We hit the road for the long scenic drive around Lake Arenal to Monteverde. It was absolutely Gorgeous! Really curvy and unfortunately not many places to pull off to take pictures so you just have to take my word for it. Nick told me it was gorgeous, and he was not lying. We did see some random stuff that caught our eye along the way.

I found it interesting that even the poorest of houses had satellite dishes. Lots of them were also recycled and used as signs.

Sodas are local eateries where you could get "typical" food and it is usually cheap. I could eat Casados everyday for the rest of my life. No lie!

We kept seeing signs for a German bakery and hefeweizen. We, not being fans of Costa Rican beer were getting excited and then we came across the Helen, GA of Costa Rica. Not what we were expecting to see. I snapped a few pictures but we opted to ease on down the road for something not so cheesy.

The transition from rain forest to cloud forest was our favorite terrain and my kind of weather.

We opted to stop in this shop. We loaded up on Kombucha, organic wine, orange gluten free cookies (that were awesome BTW) and gluten free beer to tide us over and to help us stock up for our next destination that was going to be much more rustic and off the grid than the last stop. The owner is an ex-pat hippie chick that came here for the study abroad, met a Tico and never left. I would visit this shop again on my next visit if we make our way around the lake from La Fortuna to Monteverde. The "real" German bakery is next door, but he is an angry man who hates Brits and Americans apparently, but has great food and beer, not cheesy like the other stop.

Wild horses and stray dogs plague the streets. We made a game of naming them all as we passed them.

This is the point where the roads got really bad. Nick told me that in fact the roads are significantly better than they used to be. The only road that used to lead to Monteverde was basically a livestock trail and it would take three times as long to get there. The roads are really, really bad in the cloud forest but there is one paved road that runs through part of main street. Luckily where we had to drive to wasn't too far off the main paved road once we got to the paved road. The climate between where we left and where we drove to changed drastically. It was breezy and chilly and we were always in the clouds. It is hard to explain. It is magical. Like no where else on Earth. I could not believe in a matter of just a few hours how many ecosystems we traveled through. I can't wait to tell you about Monteverde.

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