Day 6-7: La Fortuna, Arenal Volcano

After 5 days on the Caribbean, we were making our way to La Fortuna, a small town known for the Arenal Volcano. The volcano was dormant until 1968 when it erupted. It continued to erupt until 2010. It's still active, but not erupting. You can see the smoke rise out of the top. The 5 hour drive wasn't bad. We stopped at a fruit stand and got 4 mangos and a bunch of bananas for $2! The fruit in Costa Rica is amazing. 

Quinta Benavides, our next AirBnB, was a little outside of La Fortuna downtown. It was down a dirt road and not surrounded by many houses. It reminded us of a house in the middle of a farm! We had a perfect view of Arenal Volcano in the backyard by the pool.

After we unpacked, we went to downtown La Fortuna to walk around and get groceries at Pali. In the park, in the middle of town, we were able to get an almost perfect shot of Arenal Volcano without any clouds in the way. 

We needed to do laundry and were excited that Quinta Benavides had a washer and dryer. We had to text the host and asked how to use the "semi-automatic" washing machine because it was filled with water manually and had 2 separate washing barrels. One for washing and one for spinning?? We were thankful we packed lightly, so there wasn't much to wash!

The next day we woke up to heavy rains and complete cloud coverage. You couldn't see the volcano at all! We had planned to go to Arenal Volcano National Park to go hiking to get views of the volcano. Many people spend days here and never get a clear view of the volcano. After much debate and a good breakfast, we decided to go for it! 

Since we only did carry-ons, we couldn't bring mosquito spray, so we had bought mosquito wipes. After wiping down, we began our hike through the rainforest that didn't get destroyed by the lava flow. Then we hiked through rocks formed by the lava to a set of stairs that led us to the viewing platform of the Arenal Volcano. The Kings were lucky and got a perfect view of the volcano without any cloud coverage!!

On our descent back down, we took a different path called "Senderos de Ceibo" which would lead to gigantic 400 year old tree. Theresa was excited to learn it was a Kapok Tree because she read a book by the same name to her kids at school every year when they learn about ecosystems.

After the hike, we stopped to eat pizza at Pizza Mediterranea for a late lunch. We ordered a caprese pizza and a seafood pizza. The seafood pizza had shrimp and octupus cut up in the cheese as well as a whole small crab and two mussel shells on top like pepperoni! For dessert we ordered a pizza with nutella and strawberries.

We ended our evening enjoying the sunset while swimming.