Dear Dean and Anita: Thank you for the use of your home. We had a wonderful vacation ! Chris and Corbin and Tatiana were great and we loved exploring this part of the world. Below is a portion of the email I sent my family as our summary. I think you can tell, despite being the rainy season, we had a great time. All is well at Villa Cielo Rosa! Warmly, Susan and Derek van Amerongen Got back from Costa Rica last night/this AM, around 1:30 Had a fabulous time in Costa Rica!! they say the province we stayed in, Guanacaste, is growing with leaps and bounds, but the entire state we travelled in has just one traffic light. Most of the roads we travelled on, were dirt or poorly paved, with potholes. Derek did a great job keeping us and our Hyundai SUV in one piece. Dad, we figured out gas was about $3.75 a gallon, though we bought it in litres and the government controls the price. Every station is the same and if you found a station, you needed to but gas, because they are few and far between. We hiked to a volcano in the Rain Forest (much like the Rain Forest Cafe in Towson), Julie and Corrie washed their hair in a waterfall. It was just like an Herbal Essence commercial, she said. We white water rafted in the Colorado River, rapelled thru the jungle on a single cable, going from tree to tree like Tarzan!! Greg and Corrie took surfing lessons and greg became a real pro. Corrie developed the only injury of the trip...surf board thumb, from holding on to the surfboard. Our house was beautiful, way up a mountain with a magnificent view of the Pacific Ocean. We had 3 BR's, our own individual swimming pool and the best feature, a washer and dryer. Each day we came home muddy and sandy from the latest "Van Adventure". People were very friendly, but Corrie's spanish really helped out. She is Amazing. The food is great. We have developed a taste for fried Yucca chips. We saw three types of monkeys and dozens of interestiing birds. Cowboys were riding horses, herding these beautiful leathery cattle. We saw men plowing their fields with these immense oxen in a yoke. Just like something out of National Geographic!!! Butterflies are everywhere, all sorts of colors, and they are bigger than anything we have ever seen here. Gracie's favorite restaurant of the trip was called the Monkey Bar and was really just a large treehouse with a bar that served pizzas. I'll pass the pictures when i get them.