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It has been way too long not to blog for such an exciting few weeks. The biggest highlight of course was my dad’s visit. We spent the first weekend up in Monteverde, the quintessential Costa Rican rainforest. And although it was the dry season, it stayed true to its name with a constant refreshing mist. We stayed at a treehouse hotel up in the clouds that included delicious breakfast and 5 o’clock tea to watch the sunset. And we met some interesting characters, including a nature guide who had a fondness for potty jokes and spent more time talking about porcupines pooping and bird indigestion than about all the beautiful plants and animals we saw.

On Monday we headed back to Quebradas with a stop in San José for my Junior Achievement training, a course I am starting with high school aged kids in Quebradas that teaches them how to start their own business. And since I’ve never started my own business, I may need more than a three hour training to be qualified to teach the course, but it’s a start. In Quebradas, dad got to come to an English class, help out with building some planting boxes at the school for our greenhouse, observe a chaotic artisan group meeting and went on his own adventures in San Isidro where he learned the names of lots of new tools in the hardware store in order to construct a screen door for my bedroom. Not exactly a relaxing visit, but he did great.

And just to make sure he left good and tired, we decided to climb the highest mountain in Costa Rica for his last few days in town. Brigitte came down all the way from Bijagua and we picked up Adrienne in Canaan and made our way up 3820 meters and back in two days and one night, plus some side trips to some cool rock formations and a beautiful lake. It was an incredible hike. We walked through various microclimates: rainforest, desert, burnt trees, and up a trail called the “Hill of the Repentants,” right before we got to the lodge on the first day. So it was tough, but well worth it. Meals consisted of PB&J, granola, trail mix, and pasta with bagged tomato sauce for dinner, cooked over a portable burner that took a good 45 minutes to boil water. The second morning we got up super early to summit Chirripo, and it was as awesome as every says it is. We were above all the clouds and it was gorgeous and peaceful and totally exhausting, especially since we had to go all the way back down that same day. But we all made it more or less in one piece, and it was such a wonderful experience to share with my dad and my friends and I have a feeling I will be up there again before I go.

Although it was sad saying goodbye to dad on Sunday, I have hardly had time to miss him as last week was crazy with preparations for the Feria de Agua at FUDEBIOL, their big annual event. I was coordinating a lot of the activities, publicity and transportation (you may have heard me on Thursday’s San Isidro Catholic radio broadcast), and on top of all that preparing for my PCT visit. For those who have been following my adventures from the beginning, you may recall that a year ago, I headed off wide-eyed and clueless to visit a seasoned Peace Corps Volunteer in her site. Now I get to play that role and host a fresh-off-the-boat Peace Corps Trainee, and of course the visit was planned for the craziest weekend in Quebradas, but it ended up working out great because a bunch of the other volunteers near me who are hosting trainees all came to Quebradas on Saturday night and we had a campfire and slept up at FUDEBIOL and then they were all there for the activities on Sunday and lent some extra creativity and resourcefulness to the last minute activity planning. Not that I should be surprised at this point, but on Friday I was not feeling terribly optimistic about the event, and of course everything came together and there was a HUGE turnout (the bus I had begged FUDEBIOL to contract but they were skeptical of whether it would fill up ended up having to make extra trips and fit about double its capacity each time) and the scavenger hunt, traditional dance performance and soccer games I helped organize were all a big hit. So my visitor, Liz, definitely got to see one of the more eventful Sundays ever in Quebradas and we both left drenched from playing soccer in the rain and socially overstimulated, which means it was a good day in my book…