Fishing with the Young Men, by Jodi

We got invited to go fishing with the Young Men today. Kevin's been looking for an opportunity to go fishing with the Ticos so he can see how they do it with their line and hook and nothing else. We met at the church building and then piled all 10 young men between our car with all our kids and Hidalgo's five seater. We drove about 10 or 20 minutes to a friend of the Hidalgo's farm and found that we couldn't get past a locked gate. Efrain said it was only a kilometer or so, so we all unloaded and started walking...

 and walking...

 saw this cute little anteater looking animal in a tree...

 some of the boys found an ox skull...

 and walked some more...

 passed Kevin's new favorite tree, the Matapalo tree

 and another cool tree...

 and some horses...

 another cool tree.... (Kevin likes trees)

 and walked some more...

 Sadie and Tessa lasted as long as they could. At this point I realized that the water shoes I'd worn hadn't been broken in yet and I had nice big blisters growing on my feet.

 Finally, we got to one of the coolest rivers I've ever seen. I can't believe this is part of someone's yard. It was so tranquil and peaceful. Luckily, the weather was also really good and not too hot, or Autumn would have revolted after the first 1/2 mile of walking and I would have happily joined her back at the car in the air conditioning.

 We didn't actually catch any fish...Jack caught a clam, though. I still don't know how.

I had one on the line at one point, but it got away right before I pulled it in. We used cow heart for bait.

 We only saw one crocodile. :)

 The net worked really well for catching little river shrimp. They looked like translucent crawdads to me.

 Autumn decided not catching fish was boring. So, she turned to whittling.

 Sadie kept catching cow bones in the net.

 Tessa found a seashell. Not sure how that happened at a river.

 This cool crane hung out on the other side of the river from us the whole time we were there.

Kevin summoning his eagle scout skills to build a fire before we leave so the Young Men can cook the fish they managed to catch. He couldn't find any kindling dry enough to get it to light before we had to go, so he taught them the log cabin trick. We had a guy waiting for us who'd showed up to fish with his friends and Kevin asked him if he could give us a ride back to our car, since we knew the kids were going to have a really rough time making that long trek back (except Jack). He piled all of us in his Escort and drove us out. 

We told him about the crocodile we saw and he said that one morning he came really early and there were 15-20 laying out in the sun on the river bank we'd just been fishing on. 

We had planned to go visit some caves that were an hour away from where we'd been fishing. Kevin accidentally took a wrong turn when we got on the main road and we ended up going back towards our house for about 20 minutes before we realized what had happened. We stopped to fill up our gas tank before flipping around and I decided maybe we should call the park just to make sure they were open. They answered and said their last tour of the day was at 1:30, which was right then and we were still an hour and a half away. Thank goodness we didn't make that long drive just to find out they were closed. Yes, we have done that before. Luckily, we do learn...sometimes.

We decided to head to Liberia instead, since we were half way there at this point. Kevin is easily swayed by any course of direction that takes us by way of fast food. Liberia has a Papa Johns, Burger King and McDonalds. We hit all 3 between lunch and dinner. :) We also went to the one movie theater within several hours of our house and saw Rio 2. Autumn had me go ask if they could put English subtitles at the bottom of the screen, but the manager said they didn't have that option. So, we did our best to understand what we could...Sadie and Tessa lasted through about half before they started drawing and chair hopping. I lasted through about 2/3's before my eyes got really heavy. 

We made the hour and a half trek home with 4 very tired kids...and Junior. We'd given him a ride to the Young Men's activity, so he came with us when we left. He's so fun with the kids and really helps us practice our Spanish since normally when we're together as a family, we don't have much motivation to practice.