More from Arenal (April 28 & 29)

Our last day in Arenal, we hiked to La Fortuna Waterfall and hung out in the hotel pool.

This is the waterfall from the top

and from below, up close

Doug joked that we saw the highest mountain outside the Himalayas for free, in Argentina, but to walk down steps to a single waterfall was $15 in Costa Rica. Everything in Costa Rica is either privately owned or by the government and has an entrance fee - and they're not cheap. Fortunately, the kids have been free to most things. Almost nothing is free here, though - parking, beach chairs, etc. It feels like they try to squeeze as much money out of tourists as they can. I think 10 years ago, it was much more affordable to travel to/in Costa Rica. Food, groceries, restaurants, lodging, etc. hasn't been much cheaper than the U.S. or even California, as far as we can tell - even though 500 colones is $1.

people were swimming there, but we didn't bring our suits. It was kind of cold anyway. It was beautiful and cool to get that close to it and put our feet in.

Heading back up. When we bought our tickets, the guy selling the tickets cautioned us, when he saw the kids, that there were 480 steps with skepticism that our kids could do it. Doug just said 'OK'. He told our kids that he didn't know our kids.

They did great! They walked the whole thing by themselves without any whining or complaining. We were very proud of them!

We stopped for lunch after the hike. Sutton has comida typica (typical Costa Rican food) (that's actually how it's referred to in restaurants and menus) - fish or chicken, rice & beans. It's also often referred to "casado" which means "married". The kids love it and always choose fish.

More Comida typica - chicken and rice (arroz con pollo) - kind of a costa rican style of fried rice.

Doug opted for the carbo load option

Enjoying batidos at the pool bar. This was the reward for the kids' great job in climbing down and up the stairs to the waterfall.

Kerrigan's first time in a pool. She absolutely loved it!

Doug being 'dead man' trying to see how long he can hold his breath. Good thing nobody jumped in to rescue him.

Since I didn't get any pictures of the volcano at night, here's a picture of a postcard showing it as we saw it. There were other postcards with the lava spouting like fireworks and beautiful, but that wasn't as we saw it. It looked a lot like this.

a map showing the location of La Fortuna and the Arenal Volcano that I forgot to put in on the first post re: Arenal.