Sunday, July 7, 2013

Genevieve and I went to the zoo after breakfast but unfortunately the frog area and the butterfly area were closed. We checked out of Los Lagos and headed off to The Butterfly Farm. About 15 minutes out Mark and I were chatting and it comes up that Alajuela refers not to just the city but this huge county thing and I wonder if we’re going to the right Butterfly Farm. Uh no, we’re not. So we put in the location of La Guácima de Alajuela which is where it’s actually located and hope that all the signs we remembered from when Genevieve was a baby are there. Well, they’re not. We drove around and around and around La Guacima and finally, finally came upon the farm but it took about an hour longer than it should have and we had to skip lunch. Costa Rica, you really need to join the rest of the developed world and have addresses, for gosh sakes!!

Fortunately when we arrived a tour was starting in just ten minutes so we got to see all the butterflies and the caterpillar eggs and the caterpillars. Some of them are singular and some group, eat all the leaves on a stem and then move all as one to the next stem. We also learned a bit about the business, most of the pupaes come from their farmers in the surrounding areas who raise them and the package them and sell them to The Butterfly Farm, who exports them to the California Academy of Sciences in San Francisco, and Six Flags Discovery Kingdom among others. I think that’s a job I’d like – raising butterflies!

After our tour we head to the car rental return, and they take us in a shuttle back to the airport where they’ve called a taxi to meet us and take us to the Adventure Inn. I guess they’ve gotten in trouble for having taxis come directly to the car rental location. We arrived at the Adventure Inn and checked into our upstairs room this time. We were tired and so we just hung out in the room for a bit and then had dinner in the hotel restaurant.

<<Previous | Next>>