Weeks 25 and 26: Field Trips, Accidents, and Scorpians

Ray and John had another grade level team-building field trip (like when they went on the catamaran first semester) where they got to go ziplining. Mark and I are happy that we did not have to go with as it looked quite daunting! John was pretty scared when he started the day and had a parent help him through the first course. By the end he was going on the zipline upside down!

Car accident:

Mark took a trip to Liberia to run some errands while I was working and the boys were in school. He ended up in a Costa Rican car accident when a car in front of him decided to come to a dead stop in the middle of the road going 55 miles per hour to stop and chat with a friend. The car was two cars in front of Mark, but caused a chain reaction where Mark had to slam on his breaks, but hit the car in front of him; a 1996 RAV4 can’t stop the quickest. Fortunately he hit an American so they were able to communicate. The man also spoke Spanish and gave the Ticos in front of him an earful as they were the ones who came to an abrupt stop. They just shrugged their shoulders and left the scene (their car was not hit or damaged) and Mark was able to settle up with the American without calling the police (he just happened to have cash on him which was a plus). I think we got off cheap considering we do not have insurance. Now we have to look into fixing the damage on the front end of our car. You can see that Mark did a little fixing on his own-it’s a bit better!

Scorpians:

For some reason we have had a rise in the number of scorpians in our house. Ray had an incident the other night (at 10:30 at night!) where a scopian fell out of one of our air conditioning units when he turned it on. He and the scorpian had a battle, but Ray won! As his note below states, “Please don’t freak out, this scorpian is DEAD!” Two nights before this I woke up in the middle of the night with something crawling on my arm. I grabbed it and threw it onto the floor and got stung in the process. I assumed that it must be a scorpian and had Mark search until he found it. I was correct and Mark was able to kill it. It was a larger scorpian-probably about 2 1/2 inches, so the sting did not hurt more than a bee sting would. We have been told that the smaller scorpians have a much more potent sting. Needless to say, it was not easy to go back to sleep!

Other interesting notes:

John introduced us to the “rainbow tree”-properly called the Rainbow Eucalypus. You can see how it gets its name! https://news.co.cr/rainbow-eucalyptus-one-of-costa-ricas-hidden-gems/30260/

We have been keeping up with the weather in Wisconsin and cannot believe the difference between our current location and home. Note the temperature comparisons from last week-more than 100 degrees apart!