Thursday, 4 September 2008 02:57 pm
Vacation report addendum
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deckardcanine1. Mom reminds me that there was less tension due to less planning, not more. Freer schedules meant less cause for frustration, even if it also meant more time sitting around with books and puzzles.
2. I just remembered another place we'd stayed a while: Arenal, home of a volcano that's been active since its deadly awakening 40 years ago. It's kinda surreal hearing random thunder-like sounds on a clear day. My dad tried to get a photo of an eruption, but the peak was always obscured by clouds. I said he was looking for lava in all the wrong places.
3. I left an important animal off my list: the golden orb-weaver spider. It's important because Sarah fell in love with it, and spiders more generally, during her studies. She made a point to count all the specimens we found at La Selva. The males are as tiny as the spiders I usually see, but the females are bigger than daddy longlegs and have legs that resemble resistors. They make great webs.
4. I had glossed over the birds, but a few did stand out to me for reasons other than calls. The gray, forest floor-dwelling Gallina del Monte (literally "mountain chicken," but Google tells me that that has another meaning) is pretty and cute in a subtle way. The largest bird was the pavón ("big turkey"), whose face suggested a distant cousin to the dodo.
5. Sarah didn't glean much about the peccaries from her first visit to La Selva, so I was a little worried that they'd charge at us if we got too close. Instead, they just eyed us and occasionally ran the other way. Sarah overcame the odor enough to admit that the young ones ("peclets," I call them) were aww-worthy. We were fairly surprised to see whole families roaming so close to the cabins at the forest edge. The first time I counted five of them, I called it a bushel and a peccary.
2. I just remembered another place we'd stayed a while: Arenal, home of a volcano that's been active since its deadly awakening 40 years ago. It's kinda surreal hearing random thunder-like sounds on a clear day. My dad tried to get a photo of an eruption, but the peak was always obscured by clouds. I said he was looking for lava in all the wrong places.
3. I left an important animal off my list: the golden orb-weaver spider. It's important because Sarah fell in love with it, and spiders more generally, during her studies. She made a point to count all the specimens we found at La Selva. The males are as tiny as the spiders I usually see, but the females are bigger than daddy longlegs and have legs that resemble resistors. They make great webs.
4. I had glossed over the birds, but a few did stand out to me for reasons other than calls. The gray, forest floor-dwelling Gallina del Monte (literally "mountain chicken," but Google tells me that that has another meaning) is pretty and cute in a subtle way. The largest bird was the pavón ("big turkey"), whose face suggested a distant cousin to the dodo.
5. Sarah didn't glean much about the peccaries from her first visit to La Selva, so I was a little worried that they'd charge at us if we got too close. Instead, they just eyed us and occasionally ran the other way. Sarah overcame the odor enough to admit that the young ones ("peclets," I call them) were aww-worthy. We were fairly surprised to see whole families roaming so close to the cabins at the forest edge. The first time I counted five of them, I called it a bushel and a peccary.