Yes, I know I’ve been horribly off-topic lately what with the blog awards and such, but since my photo/vacation posts seem to be popular I’ll stay off-topic for another day.  As you may or may not know, I was in Costa Rica for two weeks on the Pacific side of the country.  And because Andy begged me, here is a picture of the first excursion I did: ziplining.

Yes, I had an awesome time.  11 lines through a beautiful rainforest…what more could you ask for in an excursion?  In addition to that, I met my match when it came to certain female competition:

On the way up to a waterfall and river near the volcano, my group got to ride horses.  Growing up near farms, I’ve ridden before and generally think I know how to handle horses.  I thought I would have it easy when the guide gave me the smallest one (since I was the shortest person), but boy was I wrong!  1 stubborn female + another stubborn female is not the recipe for success, believe me.

Without wanting to sound too negative about the whole thing, let me just say that the snorkeling sucked on the Pacific side.  Not only did the tour not take us to any reefs, but the day was overcast and the water was murky as well.  So no, I don’t have any pictures as awesome as I did when I went to Belize.  I got a few pictures of the pretty little blue fish (left bottom corner), but that was all the underwater life I saw.

The good part to balance out the bad snorkeling was that on the way back, the sunset was lovely.  As you guys can tell from my blog headers, I love sunset photos, so you may expect to see this one on the blog in the future.  Or maybe some other landscape photos I got because I got way more than I can show here.

Of course, what photo collection is complete without your mandatory cute animal picture?  The story behind this is that at the hotel where I was staying, turtles would come up to lay their eggs on the beach.  The security guard there would put wire fences around the nests to prevent people from stepping on them and these fences would also capture the newly hatched turtles.  He would then release the turtles around 11:30 after making sure that no birds were around to pick them off (looks very bad to the tourists!).  I was fortunate enough to be at the beach when they were releasing the turtles, which I why I got a picture of this cute little guy.

So, that about sums up my vacation, except for my white water rafting excursion and the occasional game of water volleyball.  In short, there was lots of relaxing but I also got some reading done and had a great time staying active by taking tours and such.  Also: another sunset picture.  I couldn’t resist.