From the plane . . .

Finally after hours of a stubborn sun beating against the port side of our aircraft I pulled up the window shade and brilliant Caribbean light burst into the cabin.
"Griffin," I said, "look outside."
"It's like an ocean of clouds sitting on top of an ocean of blue," Griffin noted. He was right: hot tufts of cumulus clouds shed dark patches of shadow on an ocean so unyielding that the long lines of breaking waves looked like hard disturbances on a lacquer table. Seams of waves cresting in white moved at a glacial pace.

An hour later Costa Rica hove into view, the geological equivalent of a rumpled coverlet of ridged khaki and smoked green hills. The occasional rural tin roof winked up at us, a mute salutation to the inquiring eye looking down from miles up. The roads grew more frequent as we neared San Jose, brown country roads and the slender asphalt veins of main trunk roads.

At the airport Javier, our ever present guide and initiator into the mysteries and byways of Costa Rica, greeted us with a big smile. Our van took a long drive up over volcanic mountainsides and the cloud cover we had spotted from the valley near the airport became, once we neared the top, a fantastical world of cloud rain forest that is uninhabitated due to its status as a national park. Visibility sank to a few meters. That the noonday sun existed was doubtful for we moved through a world of grays with solemn ferns and enormous leaves.

At long last we have arrived and discovered toads the size of bullfrogs, frogs colored neon green and black, termite nests and in the background as evening arrived, the lazy hooting of howler monkeys.

The kids have enormous appetites. They have learned to greet in tHe bumped fist fashion of young Costa Ricans. And charmingly, the default greeting and farewell is always "Pura vida!"