Arenal Volcano & La Fortuna

This last weekend we visited the town of La Fortuna and stayed in the Los Lagos Resort and Spa at the base of Arenal Volcano. The resort has absolutely HUGE, the hotel rooms were sort of little bungalow type things and they were spread out in separate buildings all throughout the jungle. They had a free shuttle service so whenever we wanted to go anywhere (the pool or front desk) we could just ride that instead of having to walk super far. The hotel was situated literally on the bottom of the Volcano and we had a perfect view of it right from our front balcony (check my facebook pictures). We also got to visit a beautiful waterfall where we could walk to the bottom and swim, you could even see people ziplining over the waterfall, is was so awesome. For the majority of the weekend we just hung out at the resort, went swimming in the pools (all of which were natural fresh water from the mountain, no chlorine or anything) and they also had hot pools which were from natural hotsprings, they were so warm it was almost like a hottub. Both days we went into the town of La Fortuna to eat lunch, it was a cute little tourist town that had amazing views of volcano right behind a beautiful church (check my pics). It was full of little souvenior shops and excursion companies, the area is known for its white river rafting, ziplining, and other fun stuff to do in the jungle. We became friends with one of the shuttle bus drivers named Dennis and he even played the guitar and serenading us with a Spanish song one night in the hotel. Besides these things, the weekend was really fun, a few of us went into town both nights to check out the nightlife but it was a pretty small town with not much going on, besides a really cool discoteca we found on Saturday night. However the highlight of the trip was Friday when a few of us brought home a cute little dog trixie ahahahhaah. Costa Rica is notorious for having stray/homeless dogs everywhere, and I MEAN EVERYWHERE, it breaks my heart every single day having to see a bunch of starving scraggaly looking dogs running around. So Friday night without really thinking things through, we saw a cute hungry little dog running downtown and thought it would be a good idea to bring him back to the resort with us (dont ask me why we actually did it). The taxi driver nor Dennis had a problem with it and we managed to get her back to our room and feed her some platainos (similar to potato chips, fried vegetable banana thing that's really popular here). Not everyone liked the dog as much as we did, so long story short we were forced to put trixie back outside and let her find somehwhere comfy to sleep for the night. Trixie ended up staying on the resort and all weekend we saw her running around getting pet my random people and she looked like she was having a blast, until saturday evening when we saw one of the security guards shoo her off of the property, it was all really sad and we hope that trixie found her way back to town and some where to sleep. At least for one night she got some attention, food, water, and some air conditioning! LOL that was our adventure for the weekend, tomorrow we're headed to Monteverde Cloud Forest and I'm spending the weekend ziplining and horseback riding in the tropical rainforest, super excited! I'll update when i return, Ciao!