Now that Laurens Mom and sister have arrived we had some exploring to do! We loaded up the rental Toyota Rav4 with all our gear and hit the road. Our first destination was the Monteverde cloud forest up in the mountains. We waved goodbye to Brad and Sheena, plugged the coords into the GPS and away we went.

It was a beautiful paved highway drive back towards the northern side of Costa Rica. After about an hour we turned off the highway and started down some smaller paved roads, which gave way to a potholed road, which eventually gave way to straight dirt track. Ahhh... GPS how I love the adventures you take us on.

The dirt track took us up into the mountains through some fairly decent offroading action for a rental Toyota Rav4. I had to use 4x4 twice to get up some steep skree track. Banging up this rough and rugged road we successfully scared the crap out of Lauren's Mom who kept mumbling something about a "deposit"...


Lauren assured her this kind of driving was quite normal in Central America and away we went. The scenery was beautiful and as long as I kept the RAV4 a decent distance away from the sheer cliff drop off everyone was happy.


View from top of the pass. You can see the Nicoya peninsula and Golf of Nicoya off in the distance


View towards Monteverde, You can see all the clouds hovering over the "cloud forest"


We eventually arrived in Santa Elena, where Carly had booked us a cool little apartment complete with kitchen so we could cook most of our meals. We settled in and got to eatin' and drinking.

View from the apartment


Next morning we were up early to see the sights. First thing first. Coffee.


The coffee is served in traditional Costa Rican style. The device is called a "Chorreador" and consists of a cotton bag which is filled with grounds and hot water is poured through.

As you can see, Carly is very excited about the coffee. Yes... Yess!


Finished product. Delicious


After getting our caffeine boost we headed to the "Butterfly Garden". I was thinking... Ohhh great. Butterflies. This is going to be lame. Suprisingly enough it turned out to be very interesting. We got to see and interact with some cool butterflies and bugs.

Lauren's Momma with a Blue Morpho


The girls got to release some freshly hatched? butterflies into the garden.


More pics, vids, and the rest of the story on the blog at http://homeonthehighway.com/mommaverde-and-puerto-viejo-costa-rica/