Get out and vote!

The flight to Houston seemed uneventful. It wasn’t until I’d landed as was waiting to disembark that I learned that we were half an hour late. Fortunately, our arrival gate had been moved to the one right next to my departure gate. I made a quick call to my uncle (who, along with his wife and my grandfather, had the same flight from Houston to San Jose) to confirm that the departure gate was the same, and walked the 100 feet to the gate. Just in time to have my passport double-checked and begin boarding.

Once we arrived, we marshaled our little group together and then proceeded through customs and out into San Jose. We met up with my parents, who had a shuttle to take us to the rental car place. Once there, we waited while my dad got all the paperwork done. I had packed my camera in the checked luggage, so I didn’t get any pictures of the airports, or my first view of San Jose, but I here’s the first picture I did take:

Once the paperwork was out of the way, we packed our Toyota Prado with our luggage and began the drive to the Pacific coast town of Jaco.

I’m going to take a moment now to talk a bit about the geography of Costa Rica. There’s basically this mountain range running down the middle of the country, separating the Gulf coast and plains from the Pacific coast and plains. San Jose is nestled in a large mountain valley, near the center of the country. My dad described the topology of the country looking as if it was made by someone crumpling up aluminum foil and then trying to smooth it out.

All that is just a long way of saying that the drive to Jaco covered some of the craziest twists and turns (and stunning vistas) I’ve ever seen. The trip down to Jaco took us about two hours, and we arrived just past six o’clock. Owing to Costa Rica being in mountain time, it was dark when we arrived. We met the assistant of the condo owner, who gave us a rundown of what we’d need to know. Things like, where to get groceries, where to eat out, and when we had to wear our hard hats.

You see, the condos were still under construction, and said construction could be shut down if an inspector happened by and caught anyone without a hard hat.

We got settled in and then went out to the Wishbone for dinner, a place we would revisit a few more times before the trip was over. The remainder of the evening was spent relaxing and going to bed early.

In the morning, we got up pretty early, and headed to Marea Alta for breakfast. Like most of the restaurants we went to, it had a cozy, open-air eating area where we could enjoy the pleasant morning air. On the way back, we went to a grocery store to stock up on food and alcohol. There we met a new fruit. Called quanabana (though we didn’t discover that until later), it was quite strange looking. As I was in full “tourist carrying his camera everywhere mode” by this point, I snapped a picture:

The rest of the day was uneventful, and the next morning my parents drove back into San Jose to pick up my sister and her boyfriend. When they returned, we lunched at the Wishbone again, and then met the construction foreman, who took us on a tour of the area around Jaco. Our first stop was a turtle preserve. Here, they took the eggs from the nest after they were laid and moved them to a safer area inland a hundred feet or so. Then when they hatched, they let them head for the water long enough for the baby turtles to afix the location of the beach in their heads, and then rounded them up and spread them out further along the beach. Less chance of being eaten.

After that, we stopped by another recently developed area for some drinks and a look out over a marina. We saw a lot of really expensive boats, including one that had a helicopter:

As it turned out, the foreman had a childhood friend who was working as a tour guide. He arranged for us to spend some time with him over the next couple days. Our first trip involved getting up early in the morning (which wasn’t too hard, as the construction crew also got an early start) and heading to a bridge over the Tarcoles River. There we took pictures of the many crocodiles and several birds we saw. From there we headed to Carara National Park for a hike through the forest. There we saw many birds and lizards.

The next day, we were off to Manuel Antonio National Park, which is a couple hours southeast of Jaco, near the town of Quepos. There, the entire group of us took a several mile hike, over what turned out to be very up and down terrain. It was well worth it though, in addition to some stunning views out over the Pacific, we saw monkeys, sloths, more birds and more lizards. We debated going for a swim, but decided it would be better to head to our next destination sooner rather than later.

That destination was Villa Vanilla, a farm that grows vanilla (of course) as well as a host of other spices. There we went on a tour of the farm. The first stop was the drying shed, where we saw real cinnamon, cocoa beans and vanillia beans. After that, it was into the farm itself, where we saw all sorts of plants, and got to sample a few things straight off the vine, so to speak. Let’s just say you haven’t experienced pepper until you’ve had one fresh.

Thursday was a day off, after the long hikes and early mornings of the previous days (though the morning was still pretty early thanks to the sounds of construction). Some people swam, some people read, and a good relaxing time was had by all. Friday we started fairly early again. This time our destination was the town of Tarcoles, on the river of the same name. There we got on a boat for a tour of the Tarcoles River.

We saw countless birds, and innumerable crocodiles, and I finished off my last two rolls of film (more on that in a future post). After that, some of the group did a canopy tour, while the rest took advantage of being on vacation some more. We capped off the evening with a drink at Villa Caletas, which is perched at the top of a mountain. The bar there is built facing west with a open amphitheater looking out across Nicoya Gulf. The sunset there was stunning. As I mentioned, I was out of film at this point, so I’ll have to link you to one of the pictures my father took:

The next morning, I began my trip home. My aunt, uncle and grandfather were leaving an hour or two before I was, so we shared a taxi back to San Jose. After seeing them off, I went to my gate to wait for boarding to being. The flight back was quiet (apparently I missed some excitement by not leaving on the earlier flight), and I arrived in Houston in the mid-evening. As I wasn’t leaving Houston until the morning, I’d reserved a hotel room at the Airport Marriott. There I spent the remainder of the evening watching TV. The next morning, it was back into the airport where I boarded my flight to Cleveland and arrived home.

Be sure to check out the rest of my pictures!

The basic line of my thinking started with the following: I like the idea of a blog, I just haven’t been very good at the execution of a blog. As I thought about it from there, the reasons why I wasn’t very good at writing the blog became apparent.

One reason is best illustrated with an example. I have been sitting on a post about my Costa Rica trip for over a week now. I haven’t published it because I’ve been waiting to get the pictures developed and uploaded to Flickr. My original plan was to make this post after the Costa Rica post was published. But because the Costa Rica post was basically stuck in the unpublished state, this post wasn’t happening either. Normally, the post that’s blocking me from writing anything is all in my head and so nothing ever gets written. This sort of behavior has sentenced many previous post ideas to death.

But the biggest reason is that what I want this blog to be has changed. I’m not really interested in trying to document the things that go on in my life, which is basically what I’d thought of as this blog’s purpose. After thinking things through, I decided it was better to do something else with this blog, something I’d be more interested in writing about. After all, I still like the idea of a blog, and the blog software and domain were already set up, so it seemed a shame to let it languish or to remove it.

And so, I’m making this post to announce that this blog is now going to be a place for me to talk about technology. A pretty open-ended topic, to be sure. But with this change I can cover a lot of ground that I’m actually interested in writing about. For example, there are interesting technological decisions and happenings going on at my job, which are cool and I’d love to share (though obviously there’s some detail that must be omitted). And I can talk about gadgets and such, because I really dig that sort of stuff.

That’s not to say that I will never make non-technology related posts. There’s still cool stuff I occasionally do that I do want to share, like my Costa Rican adventure. And it will likely be better and more interesting than what I was trying to do anyway, because it will be fun and cool stuff that I’ll want to spend time writing about. If you really want to skip out on the tech blather, feel free to point your browsers to this page or your RSS readers to this feed.

Oh, if anyone has a better category name than “Non-Tech”, I’m all ears.

Unsecured wireless networks are as common down here as they are back in the states, it seems.

Though I probably won’t post a lot (big surprise), as I’m on vacation.

Pictures and maybe more posts when I return.

I went to my parent’s house for Thanksgiving. It was pretty nice, and there were some deer outside the window on numerous occasions, so I took a picture of one.

It was nice to visit home, I think it’s been two or three years since I was last there. And boy has the place changed, new interstate interchanges, new shopping areas, more homes in the neighborhood where I grew up, all sorts of things. I spent much of the time relaxing, and eating delicious turkey, and watching some football.

But I had to come home sometime, because those late work nights won’t happen by themselves.

Then with winter coming, I started to grow it back:

Then a coworker (who also has shaved his head), suggested we do mohawks for halloween. And so, here’s me with a mohawk:

I don’t think I’m punk enough to pull it off, but I’m still gonna keep it till the weekend.

It was a lovely ceremony, though it started a bit late due to forgotten flowers. It was an outdoor wedding, and the weather was perfectly cooperative. The reception was nice and the food was pretty tasty. Not much dancing, which is kind of to be expected. And the bride had to retire early when it was discovered she was laying on the floor and wasn’t inclined to stand up. There were some ups and downs in other areas, and I wish I’d been less me during it all, but there’s only so much I can do.

Also, yesterday was my birthday, for which I am taking today off of work. The morning will be spent largely apartment bound, as I’m getting some work done on my car. The afternoon, running errands. And sometime this week, meat!

1. Conservator
2. Agronomist
3. Pharmacologist
4. Computer Support Person
5. Heavy Equipment Operator
6. Tree Harvester
7. Road Construction and Maintenance Worker
8. Arborist
9. Computer Engineer
10. Lineworker

Interesting choices. I guess that’s what I get for liking both the outdoors and big machines.