We have a late-night visitor
By Karen:
 These odd things are “Oropendulas” — birds nests. |
 Juan brought his son up to visit on Friday. Juandra (little Juan) is a bright, dear 11-year old, who helped me with my Spanish. |
 Juan & Juandra |
| Friday night, we had a guest in our room. He wasn’t really welcome, and Dave tried to bribe him to leave with a banana, but it didn’t work. He nibbled though my plastic sacks that had candy, and ate part of a tootsie roll pop. And then, in the middle of the night, he got inside the mosquito netting, and walked across my stomach (or, rather, the blankets on my stomach). I tried to get him to leave, but apparently just cornered him even further back in the netting. | Who was he?A RAT!
All I knew, we had just settled back down to sleep when I heard a plaintive “Daaavvvve” as Karen felt the rat running over her tummy. The flashlight revealed one frightened little mountain rat clinging to an upper corner of our mosquito netting. After that, Karen wanted to leave a day early and I did not really blame her. |
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We excused ourselves, and left the next morning. You’ve seen the road, and here is the neato bridge over the Penas Blancas River. |
 Wide bridge, isn’t it? Freaked me out to walk over it, let alone drive it. |
 But the road finally got MUCH better. |
 Ooops. Dump-truck dumped a load of dirt in the road right in front of us. Luckily, there was a Bulldozer nearby. |
 Oh joy, a paved road in sight!!! So we headed north to Fortuna, the closest fairly large town — the grinding noise we’d heard was a totally down-to-the-metal brake — to find a phone and see what we could work out with the car rental company.. |
 On the way to Fortuna, the roof blew off the car. It uses a sort of a latching mechanism, and basically unlatched itself. That was just jolly. I started to laugh because crying would do no good. No one was behind us to get hurt, at least.
That was the last straw! The brakes had gotten worse and worse coming down the mountain and we were limping in to the next town of any size, La Fortuna. Then the roof blows off! Needless to say I was a bit pissed at that rental car company. |