Category: Personal

On this day, we were on our own in Monte Verde without our guide, Orlando.  We began with another terrific breakfast, provided in the reception area of Cabinas Capulin before setting out for the Don Juan coffee and cacao tour.  The Don Juan tour was billed as “three tours in one:” coffee, sugar cane, and cacao.  The sugar cane portion seemed like an afterthought, and the coffee portion was good, but for me the highlight was the cacao portion.

Having been on this tour, it is amazing to me that people ever figured out how to turn coffee beans into food.  The plant germinates in a green house for two or three years before being planted in the ground.  The plant is only good for 25 -30 years.  This coffee plantation pulls out the plant at 25 years and plants a new seedling.  Of those 25 years, they only get 15 harvests.  The beans must be hand picked, because the beans ripen at different rates.  Our guide said that the pickers might visit the same plant 15-20 times during the six-week harvest season.  Then the bean goes through a six or seven step process in which the various layers are removed to reveal what we know as the coffee bean, which is then roasted.  The roasting time determines the flavor of the coffee.  Our guide asserted that light roast provides the best, non-bitter, non-burnt taste.  She also said that longer roasting times, such as “dark roast,” does little to make the coffee stronger, despite popular misconception, while giving the coffee more of a bitter taste.  Except for Sam, none of us are coffee drinkers, so we found this presentation and tour interesting, but not overly so.

This particular plantation is small.  They only sell to the US via internet sales.  The major coffee brands in the US only buy from large plantations.  I tried a cup of the light roast at the end of the tour.  I still don’t like coffee, but the Don Juan light roast was less terrible than other coffee I have tried.

The next step of the tour was showing how sugar cane is pressed to create a sugary water.  This sugary water can then be processed into sugar.  In this part of the country, most of the sugar cane is processed into rum.

By far the most interesting portion of the tour was the discussion of cacao.  The cacao pod was surprising.  When our guide cut the pod open, what came out looked like meat.  Tom commented that if he had seen this before ever seeing chocolate, he might not have ever eaten chocolate.  The meat-like stuff you can see in the picture is peeled and processed into the cacao nut.  This nut is then roasted.  The nut is often then processed to separate the cacao powder from the butter.  The butter is used in cosmetics, generally.  The powder is then used to make chocolate.  Our guide talked about how you have to look at the label to make sure that the chocolate has a lot of cacao in it and is not adulterated with “chocolate flavors” and other additives.  Apparently the pure cacao has many health benefits.  the good stuff is 90 something percent cacao with a little of the cacao butter added back.

She mixed the cacao a few different ways for us.  The Aztecs thought this was the food of the gods.  Sugar cane and coffee are not indigenous to this part of the world, so the Aztecs did not mix the cacao with sugar.  They mixed it with chili powder and perhaps cinnamon.  This mixture was then stirred into hot water.  Because the pure cacao has a number of health benefits, the Aztecs felt stronger and satisfied.  We tried it this way.  It was really good!  Then she mixed in a little brown sugar from their sugar cane, and this mixture was terrific.  During this portion of the tour, she showed us a number of ways that the cacao is processed and used.  I found this portion of the tour the most interesting — plus, we got to sample stuff!

After the tour was over, we rode in a traditional Costa Rican ox cart back to the mandatory gift shop.  The ox cart, originally from Europe, probably Italy, holds a special place in Costa Rican culture.  It was the first major transportation system that brought coffee from the mountains to the coast.  Costa Rica was exporting coffee before it was an independent country.  Each cart is individually painted and is a work of art in its own way.

 

Following the coffee tour, we set out on a hike along a trail on the grounds of our cabins.  The Cabinas Capulin is also a working farm, so along the trail there were some parts of the farm to view.

It has rained every afternoon since our arrival, so the ground was slippery.  Sam’s stumbling and near falls were very funny.

The trail was well marked.  We weren’t very quiet during our walk, so we didn’t see any wildlife.  There was one point where we heard a lot of birds in a distant tree being quite loud, but we never saw the birds.

There seem to be very few flying, biting insects in this area.  We were wandering through the cloud forest without applying any bug repellant, and we were never bothered by mosquitos, flies, or other insects.

Upon our return from our hike, Tom and I played with the frisbee for an hour, and then I made grilled cheese sandwiches on the hot plate in our cabin.  We then spent a relaxing afternoon reading and taking a siesta in our cabins.

This was the only afternoon / evening since we arrived without torrential rain.  We took advantage of this clear weather to book a night nature walk through the forest with a guide.  Armed with flashlights, we ventured into the forest.  We saw a sloth, some snakes, a few sleeping birds, and some interesting nocturnal insects.  It was a little pricey for what we saw, but it was worth doing once.

We returned to our cabin to snack on some popcorn and relax before bed.

 

 

After a terrific breakfast at our cabins, Orlando met us and took us to the Selvatura Cloud Forest park, where we began a zip line tour over the cloud forest.  Where we were in Monte Verde, Costa Rica, looks a little like a tropical rain forest, but in fact a cloud forest is different.  Where rain forests get torrential rains, most of the rain runs off and moves into tributaries of rivers.  A cloud forrest doesn’t have as much rain.  Most of the moisture comes from clouds that are pushed inland by ocean winds.  This means that the moisture comes in the form of condensation that runs off leaves and soaks into the ground.  The Selvatura park features a number of really long zip lines, the final one measuring a full kilometer.  At points we were hundreds of feet above the canopy, passing over and among terrific scenery.

Soon after our arrival we were suited up and ready to go.  We had to take a short shuttle ride from the reception area to the first tower. After a short instruction session, we were on our way.  The first zip was short, but the next one was almost a kilometer.

After completing the zip line tour, we then hiked along the couple miles of trails through the Selvatura Park, which is sort of a privately held nature preserve.  Tom wanted to see a “big cat.”  Sam wanted to see a sloth.  Candy wanted to see a monkey.  I wanted to see a toucan.

I’m not exactly sure how long the nature trail was, but it took us nearly two hours to walk it, stopping from time to time to try to spot some wildlife.  There were several pedestrian foot bridges along the trail that gave us a chance to look at the forest from the middle and top of the canopy as well as walking from bridge to bridge along the ground level.

This picture gives you some sense of scale for the length of these suspension bridges through the cloud forest.

The best way to find wildlife at a national park in the US is to watch where all the cars are parked by the side of the road.  Someone spots an animal and everyone else stops to see it too.  The same was true in the cloud forest.  We came around a curve in the trail and found a couple pointing into the trees.  It turned out to be an oncilla, which is somewhat smaller than an ocelot.  He eventually got tired of all of us staring at him, came out of his tree, and disappeared into the vegetation.  Tom was the only one who got to see what he wanted to see on the hike.

As we finished the walking tour, we were getting hungry for lunch.  Orlando took us to a small Soda in town where we had yet another terrific meal.  We bought a few groceries to take back to our cabin as the afternoon rain began to fall.  We then spent the afternoon relaxing in our cabin.  We went to a nearby pizza joint for dinner, and then ended the day with some board games back in our cabin.

Over the past 6 Summers we worked to get the kids to all 50 states in the US before Tommy went off to college.  We managed to complete that goal about a week before he reported into West Point for Beast Barracks.  We had thought about trying to go to England this Summer, but the cost of airfare just put England into the “too hard” box for this year.  To work around Sam’s Summer School and Tom’s military training, we decided to have two smaller vacations rather than one long one.  The first vacation of the year is a week in Costa Rica.

Normally Candy has spent months planning each of our family vacations, using TripAdvisor, Yelp, and other Internet sites as well as travel books from the library.  This year she did some basic research, but then we hired Orlando Vargas, a Costa Rica guide, to work out the details.  This was both liberating and stressful to Candy the Microplanner.  Orlando picked us up in the airport and began the four-hour drive over largely unimproved roads to La Fortuna.  Along the way we stopped at a small “Soda” for lunch.

Most traditional Costa Rican meals include black beans and rice.  All of the food has been superb.  The drinks were fruit juices of different types.  Tom and I hand pineapple, Sam and Candy had something red.  Tom and I also tried the home-made hot chillies in large yellow-topped jar.

We arrived at the Los Lagos resort just as the afternoon rain began to fall.  We checked in then went to the pool-side snack bar to get a light dinner to take to our rooms.  We weren’t very hungry after the huge lunch we ate.

This first day was largely a travel day, but the second day was full of high adventure.  We began with a wonderful breakfast buffet at Los Lagos and then Orlando took us to Pure Trek, where we had scheduled an excursion in which we conducted four rappels down canyon walls and waterfalls.

After signing a bunch of waivers, we boarded the PureTrek van to take us to the adventure area.  Most of the drive was along unimproved roads past houses and agricultural fields.

I haven’t been rappelling in many years, and I was really looking forward to it.  Sam and Tom had both rappelled with scouts.  Tom had just finished air assault school, during which he rappelled from a helicopter.  Candy had never rappelled.  So we were a mixed bag.

I volunteered to go first for the day.  I wanted to check the safety of the apparatus before Candy and the kids came down.  We all lived. One of the things I liked about these PureTrek guys is that they were safe, but they let you bound down the cliff instead of just walking.  It was an awesome experience.

From this shot, you get a sense of scale.  The cliff for the first rappel was 145 feet.

The guide at the bottom of the cliff, pulled the rope to stop our descent and then dragged us under the falling water to make sure that everyone gets wet.

Our next stop for the day was to see the La Fortuna falls.  Getting there meant going down hundreds of stairs to the base of the falls and then back up again.

After leaving the La Fortuna falls area, Orlando took us to a local watering hole on the La Fortuna river.  Tom and Sam both had a chance to swing out and drop 30 feet into the pool.

After all the adventure and hiking, we went back Los Lagos to relax a little before dinner.

The resort had several pools, some “cold” and some fed by the volcanic hot springs.  They both had the fastest water slides I have ever experienced.  You could really shock yourself going from the cold pool to the hot pool and back.

The Los Lagos also had a butterfly enclosure, some alligators, a frog enclosure, and an enclosure for leaf cutter ants.  We spent a few minutes walking through these areas before getting ready for dinner an at upscale steakhouse / soda.

The next morning, after another hearty breakfast, we took a hike up a trail to an observation area for a better view of Arenal.

After this hike we began a three hour drive over unimproved roads to Monte Verde.

Upon arriving at Monte Verde we went to lunch at the Tree House restaurant.  A tree grows up through the middle of the restaurant.  It is a living tree and home to birds.

After a terrific Italian dinner at a local restaurant in Monte Verde, we hit the sack early and got ready for the next day’s adventure.  Stay tuned!

I recently travelled to London to attend a conference for work.  To save a large bag of cash on the flight, it was cheaper for us to go over a couple days early, so I had a chance to see a few fights the day before the conference started.

The first thing we did was go atop The Shard.  This is the tallest structure in the EU.  From atop the Shard you get some spectacular views of London.  It was a bit hazy in the morning, but the weather cleared up nicely the rest of the week.

I met my buddy Simon, and we then visited two places I hadn’t seen in my previous visits to London.  The fist was the Cabinet War Rooms, where the British Government ran during WWII.

In the Cabinet War Rooms was also an extensive museum dedicated to Winston Churchill.  It was really terrific, tracing his life from his earliest days as a soldier and war correspondent to his second term as Prime Minister and his death.

I have been to London several times, but I had never gotten to the Imperial War Museum.  I had been told it was primarily filled with WWI artifacts.  Since that war doesn’t interest me much, this museum always took a back seat to other things I wanted to see, like the British Army Museum.  The ground floor is dedicated to WWI, and the displays are excellent.  The museum focuses on soldiers’ stories, not the battles and generals.  I really enjoyed it.  The other displays, WWII to the present were less impressive.

We passed this sculpture at one point.  Since I have played a number of pirate games, I had to get a picture of this.

That evening we saw an excellent production of The Taming of the Shrew in the Globe Theater in London.  This theater is an exact reproduction of the original Globe.  It was really neat to see Shakespeare in the Globe in London.

After three days at the conference, all of the folks I know headed home, but I stayed to attend the Partizan wargaming show in Newark on Trent, Nottinghamshire.  That is the subject of my next post.

Here is an inspirational story.  It’s been around for a couple of years, but someone just sent it to me again, so I thought I would post it here:  The Krissoff Family

We’ve all see the “I support our troops” bumper stickers.  I often wonder “how?”  Putting a bumper sticker on your car does nothing to support our troops.  A few years ago when we were the token poor people in an affluent neighborhood, I tried to get the scout troop to do shoe boxes for our troops and got NO response.

My son was home this weekend from school, and we filled the weekend with holiday activities.  These included running in the Archbishop Spalding annual “turkey trot” fund raiser.  This year all four of us walked or ran the course.  My knees protested the last mile, but I completed the run.

The weather was perfect.  Not too cold and not too hot.

We found a gingerbread village kit at Michael’s, which Sam assembled and decorated while Tom was busy with one of his friends.  On Black Friday we decorated the house for Christmas, including setting up our Christmas tree.  For the past ten years or so, we have been decorating on Black Friday.  I think it is too early, because it is no longer novel or special when Christmas rolls around, but we did the same this year, because we wanted Tom to participate.

By the way, I set up a Christmas tree, not a holiday tree.

Last Saturday Tom (and the class of 2019) was formally accepted into the United States Corps of Cadets at West Point.  This gave us a chance to spend a few hours with him before the academic year started.  We had a VERY nice visit.

Sunday and Monday, I participated as an “Old Grad” in the Beast Barracks march back.  Cadet basic training, or Beast Barracks, ends at Camp Buckner on the West Point reservation and culminates with a 12.2 mile ruck sack road march over steep and rocky hills to the West Point main campus.  This has been going on since time immemorial; although, Beast when i was a cadet ended at Lake Frederick, nearby, rather than Camp Buckner.  What is relatively new is that the Academy encourages a bunch of Old Grads to participate each year to strengthen the new cadet’s connection to the “Long Gray Line.”

For the “Old Grads,” the march back began with a briefing by the Commandant of Cadets and the senior summer cadet leadership about all of cadet summer training.  I will admit that when I heard about Cadet Field Training (the summer between Plebe and Yearling years) being shortened, I thought that was a mistake.  During the briefing, however, the told us that in fact those missing three weeks have been replaced with a different three week Cadet Leader Development Training, which is a three-week, Ranger school-like tactical leadership course between Cow and Firstie summers.  I think it was a good trade, and cadet summer military training is strong.

We Old Grads slept in Barth Hall at Camp Buckner on cots.  Lights out was 2200, and wake up was 0300.

The night before the march back, the new cadets got to relax a bit with a talent show and the unveiling of their class motto.  The talent show included a new cadet playing the bagpipes while another new cadet engaged in River Dance style dancing, a new cadet doing tricks on his yo-yo, several singers and musicians, and even a Best Barracks rap act.  During the summer, the new cadets in the class of 2018 had nominated and voted on their class motto.  At the end of the show, the final result was unveiled, and while it doesn’t rhyme, it is quite good: “So Freedom Will Reign.”

The march back begin Monday at 0230 for the new cadets and at 0300 for the old grads.  We linked up at the parade ground at Camp Buckner with the companies to which we had been assigned.  My son was in G Company, so I was able to march with his platoon.  That was doubly good, because not only did I get to march with him, but since his company was determined to be the best at Beast Barracks, his platoon was first in the order of march.  We reached the half way rest stop before the last company stepped off from the starting point.

A relatively new tradition is to honor a recently fallen West Point graduate by naming the new cadet regiment as Task Force ___.  The class of 2019 was Task Force del Castillo, named after a recent graduate killed in Afghanistan.  Widow del Castillo marched with our platoon — several months pregnant — and Tommy had a chance to talk to her.

The ski slope marked the final rest point before the march onto post where the rest of the corps and a strong of spectators awaited our arrival.  The chaplain’s office provided ice pops to the cadets and new cadets.

Except for a little more illumination during the first — and hardest — three miles of the march, we couldn’t have asked for nicer weather.  It was 63 degrees with moderate humidity.  Despite arthritis and a recent knee surgery, my knees held up fine for the march.

This was an excellent event.  I am very glad I was able to participate in this with Tom.  We had a chance to talk a little on the march and a little more during the rest at the ski slope to wait for all the companies to arrive before the final two miles to West Point.  He is doing well and seems it really good spirits.

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See this little movie of Tom’s company marching onto West Point.

 

 

This morning we dropped off my son at West Point to begin Cadet Basic Training, a.k.a. “Beast Barracks.”  This is a picture of him standing in line to get into Eisenhower Hall to begin his adventure.   It was a bittersweet moment for all of us.

The drive from Mammoth Cave National Park to Charleston was very, very long, so Candy planned for to interesting stops along the way to break up the drive.  The first was in Corbin, KY, where Colonel Sanders started his motor park.  Eventually it became both Kentucky Fried Chicken and Days Inn.

They had some very interesting displays to enjoy while we waited for our food.  One idea that was interesting was that Colonel Sanders felt that women made the decision on whether to stay at which motor lodge, so he placed the ladies restroom so that you had to pass through a model of his motel room to get to it.  In this way, he thought the women would see how neat and clean his rooms were and be amenable to staying at his motor lodge.

Our next stop was at the Museum of Appalachia.  I wasn’t sure what to expect, but it was actually quite nice.

There were a large number of buildings from all over Appalachia that had been moved board by board and stone by stone from their original locations to the museum to form a sort of farming community.  These included stores, barns, cabins, churches, and schools.  There were also two larger buildings containing professionally presented displays of rural life and some famous people from Appalachia, including Sergeant York and Cordell Hull.

The people running the museum were very friendly.  We bought a couple of AMAZING cookies that were made there.  It was a worthwhile short stop to break up the long drive.  We arrived in Charleston late that night and just had time to unpack the car and hit the sack.  The next day we got up early for a two-hour walking tour of the historic part of the city.

Our guide, 7th generation Charlstonian, provided a very interesting and informative walking tour of the historic part of the city.

The city is quite picturesque.  It had fallen into disrepair after the Civil War.  In fact, the city was in such bad shape that there wasn’t even enough money to tear down the old buildings.  In the end, this turned out to be good.  Where in other historic cities, like Boston and New York much of the historical areas had been the target of urban renewal, in Charleston, the historical buildings hadn’t been torn down when money was finally found to rebuild.

This church was an Anglican (Church of England) before the American Revolution and was the official church in Charleston (and all the British colonies).  When the Revolution ended, the Anglican churches became Episcopal churches.  The Episcopal church reunited, North and South, after the Civil War, unlike many other churches.  In the 1960’s this church left the Episcopal church and became Anglican again during the flap over the revision of the Book of Common Prayer.  Lots of history there, but not worth describing in the posting.  Many other churches have left Episcopal church in recent years for a variety of reasons, including heretical statements about the Bible by Episcopal bishops.

The old theater in town is still active, hosting theatrical shows, musical shows, and a popular chamber music series each season.  It has been beautifully restored.

After our walking tour we walked around some of the shopping areas and had lunch, followed by a couple of hours in the hotel pool.  Our hotel also has an interesting story.  It was demolished in 1968 and was rebuilt in the early 1970’s to look on the outside like the original.  It was a VERY nice hotel within walking distance of everything we wanted to see in the historical area.

That evening we walked around a few more shops and had pizza in a local establishment, Di Giovani.  Trip Advisor said that the food was very good, but everything else “sucked.”  They were right.  The food was very good, but the service, ambiance, etc. were poor.  It was one of those places where you felt they were doing you a favor to take your money.

We got up early the next morning for a boat ride out to Morris Island in the bay.  The tour guide and his two assistants were excellent.  Morris Island, site of Ft. Wagner (as seen in the movie Glory) during the Civil War, is largely barren today.  Sharks teeth, shells, and occasionally bricks from Ft. Sumpter wash ashore.

Sam and Tom found part of the tooth of a Maglodon, a prehistoric shark-like creature.  The sharks in the area are small, so the teeth were tiny.

We elected to skip Ft. Sumpter.  Others who have visited said it is disappointing.  The top 2/3 of the fort from the Civil War were rubbled and are gone.  Much of what is there is from the Spanish American War rather than the Civil War.

After returning from the boat ride we cleaned up and checked out of our hotel, had lunch, and headed up to North Carolina with a quick stop at South of the Border.  After checking into the Ft. Bragg guest house we had dinner and played miniature golf in Fayetteville.

The course was quite nice and had 36 holes.  On the final 18 holes Sam won, which she says is the first time she’s ever won at miniature golf.

The next morning we slept in a little and then visited the 82nd Airborne Division Museum.  Located along Ardennes Street in the middle of the division area, while small, it is quite nice.

Candy and the kids were pretty “museumed out” by this point, so we only stayed two hours.

Every time I come to Ft. Bragg I remember how much I liked being in airborne units.

Upon leaving Ft. Bragg we headed home to unpack the car, unpack our bags, return the rental car, and hit the sack early.  It was a long vacation, but a good one.  We completed all 50 states just three days before Tom heads to college.  This is our last family vacation while we’re all living together, which for me is a sad thing.