Time to start blogging again...

I have been very negligent as of late and I have not kept up with our blog entries. It’s time to bring our readers up to date on what we’ve been doing lately.

In February, John and I decided we had to get serious about our health and weight, so we dramatically changed our eating habits. I am pleased to report we have dropped about 85 pounds between us. You could say we have lost the equivalent of a 10 year old child. This is not a diet, this is a total lifestyle change and I think we will probably eat this way for the rest of our lives. I will blog more about this later.

I’m still without employment, so in late March I was able to take a road trip to Ft. Worth, Texas where John attended a conference. We both managed to come down with bad colds which turned into the coughs from hell.

We took a trip to Costa Rica for 12 days in mid April. Even though we still had our coughs, we had a great time. We really didn’t have any work that needed to be done around the house, so we took the time to visit some places John hadn’t been to before.

We took a day trip to Monteverde where we rode the Canopy SkyTram followed by a walking tour of the jungle canopy. I was really glad I remembered to bring a sweater with me because it gets chilly up in the mountains.The vistas were amazing.We ate lunch in town at a typical Tico restaurant. We ended the day with a visit to the Monteverde Dairy for one of the best ice cream cones in the world. Yummy! The ice cream is not on our normal menu, but everyone needs a little splurge now and then. The secret is in the portion control. We bought some Parmesan cheese and the best smoked cheddar I have ever tasted. This is true smoked cheese, not artificially flavored. I now know I had never had the real thing before.

We have actually found the Costa Rican way of eating is more in line with our new dietary changes.

John had never been to the Pacific side of Costa Rica, so a few days after Monteverde we headed out for Puerto Limon via the Braulio Carrillo National Park where the mountain views were majestic. Once we got to Puerto Limon we headed south through Puerto Viejo and eventually found our way to Punta Uva. We found a wonderful hotel in Punta Uva. The hotel had a nice restaurant, pool and large cabins with hot water, a/c and a veranda. John heard howler monkeys for the first time that evening, so we decided to sit out by the pool where we were serenaded by the local frog population. The restaurant staff accommodated us and served our dinner and drinks poolside.
The next day we headed back to Atenas via the southern route through Turrialba, the Orosi Valley, Cartago and San Jose. Again, the scenery was spectacular.

The only downside of the trip was Isuzu Susie decided we didn’t need any air conditioning, so it just quit working.


Vinicio promised to have it fixed for us before our next trip to CR. He is also going to get trees planted along the east property line. It is great to have such wonderful friends as we have in Vinicio and Maritza.







When we got back to Houston the bathroom scale reported John had lost 5 pounds and I had lost 3.

More to come later…