The first order of business this day was to put gas in the car. While the tank was filling, I noticed this sign:
I read the sign out loud, and everyone said "Grinnell??" No - "granel." Neither Terry nor Guillermo knew what that word meant, so we tried to look it up. The best translation we found was "bulk oil," or "oil in bulk."
When Terry came to Costa Rica in 1972, she stayed in the town of Naranjo. She wanted to visit the town again, so we drove there and walked around for a while. Here are some pictures:
Earlier, I mentioned Terry's junior high Spanish teacher. Her name was Karen (well, it still is), so when I saw this sign, I had to take a picture:
The main adventure of the day was the La Paz Waterfall Gardens. As the name implies, the place features a series of five impressive waterfalls, as well as tropical gardens and a variety of wildlife. There's not much more I can say - I'll let the pictures tell the story:
There were birds:
...butterflies:
...sloths (look close, they're there):
...ocelots:
...jaguars:
...cougars:
...and more. By the time we got there, we only had about an hour and a half till closing time (we had gotten a late start that morning), so we skipped over the insects, snakes and frogs, and headed directly for the waterfalls:
There was just one problem. Think about it - waterfalls necessarily entail changes in elevation. So to see all five waterfalls, we had to go up and down stairs. Lots of stairs. Over 700 stairs! So you might think, well, at least that's good exercise. But Terry had knee replacement surgery just a few weeks before we went. By the time we reached the end of the stairs, poor Terry was just about done in.
(Don commented that this made us members of the 700 Club.)
On the drive back, we got an unexpected bonus - another waterfall, cascading down the cliff wall next to the road:
And again, we drove back to San Rafael for dinner, and that was it for the day. Here's the map:
