7/4 Bumpericus Lateralis

Today we started the day very early - we are two hours later here and were the first ones to breakfast! We had beautiful breakfasts with a beautiful view of the lake, and left afterwards. Aunt Les was able to somehow pre-download a map on her phone and we had a much better time navigating, but that didn’t mean that the roads were easy to drive on. We were doing fine until we got to a steep incline riddled with deep, gaping potholes, but we gritted our teeth and bumped past them, thanks to our driver extraordinaire. We took the boys to the lake to fish, and the girls went on our way to the butterfly sanctuary. We stopped at another one way bridge to take a picture of the river, only to return to our car and realize that our bumper was missing! We immediately turned around to retrace our steps and were all leaning out of the car looking for our bumper. We joked that we weren’t going to get to learn scientific names for butterflies, instead we would be looking for the rare bumpericus lateralis. We drove all the way back to the giant pothole hill, and all were so excited and relieved to find our bumper laying in the middle of the road, in one piece. After that, we put the bumper in our car and drove to the butterfly conservatory. There, we saw tons of beautiful butterflies, like glass wing and blue morph, chrysalises that were a shiny gold, and black and green poisonous dart frogs. We then drove back to the lake to pick up the boys, and went for lunch in La Fortuna at a restaurant called Ketchup. We came back to the hotel to swim in the pool and listened to reggae while we tried to find openings in the clouds to look at the volcano. After that, we played canasta and went to dinner at La Mesa de Mama, which was delicious. Now we are back at the hotel, preparing for another day of driving.

- Alden