Obligatory Vacation Pics

A brief travelogue

Thursday we arrived in Costa Rica about 12:00. We rented a large Toyota SUVish thing and hit the road for the Arenal Observatory Lodge. Arenal is a large volcano in the North Central portion of the country.


Arenal: Terrifying, fire-spewing mountain dominates landscape

I got us lost almost immediately, so it took us about 4.5 hours to get to the place, when it should have taken 3 - 3.5. Sorry about that. Also, the road was wet, windy, and had me on my last nerve. We later learned, this was nowhere near the worst Costa Rica had to offer. But the sheer drop offs to 150 feet of lush, canopy covered doom kept me on my toes.

The next day we hiked in the jungle, observed wildlife and plantlife, and swam a bit in the pool. I also read a bit.


Jason at Waterfall. He did go swimming in the waters.

The Arenal Observatory Lodge was great. We were quite pleased.


Jason takes in some sun. Behind him is Lake Arenal, a warm lake, heated by MAGMA (I think). Anyway, its warm.

We drove out Saturday morning in nice sunshine. Costa Rica is relatively small, so we cut halfway across the country in a few hours.


The road out was scenic and much easier to drive


We encountered some minor obstacles

We arrived at Playa Samara around 1:00, and checked into the Hotel Las Brisas Del Pacifico. It's a really nice resort, and as we were there in the off-season, it seems we were two of only about twelve people at any time. That means we had a nice beach and pool mostly to ourselves.



The town of Samara sits on the beach and is full of friendly folks. We were on the beach for maybe half an hour when Jason said to me "I wonder if any of these people know how good they have it?"
As if on cue, within five minutes a gentleman rode up to us on a horse and introduced himself. He was a recent retiree from the Venezuelan petroleum concern. He had been educated at the University of Florida, worked as hard as he could, and had no found his piece of paradise. His life's duty was to now ride the beach and tell folks to live a good life.
So, yeah, some folks knew exactly how good they had it.

We also went into Samara for some meals and to look around.


Jason stands in the main road of Samara. Not very busy on 12:00 on Sunday.

Monday I read, and Jason swam in the ocean. We then drove into San Jose, which is a lovely city with absolutely no signage to tell you where you are. But after some major navigation issues (again, my fault), we found The Hotel Don Carlos.


A main walkway within the Hotel Don Carlos

The hotel was a former president's mansion in an historic and lovely part of San Jose. If you want to see it, I recommend taking a cab from the airport, lest you get as lost as I got us.

We ate at a nice place up the street and settled in for the night.

We returned, taking an all-day journey from San Jose, to the airport, through Houston, US Customs (which is a separate post for another day), and into Austin.

The hardest part of the trip, by far, was being away from Jamie for so long, and unable to speak with her for several days by phone or e-mail. I knew it would be difficult, but you don't really know until you're ankle deep in the jungle listening to howler monkeys.

Anyhoo, it was a great trip, and one day I'd love to return, with all the knowledge at my fingertips that I've picked up on this go-round.

Jason was a great travel companion, so no doubt I will enlist his aid once again someday.

For pics from Jason's POV, please click here

The League Returns (from Costa Rica)

hey Leaguers. I'm back.

Well, it was a great trip. We had a great time, and saw a lot of the lovely island nation of Costa Rica, and saw a lot of ice and bears. Really, the whole place is just sort of a rock in some sort of icy waters. You can see the whole place from end to end, and there's, like, five buildings and a lot of rusty ships.

Honestly, I was surprised by the large numbers of penguins, and how much work they had me doing gutting fish in the hull of a ship for the first two or so days. But, you know, there's no sunlight down there, so after the first 36 hours, the best 20 or so just fly by.

Jason spent most of the week playing cards, dominoes and high stakes Russian Roulette with a bunch of sort of shady looking guys who kept thinking up little chores for me to do, like cleaning out the penguin pate masher and whatnot.

Interesting trip, but weird how those guys didn't want Jason to do work, but everytime I tried to get a little sleep they were barking at me in Inuit and shooting rounds off over my head...

More later. Hope everyone is well...

The League Returns

Sounds like an awesome movie, doesn't it?

The League and Steanso are scheduled to make their return flight this evening, landing around 8:30. Let's hope they are not detained in Houston trying to smuggle monkeys in their pants. I look forward to their many stories and hope they took lots of pictures.

Cassidy currently has Lucy in a neck hold, so I think it's time for doggie day camp to come to an end.

Thanks for putting up with my ramblings, everyone - I hereby hand the LOM back over to its rightful owner. Bye!

This post written by jamie while The League was out

Too many puppies

It's the end of day four of my stint as dog pack leader. I haven't gotten a good night's sleep since Ryan left. This is not solely Cassidy's doing, I just think Lucy and Cassidy bring out the Space Madness in each other. Adding Jeff the Cat to the mix doesn't help. Cassidy loves Jeff and spends 90% of her time here trying to get to him. I've placed a barricade in front of the stairs to give him a safe haven, but Jeff just can't help himself. He tries to come downstairs when he knows she's around, so he's kind of asking for it.

On the whole though, the dogs have been pretty well behaved (although I reserve final judgement until Tuesday night, when the Steans Bros. return). Three dogs and a cat is just a handful.

I have to give thanks to Nicole, though, who watched the dogs yesterday while I was out, and the In-Laws, who took Mel and Lucy on a nice long walk this evening while I took Cassidy for a hop up and down the street.

And on a completely unrelated note:

Mars Attacks!

This post written by jamie while The League was out

Parents, In-Laws, Lake Austin Spa: Super Awesome.

I have to give a big shout out to the McBrides and Steanses for their tremendous generosity today. This morning, KareBear, Ryan's cousin Susan, and I drove out to Lake Austin Spa where KareBear (and the Admiral) treated us to a day of R&R. I had a head and foot massage in the morning, a wonderful lunch, and a facial in the afternoon all within the gorgeous setting of Lake Austin wilderness. We also had time for some floating in the pool between appointments. A lovely day!

While we were gone, our storage closet (aka our garage) was visited by three helper elves and has magically changed back into an actual working garage. Cardboard Mountain was disassembled and whisked off to various recycling locations. Holiday decorations were neatly set off to the side. Countless dead bugs and spiders I'm sure were swept up and disposed of. It was a task not meant for mortal men and yet Team McBride and the Admiral came through with flying colors.

I knew things had gotten bad when I opened the garage door upon our return to the house and Karen exclaimed, "You have a sink in there!".

I can't say thank you enough to both sets of parents. You're the best!

This post written by jamie while The League was out

Dance!

Confession time. I love the show So You Think You Can Dance, Fox's summertime replacement for American Idol. They started advertising for it about 2 months ago during Idol (yes, I still watch and you can ask me why till the cows come home and I'd still not be able to come up with a good answer). Just seeing the commercials made me excited. They used the song, "I Wanna Dance With Somebody", which can be an awful or great song depending on the artist.

Now I thought this song was pure cheese when I was younger - mainly because it was in heavy rotation as one of 5 songs on VH1 (yes! they played videos once!) and was performed by Whitney Houston, who, ironically is one of the worst dancers I've ever seen. She spends the majority of the video either watching other people dance or mildly bouncing.

*I would be able to provide video here if I were a more talented blogger, but YouTube won't let me have it. If you're that curious, go look up Whitney Houston and the song.

I saw David Byrne do a brilliant cover of this song years ago in Austin and couldn't believe the difference. Stripped of the irritating synth noises and hand claps, this was a catchy song that ACTUALLY made you want to dance.



Early season (season 2?) American Idol contestant Jennifer Fuentes also attempted "I Wanna Dance With Somebody" with hilarious results. Accompanied by only a piano (yes, at one point American Idol had a budget), the song took on a very high school talent show vibe. My favorite part is where, instead of editing the song around the spoken portion, she looks off to the side and says "Dance!". Good stuff.



But I greatly digress. I didn't start watching So You Think You Can Dance until last season and even then not until the final 20 round, so this is my first season watching the auditions. It seems as if they are showing us more talent and less of the bad auditions than Idol does, which I greatly appreciate. I danced for 10 years when I was growing up (ballet, tap, jazz, and modern), so I love that there's a show on that has a wide variety of styles of dance. The talent I saw last year was incredible (far better than what you get on Idol if you ask me) so I'm eager to see what this year has in store. The judging is also better. Instead of sound bytes (Randy), random insults (Simon, although he is usually correct), and unicorns (Paula), Nigel, Mary, and the guest judge manage to offer constructive criticism that is interesting to the viewer. If you are at all interested in dance (all one of you), I highly recommend this show for summertime entertainment.

Don't worry, folks, if you're bored - the League should be back soon, and then you can find out what Superman has been up to.

This post written by jamie while The League was out

It's all mine: muahaha!

Hi ya'll. As you may have heard, while the League is taking some vay-cay in Costa Rica, he has left his blog in my hands. Boy is he dumb.

Yes, the League and Steanso are currently on a short flight to Houston and will then jet down to the jungles of Central America where they will rendezvous with their tour Howler monkey, Senor Screechy. They will be staying here, here, and here, so don't feel too sorry for them. Their first hotel sits at the base of a large volcano, but hopefully Screechy will steer them to safety should it decide to erupt.

My posts won't be as long as the League's - I do have company coming this weekend so I don't know how often I'll be able to blog, but I'll try. Mel and Lucy's cousin Cassidy is also staying with us, so we'll see how much sleep I'll get with a gaggle of dogs running around.

This post written by jamie while The League was out