Titi Trail

Monday, June 23, 2008

Today we awoke with the sun, naturally, because 1) we had gone to bed at 9:00, and 2) we had slept with the doors open so the light was obvious. How nice, I could literally bird watch from bed! We had a nice breakfast, as a matter of fact I will just stop stating the fact because all of the meals we had were excellent. It was pouring rain, so we hung out in our cabina quite a bit. Genevieve and I took a little hike to the tropical garden while Mark and Charlotte continued to hang out. Genevieve caught her first lizard ever by herself, a little anole hanging out on the wall of our cabina. At lunch we chatted with a woman and her two grown daughters who had taken the forest tour with Philip. They said they had mentioned to him how interested our girls were in nature, but he said something dismissive. They felt that it was a bit unreasonable that we couldn’t take the tour, and as they were moving on to Lapa Rios, the resort down the road, they were going to see if they could do anything for us. As anyone who has been to Costa Rica knows, you see much more on a tour than you can on your own so not taking one at all was a bit of a bummer.

After lunch we decided to hike the Titi trail. Charlotte was NOT HAPPY about hiking, but I dragged her. At one point she was whining so much that I snapped “Charlotte, stop it right now or I’m going to give you a spanking”. She stopped whining immediately but then five minutes later asked “what’s a spanking?” Okay, so my threat of corporal punishment was a sham, I know it. At any rate because of the earlier rain no animals were out but we did become quite familiar with the red mud of Costa Rica as it caked onto our shoes. On the way back to the cabina we discovered the little pond full of baby toads! Growing up in Sacramento the creeks were always full of toadlets and I was really happy to see them here. Genevieve was too, little frog lover that she is. We also finally found a sensitive mimosa plant and the girls amused themselves for a while playing with it. We went to the desk and signed up for the birding tour the next morning instead. We went to the bar before dinner and that’s where everyone was, sitting around chatting, so we had a pleasant time and a good dinner. Got the girls to bed, and as I was drifting off Mark came to tell me there was a toad on our porch! Too cool.