Not much sleep last night - for no good reason

We got up several times between 3am and 5am, going outside to check the volcano.  At around 3, there were still clouds around the top, but the rest of the sky was totally clear.  We figured maybe the clouds would clear off completely from the top a little later.  Around 4am or so, the summit was visible, but since the volcano is in a quiet mode right now, there was nothing happening except for the smoke coming out.  Well, at least I FINALLY got to see the volcano at night, even though nothing was happening.  Usually the volcano is totally covered up.  Guillermo HAS seen the red lava flowing down before and he said that it is really impressive!

After getting up in the morning and after having breakfast in our hotel, we just hung around in our room for a while, catching up on internet stuff and Facebook and this blog.  When that was all done, we packed up the car and decided to drive around Lake Arenal since that's a road we had never taken before.  It was a VERY nice drive.  We crossed the dam at Lake Arenal and took these pictures.

That's Monteverde across the lake, a place we've been to several times.  And it was near Monteverde over there across the lake where we stood and watched as Arenal sent booms of smoke out of the crater back in 1995.

From this dam, the road then was a very winding road through tropical rainforest and eventually out into open land.  There were so many interesting looking places that it would have been nice to stop and check them out, but if we had stopped at each one, we'd have never gotten anywhere.  We did stop to pick up a snack at a German bakery in Nuevo Arenal, but it was the biggest disappointment!

Here's how the lake looked when we got to the other side of it:

You can't see it in this picture, but Arenal volcano is further to the right.

Once the road started heading away from the lake, the scenery got a lot drier.  We stopped at a restaurant by a river to have lunch and there were lots of people playing in the water today.  It was fun watching them while we ate.  It doesn't look dry here, but that's because it's along a river.

From there, we drove to our hotel, which is just outside the town of Bijagua.  We were a little disappointed that the hotel wasn't further up the mountain, but we find we are liking this place just fine.  The bedroom is fantastic, don't you think?

We sat in those two chairs and saw LOTS of birds  fly into the trees outside these huge windows.  

We also hiked on some trails that the hotel property has and we enjoyed those trails very much.  We weren't planning on being gone long, so we didn't take our cameras.  We sure should have.  As we were about to leave one of the trails, we heard some rustling in the leaves.  When we looked closer we saw two little armadillos!!  So cute they were.  We stood there for the longest time watching them.  They were rooting around all over the place and eventually one of them came out onto the trail and ended up at one of Guillermo's shoes!  The little armadillo started rooting around underneath his shoe!  You talk about a PERFECT photo opportunity!!  Eventually the armadillo just walked back into the brush and the two of them continued on their way.  It was so cute!