Puerto Viejo and Kid's Club

On Thursday we left for the beach! We went to Puerto Viejo in Limon. I could write for days on our trip, but I'll try to sum it up with a few words. I'm liking lists lately, because they are quick and easy. So here's a list.

1. Puerto Viejo was a mixture of Jamaica's food, dredlocks, Bob Marley culture and Yellow Springs' hippie, peace, love, happiness culture (for those of you that go to Cedarville). The majority of the population there is Jamaicans, and the American tourists we saw were mostly college students.

2. Jose told us we'd be staying in a "resort." Never trust a Tico when it comes to vacation plans. We ended up staying at this camp-like place in the rainforest. Granted, we were close to the beach, which was awesome. But sleeping was another story. The "resort" didn't have a gate (like almost EVERY house/store/building in San Jose has, so we were a little worried right off the bat about safety. Then an alarm went off Thursday night, and none of us knew what triggered it. We found out later that a wild horse triggered the alarm because it was roaming around the property, but we didn't know that at the time. We could hear lizards clicking in our room all night, and the bugs were insane. We also heard some crazy noise that we had never heard before and we think it might have been a sloth, because there are tons of them in that area. I probably slept about 3 hours in all.

3. Troy, Ashley, Jeremiah and I got up at 4:30 to walk to the beach and see the sunrise! It was pretty awesome.

4. We were told it would be a 2-3 hour drive to Puerto Viejo from the Villa. It ended up taking us 5 hours. But we did get to drive through the mountains and the rainforest. And the air gradually got hotter and hotter as we left the valley and got closer to the coast.

5. The water in the Caribbean is so warm! I wish New Jersey was closer to the Equator.

This morning, we had kid's club at Coronado. There is a church group here from Oklahoma that came and helped. We sang songs, broke up into classes and had lessons, and then played Simon Dice (Simon Says) and Pato, Pato, Ganso (Duck, Duck, Goose). It's fun to get to know the kids better that come back each week. They're SO much fun!

Playing Simon Dice

These two brothers took such good care of their little sister