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We both lost most of our jetlags after a day of doing nothing but relaxing, followed by a long night sleep with over 10 hours of net-sleeping time! 😉
Well, time for some action now; our rental car just arrived at the hotel, a white Toyota RAV4 4WD (white is the new black 😉 ), an upgrade from the Suzuki Grand Vitara 4WD that we booked, so from today we’ll be cruising along the bumpy roads through the inlands of Costa Rica, yippee!
First stop; La Fortuna, known for its hot springs and the proximity of the Arenal volcano, one of the ten most active volcanos in the world! We’ll be staying at the Arenal Observatory Lodge, apparently the best place to see the volcano’s activity, *if* it’s not covered in the clouds that is!
Well, I hope that Fortuna, the goddess of fortune is with us and both make the clouds disappear and protect us from getting lava-burned! 😉

Hehe, I slept like a baby after the relative long journey to Costa Rica yesterday, in total 23h from leaving Robbert’s casa until arriving in the Vista del Valle hotel!
Waking up the first morning is an exceptionally nice experience; you have no idea what the environment looks like as we arrived in total darkness…well, it is FANTASTIC!! (see below)
There is a splendid view over the valley (Vista del Valle! 😉 ), extremely green vegetation, lots of colorful birds, eagles and butterflies; a great scenery to celebrate our 20 years Anniversary (today!) again, after the Ode to Love festivities last month…cheers!! 😉

So, with one day delay we made it on board the flight West, yayyy!! First stop: Houston…’Houston, we have a problem’? Nah, I don’t think so, not this time! 😉

From there we’ll have a direct flight to San Jose, where the weather has cleared up and risk of new mudslides is low, luckily!! This Houston-San Jose will again be a flight ‘on standby’ so we keep our fingers crossed!

Anyway, vacation has really started now, yeah!!

Uhh, who would think that Panama is such a popular destination; KLM has a daily flight and even then the flight was *crowded*…a bit too crowded as we unfortunately didn’t make it on the flight…:( 🙁 the most crazy thing was that the purser didn’t *want* to give out any of the extra crew seats!! OK, it *is* his call, but common…so much for being nice to your colleagues, eh? A$$h0le! 🙁

We’ve checked alternative options and wow, the flexibility is huge! I never realized that you can reach San Jose from Amsterdam via Houston, Dallas, Newark, Atlanta, Madrid, Panama, Mexico AND Frankfurt. Most of those flights have already left by now, so we’re heading back ‘home’ (casa Robbert that is), DAMN!

Oh well, better luck tomorrow, we’re gonna try via Houston @ 10:40h ITM (=In The Morning), enough seats available according to the system!

Vacation time has finally arrived! We’ll be heading West to enjoy three relaxing weeks in Costa Rica, yayyy!!
Instead of flying Oslo-Newark-San Jose as we planned initially, we did a last-minute-change-of-plans and will fly Oslo-Amsterdam-Panama-San Jose. This because we are flying with standby tickets and the Newark-San Jose flight was already full, no need to loose valuable Costa Rica sun-hours in Newark, eh? 😉
Flexibility and price are the benefits of flying with standby tickets, being unsure if you will actually make it on-board is the downside…
Well, at least the first part was successful; we just arrived in Amsterdam (and were even given seats with extra leg-room, a good start! 😉 ). The next flight is tomorrow morning @ 11am, Amsterdam-Panama, wish us luck to make it on that flight!!

Remember, remember the Fifth of November,
The Gunpowder, Treason and Plot,
I know of no reason
Why Gunpowder, Treason
Should ever be forgot.

This rhyme is commonly known from Guy Fawkes Night, he intended to blow up the House of Lords in London during the State Opening of Parliament on 5 November 1605. You might know the theme from the movie V for Vendetta. In England the 5th of November is still commemorated each year with fireworks and bonfires. A nice tradition, as everybody loves fire, eh? 😉

Check out the below compilation of ‘Funny Talking Animals’ from the BBC Show “Walk on the Wild Side“, it is *hilarious*, ROTFLMAO!!

There are totally 21 clips in this BBC One ‘Walk on the Wild Side’ YouTube playlist, allow yourself to have a laugh and watch ‘m all! 😉

Something similar was done in a show called ‘Animal Crackers‘ by dutch comedian André van Duin back in the late 80’s. I think that each episode was just 5 minutes, but people stayed home to watch it!

The season to enjoy summer sunsets (and a related header graphic) is long gone and with winter on its way I chose a new header graphic for the blog.

It’s a nice autumn composition, eh? 😉

The renters of our house in NL moved out last weekend, so I could take care of housing stuff to prepare it for selling. Most of the practicalities have been done now, the house agent has everything to start the process, so I hope it will be officially put up ‘For Sale’ in the next coming days!! (hehe, just before vacation, nice timing…)

It’s quite exciting and special; even though I officially left NL already three years ago, the house is my last ‘formal’ thing that connects me to NL (besides friends and family of course!). Hehe, I’m becoming more and more a viking instead of cheesehead! (don’t worry, I will keep my NL passport, after all; it ain’t much if it ain’t dutch!! 😉 )

So, if you know anyone who could be interested in buying a VERY nice house in Wateringen, NL…let me know!! 😉

Adam Curry is ‘reinventing the art of radio’ with his Daily Source Code and No Agenda podcasts (the latter one is especially interesting since he and John C. Dvorak are living of of user donations/sponsorships).

Unlike No Agenda which is solely talk-‘radio’ (with some jingles here and there 😉 ), music has always played a big role in the the Daily Source Code, just think back about the good old days of Jan Polet’s HitTest, drum cadences and brilliant mash-ups.

Lately Adam is exploring new ways of listener interaction by using a shared Dropbox (if you ‘still’ haven’t heard of Dropbox, go and sign up, it’s awesome!). The DSC & Dropbox concept means that you put the music you would like to be played on the Daily Source Code in a folder in your Dropbox-account, you share that folder with Adam (name it appropriately <name> + <location>) and after he accepts the sharing invite, I guarantee you that you will experience a whole new way of your former favorite ‘radio request show’!

It is absolutely fantastic to listen to the DSC-livestream, or later-on to the downloaded podcast and hear ‘your’ song being played!! I have put 25 songs in a shared Dropbox and 6 of them have been played so far…ha, and if you’re lucky you even get a nice ‘thank you’ as happened to me in DSC-850!! It’s around 1h33m40s into the show, directly after Adam played my requested Queens of the Stone Age – Song for the Dead (so be warned for guitar riffs that make your ears bleed! 😉 )…I listened to that segment while I was driving back home last week…it gave me a BOOST of ENERGY, YAY! 😉