The first night or two in a new place always requires some time for adjustment. There are different beds, pillows, gadgets, shower water temperature/pressure issues, and so much more to figure out. I was excited that this house had air-conditioning, but I never considered it wouldn't work well. I don't know many degrees one has to hold in order to figure out how varying wall mounted air-conditioners work. No matter what we did, the temperature would change or it would shut off. The timer button seemed to make a difference, but we couldn't figure out how exactly. It was counter-intutitive. What 'mode' should it be set to? None of it seemed to matter; it did what it wanted.
I don't think I mentioned it before, but this house is located on the northwestern part of Lake Arenal. It's about a 45 minute crazy, curvy drive past the Arenal Volcano. No one is particularly fond of the constant turns, and it is easy to become car sick. We decided to take it easy on our first full day at this house. We did our 'work' in the morning (researching next stays, excursions, airline ticket prices and blog writing) and went to the pool in the afternoon. It was lovely. We had fun playing around in the infinity pool. We had a contest on who could tread water the longest (someone has a competitive nature.) Maeve smacked her leg on the wall and was upset. She blamed Michael for the incident...I mean it certainly couldn't have been her fault. Michael teased her a bit too much and she didn't care for that. After some arguing over an owed apology, Michael went to get out of the pool. Unfortunatley, his swim shorts didn't follow. The kids were hysterical laughing. His bottom was exposed just enough for Kharma to take a bite out of it. To top it off, there was a man and his baby son who witnessed the whole incident.
After our fill of the pool, I made supper at home. It was nice to have a home cooked meal. We slept in the next day and got a late start to our excursion. We headed back to La Fortuna to take advantage of the Hot Springs. There are several hotels and spas that feature the geothermal springs. We thought this was a good way of easing our way into excursions.
We took the advice of our home owner and went to a place that only features the hot springs as day trips, as opposed to the others which are part of a hotel. Eco Termales has one of the smallest set of pools, but they have another feature that I particularly liked. They only allow 100 people into the 5 pools. Fortunately, there were only two other people there. We practically had the place to ourselves!
According to one of the springs sites, hot Springs are geothermally heated rainwater intially fed by rainwater that seeps into the earth through faults and fractures. So these pools are man made, but the water in them comes from the rain and earth. The temperatures range from 90 degrees to over 110 here and close to 150 degrees at some other spas.
Maeve enjoying a nice feature of a bench behind a waterfall
It may look like she dove from a waterfall, but Maeve is doing a handstand in the water
Looks like Michael's head is photoshopped onto his body in the water
We also discovered some other critters at the hot springs. Leafcutter ants! Maeve and I went to explore the property and saw these little bits of leaves moving along in a line. Michael and I had seen a documentary on ants, so I knew I had seen them before, but we thought they were fire ants originally. There was a huge line of them to the side of the walking path. There were rocks outlining the walking path so at least no one would accidentally walk into their work route. We did see a few stray ants by the pools, so we knew to avoid them. We didn't receive any literature or warnings from the staff at the pools, so I'm just glad we knew to avoid them. I just read that next to humans, leafcutter ants are the largest and most complex animal societies on Earth. Here is a website link with more information (http://www.arkive.org/leaf-cutter-ant/atta-cephalotes) and let's see if I've figured out this video attachment. If I have, there should be two more video links that I filmed on the ants.