We woke up early to have the breakfast at the hotel. This time I ordered the pancakes and they made then with banana and macademia nuts. Mmmm! Then we packed up and left to head to Arenal. I wanted to walk down and get tripod photos of the waterfalls, but it was raining pretty hard and I didn’t want to take the gear out in that much rain. Instead, we stopped along the road and got one waterfall while holding Dave’s jacket over the camera.
Then we headed out to Arenal. The rain stopped once we got out of the La Paz area. So we were very happy about that. We couldn’t check into our room yet at Lost Iguana so we headed over to the Hanging Bridges. This was really neat. It basically was a 2 mile hike through the rainforest over suspension bridges. 
There is even a water fall you can go down to. Again we saw more howler monkeys and enjoyed watching them play for a while. We also saw the leaf cutter ants. Theses things are crazy! They go get these leaves and bring them back to the nest to grow mushrooms for food. After the bridges hike we went back tot hotel to check in. This time we realized why our room wasn’t ready yet. There were rose petals all over the bed and towels folded in all sorts of shapes. There were even rose petals in the Jacuzzi on the patio. Then we noticed a bottle of champagne by the bed. We were really confused and thought we had the wrong room. We even called the front desk. Then we found a flower arrangement with a card that said “Happy Birthday from Mom and Dad”. 
I guess my parents called the hotel before we got there. How sweet, huh!From our room we had a great view of the volcano, which is why we reserved this hotel. After settling in we headed down to the pool for a few happy hour drinks at the swim up bar. Then it was off for our reserved spot at Eco Termales Hot Springs. This place was kind of crazy because its completely unmarked. Unless you have heard about it you have no idea it is there. There is not even a sign! The nice thing about it is its much less touristy then Tabacon. There were only 10 people reserved for the entire evening! We felt like we had the place to ourselves, at first we did since we were the first ones there. After 2 hours in the hot springs, we had another Costa Rican dinner, which was fabulous. After dinner it was back to the hotel to watch the evening view of the volcano.
Day 7 – More views or Volcan Arenal and a Waterfall
In the morning, after breakfast we headed into La Fortuna to meet a group for a horseback ride to La Fortuna Waterfall. Again, they really didn’t care if you trotted and ran. So I had fun galloping with the horse again. My horse was quite the leader and didn’t like others getting in front of him. Dave’s horse however was kind of mean and kicked my horse twice! I felt so bad for her. It took about 1 – 1.5 hours to reach the waterfall area. But how amazing, the waterfall was so powerful and gorgeous. The water was a bright turquoise color. We had fun wading around in the stream below. I kind of hurt my foot here though, when I slipped on a wet rock. I ended up bruising my foot in 3 or 4 places. At least we didn’t have to hike back since we did the horseback ride. After we got back from the horseback ride it was about noon. We then went to find the Arenal Volcano National Park to do a bit of hiking. We hiked a trail over to the 1992 lava flow. This was neat because you could see the smoke and hear the lava coming down the side of the volcano. We relaxed up here for a while, before heading back. We couldn’t go to much further since my foot was hurting really bad. In fact it ended up being really hard to hike back. That evening we headed into town to have dinner a Rufino’s. This was sooo good. I had cashew chicken that was served in half a pineapple. Afterwards we bought a bottle of wine at the supermercado and headed back to the hotel to relax in the Jacuzzi tub and watch the volcano some more. But on the way back we took a side trip up a dirt road to watch the lava flow from there. You could actually see chunks of it it flowing down the side. I tried to get a few photos on the tripod from here too.
Day 8 – My 30th Birthday!
I honestly don’t think I could have thought of a better way to spend my 30th birthday! I thought I would be upset with turning 30, but honestly I had so much fun it didn’t even phase me. We started the morning off with a waterfall rappelling tour! This was my favorite activity of the entire trip. We literally rappelled down the middle of waterfalls.
Then we hiked through a canyon with a stream flowing through it. I really didn’t want this to end. But I still had more to look forward to. At the end of the trip the company served us a delicious Costa Rican Lunch. We really filled ourselves up here because the food was home cooked and good! We spend a n hour or so souvenir shopping in town and I bought myself a couple of birthday presents. In the late afternoon was decided to go to El Silencio and hiked a small portion of the Silencio trail. We could actually see a bit of a sunset from here. The first I had seen of any sunsets while in Costa Rica. We took a few photos using the tripod and then headed to Tabacon. We spent 3 hours having fun at the Tabacon Hot Springs. 
This place was cool too, very different from Eco Termales, but still really nice. We had some birthday drinks here and then headed out around 9pm. We were so busy that we never had dinner and the restaurant at our hotel was closed. We ended up having wine and cookies for dinner! But I told Dave earlier in the day I just wanted to have fun I didn’t care about having some fancy birthday dinner. So it was all good.
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