared the pants off of them. AJ said it would have been embarrassing to be killed by a falling coconut. It left a heck of a dent in the sand and it was certainly harder than their heads.

This raccoon climbed on our table and stole our food. Marco was hitting it with a towel and it didn't care. He was like "hey, I'm a protected species give me your crackers and leave me alone." It was a huge raccoon.

I just like this picture of Don and Sean in the beach. Sean loved the water.