We spent the final two days of our trip in Quebec City which is about 3 hours downriver (Northeast) of Montreal. It's famous for it's historic district which still has a whole section of buildings from the 1600's. Though touristy, it was beautiful and fascinating!
Amazingly, the old city center still has it's defensive stone wall that was built around it during the colonial era. Above is one of the gates through the wall.
Above is the AirBnB unit we got in the historic section. The gray building in the middle. We actually had both the entire upper floors you can see, plus another attic bedroom above that which you can't see in this photo. It was an enormous space! And in a great location.
The Chateau Frontenac which is an enormous historic hotel overlooking the river downtown.
The historic district really did feel like being in an old European city, with its old stone buildings and narrow winding streets. It was even overrun by tourists the same way too!
Another view of the Chateau Frontenac hotel.
An army band still wearing the traditional "Beefeater" historic british uniforms.
We took the short ferry across the river and back just for the views. Again that's the Chateau Frontenac dominating the scene in the middle.
This incredible old stone church, complete with crumbling gravestones in the yard, was directly across the street from our AirBnB (which would be on the right, just past the people walking on the sidewalk.)
Various scenes trying to show how huge the unit was. These pics are all from the main floor (the 2nd story of the building). Above was the 3rd floor with two large bedrooms, and then the attic bedroom above that.
Where we stayed. Our AirBnB was the main floor unit in the middle of this incredible old stone rowhouse. The one with the red banisters. There were so many of these beautiful old rowhouses in Montreal.
Just some examples of the old, very European-feeling buildings and streets.
These two photos are of the funky, modern architecture that is mixed into the city as well.
The building below is the famous "Habitat 67" which was built in 1967 as part of the Montreal Expo.
Those squares mixed throughout the building that look like you can see blue sky through them? Well, you can! They're empty spaces between the "blocks" that make up the structure.
Becky in the Old Montreal historic district down by the river.
The oldest buildings around date from the 1600's.
Montreal is French for "Mount Royal" which is the name of the low "mountain" that backs right up against the north side of downtown. (Analogous to one of the tall "Hills" of Seattle.)
We rode a city bus to the top, which is a vast park, and did the short hike out to this famous lookout over the city.
Here's where we stayed for the 4 nights of the second half of the week, in a hotel with its own little compound on the outskirts of metro San Jose. A/C, tv, swimming pool--definitely a jump up in comfort from the bungalow at the coast! One problem though, was the big mango tree in the background: it was heavily loaded with mangoes overhanging the metal roof of our room, so when the wind blew, mangoes would occasionally crash down onto the roof without warning. Inside it sounded like someone suddenly firing a shotgun right next to you! We asked to change rooms (ours was the only one under the mango limbs) but were told "no" because the hotel was full. Thankfully it wasn't windy most of the time we were there, and we only suffered one mango "blast" during sleep hours.
The grounds of the hotel were beautifully verdant and manicured.
On our final day in Costa Rica, we went to a nearby "chocolate tour", where they teach you about the cacao plants and walk you through the various steps of chocolate making. Cacao tree plantations are actually not located in the highlands where this was, but they did have some little trees growing there for demonstration purposes. Below is how the cacao fruits grow right on the side of the tree trunks. (Notice Rose was representing for Hershey with her attire that day.)
Here's August with a cacao that's been broken open to show the seeds covered with white pulp (overexposed in this photo, unfortunately). The seeds are the "cocoa beans" from which chocolate is made after lots of processing.
I should probably talk now about...the earthquake!
About 11:30pm on our final night in Cahuita, while I was lying in bed trying to fall asleep in the sticky heat, suddenly the room started to move. Being a 25 year West coast resident, I have been through a number of earthquakes before so it only took a second for me to snap awake and realize what was going on. By the time I managed to scramble out from under the mosquito netting and croak out a feeble "It's an earthquake!", it had already stopped, not having even been strong enough to knock over anything in the room. Becky was also instantly up, but somehow the kids both slept right on through it and our frantic ensuing discussions.
Now, for those who don't know, I'm a paranoid, earthquake preparedness freak (read: worrier) who has been obsessively studying the dangers for all of those 25 years in the northwest. The earthquake felt weak where we were, but we were only a hundred yards or so inland from the beach--I knew terrifyingly well that if the epicenter was somewhere offshore of us there could be a deadly tsunami sweeping our way, one that could land anywhere from a few minutes to maybe even several hours later. Knowing Costa Rica is earthquake-prone, I had actually even previously researched routes from where we'd be staying to the nearest high ground to be sure it wasn't more than a few minutes drive away. Now this was the horrifying nightmare I had tried to prepare for come to life. Needless to say, I felt a wave of complete panic. The kids were asleep--should we wake them now?! How could we find out where the epicenter was?! Becky was trying to get online, but having trouble with the weak wifi. Our car was parked behind a locked gate (standard security in Central America), so to flee wasn't even possible without getting the proprietor up to let us out, and he was shut up with his family inside his darkened house next door. And how could we flee and not try to warn the other people?
I went outside. Everything was quiet and dark all around--no one in the neighborhood seemed to have been stirred by the whole thing at all. I could hear the waves crashing on the nearby beach as I paced on the paved walkway outside our cabin trying to think straight. I walked over to the proprietor's door, looked at his doorbell for a long few seconds, then chickened out and walked back again and stood outside our door. "No, I have to wake them. I will be the crazy, paranoid guest disturbing them in the middle of the night, but that's what I have to do." My mind finally made up, I went back over and pushed his doorbell. No noise from inside. I waited a half minute then rang it again. After a few long seconds more, there was finally a scruffling sound inside, footsteps and then he emerged half-dressed onto the porch. Thankfully, he took my panicked questions in stride. Yes, he had felt the earthquake, and had already been online and determined that it was centered down in Panama. Panama? We were actually not that far from the Panamanian border, so I didn't know whether to feel reassured. He accommodatingly stepped back inside his door and returned with his iphone, where he showed me a geologic organization website that already had a map pinpointing the quake and listing it as a 6.2--it was centered not far from the Costa Rican border, but on the other side of the country, the Pacific side (Panama is only about 80 miles wide at that point), so there was no way that could generate a tsunami to hit our side. Almost giddy with relief, I thanked him and headed back to our cabin to fill Becky in on the situation and try (mostly failingly) to get some sleep.
When told about it all the next day, the kids were of course somewhat disappointed to have slept through it--their first earthquake. But I for one was incredibly thankful that they had missed it all.
While in Cahuita we also visited a nearby sloth rescue sanctuary, which included a tour of the care facilities, a lot of info about the 2 kinds of sloths in Costa Rica (2-toed and 3-toed), and a canoe ride on the side channels of the adjacent river. This is one of the awake 3-toed sloths (2-toed are nocturnal and were all asleep while we were there).
We also saw several sleeping sloths up in trees out in the wild at various places. And additionally I should mention here that we also saw toucans, eyelash vipers, kinkajous (at night in a tree), and even a tapir during our time in the rainforests.
After a sometimes harrowing trip over some sketchy mountain roads, we arrived back in the Central Valley, home to San Jose and the vast majority of the country's population.
The adults got in a photo in the central plaza in downtown San Jose. We went into the downtown just one afternoon to go to a museum and so the kids could see the hustle and bustle of the center.
In the small highlands town of Sarchi, where we stopped for lunch one day, there is this famous garden in front of the local church where the bushes are all trimmed into various interesting, and sometimes bizarre, shapes. These two are just a small sample.
When Becky and I were in Costa Rica back in 2003, we were fascinated by a trip we made to the Arenal volcano which was active then and where you could actually view glowing red lava and rocks blowing out of the top of it at night. Unfortunately, its has gone quiet again now, so we couldn't take the kids there. Instead we decided to try a trip over to look down into the crater of the Poas volcano, which was supposed to at least have steam and smoke rising from it's center. It's tightly controlled and you have to make reservations beforehand for a specific 20 min. window of time at the observation platform--that's all you get and you have to hope for decent weather or you're just out of luck. Well, we were just out of luck. Below is how it turned out for us: cold, windy, and clouded-in so thick we couldn't see anything below the rim of the crater. The exciting stuff is somewhere behind us in the clouds in this photo.
At the La Paz Waterfall Gardens (beautiful but pricey) the kids posed with some oxen and traditional oxcart that were harnessed up for display. Coincidentally, that very morning we had driven around the corner on a twisting mountain road and suddenly had to veer around an old man actually leading oxen with a cart like this up the paved road, like he had just time-traveled in from the 1800's. Don't have a clue where he came from or where he was going like that among all the cars and trucks.
At La Paz they had also put out hummingbird feeders, and they were absolutely swarmed with various species of hummingbird (there's apparently 50 species in Costa Rica). The video doesn't really do the whole scene justice, unfortunately.
We returned on Sunday from a wonderful week's trip to Costa Rica, the kids' first time there and their first international trip besides Canada. They did really well with it all, and both expressed on the final day that they didn't want to leave--what better review could we ask for!
When Becky and I used to travel pre-kids, we tended to move around a lot, trying to maximize what we could see in the time allotted. Knowing our kids limitations and not wanting to frustrate ourselves with trying to pack them up and relocate a lot, we decided to restrict ourselves to just two base locations, with a move in the middle of the week. We also decided to rent a car--something neither of us had ever done in a foreign country, previously having always relied on buses and trains to get around. Both turned out to be very good decisions and greatly lowered our travel stress. (I did all the driving while Becky navigated--we made a pretty good team. The chaotic driving "norms" there definitely made it the most challenging experience behind the wheel I've ever had, with the possible exception of driving out of Manhattan in rush hour two years ago.)
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Cahuita--the Caribbean Coast
The first half of the week we spent in the hot, wet lowlands in the Southeast of the country in the small town of Cahuita. Becky and I had stayed there on our previous visit in 2003, and it had always topped our list of places we would want to return with kids because of all the wildlife we had seen there in the small National Park that's immediately next door.
And it did not disappoint! Above is the little one room "bungalow" we stayed in just 100 yards or so from the beach. Very rustic (i.e. sweltering under mosquito nets with just a couple of fans to try and de-swelter it enough to sleep; lizards, crabs, and even one bird finding there way inside) and low, low, low on amenities, but, oh, the wildlife!
Below is the view from the little porch on the front. While hanging out on this very porch we saw: howler monkeys, capuchin monkeys, agoutis, coatis, 2-foot-long iguanas (up in the trees!), land crabs, lizards, raccoons, several different colors of hummingbirds in that blooming bush just to the right, and a plethora of other tropical birds. We saw more wildlife in this yard area than we saw hiking in the national park! [The colored words are links for pics of those animals.]
Here's the best picture I could get of one of the colorful land crabs that lived in holes all over this muddy yard. This one is probably 5-6 inches wide. If you held still a while they would all creep out and sit next to their holes, but any movement close by would send them scurrying back in.
And here is the family observing the capuchin monkeys eating some kind of fruits from that short palm tree at the edge. The videos below capture more of the same, and some agoutis that were frequently running about the yard as well.
