Searching for a Sloth

You can be bitten by the travel bug in ways you never expected.  In my case, it was a conversation I had with my friend in Virginia.  She told me that her grand-daughter had spent three weeks in Costa Rica doing some environmental work with her university.  Dani told her grandmother about the beauty of Costa Rica, how marvelous the people are, how natural and healthy and inexpensive the food is, not to mention the coffee, and how little money it takes to visit there.  My friend sort of casually said, "We should go."

That's all it took.  Before you could snap your fingers, we had set a date, and were looking for flights.  Because both our husbands had birthdays in October, we decided we could more easily convince them to go if we said it was a birthday trip.  I don't remember now what sites I checked, but I am sure we bought the cheapest tickets we could find.  Although the best travel site on the web, Kayak, started doing business in 2004, I doubt that I knew about them when we were planning our Costa Rica trip.

I can't recall the details of planning the trip, but I do remember that both pairs of travelers bought travel books and began reading about where we wanted to go and what were our "must see" destinations.  I have read many different guide books, mainly from the library, but my favorite is Frommer's.  From our separate research we agreed that we wanted to visit the Monteverde Cloud Forest, the Arenal National Park, and Manuel Antonio national Park.  The Virginians wanted to see as many species of birds and reptiles as possible and, top of the list was seeing a three-toed sloth in the wild.  I was both excited and afraid to sleep in the shadow of an active volcano.

So, on October 29, 2005 we set off on our first trip to Central America.