By Taylor
In the early morning, thunder and lightening were at my window, and the waves sounded like a hurricane when they reached the shore. There was a sound like an alarm that kept saying “red, red, red.” I learned later that it was a frog. It had laid a ton of eggs in the swimming pool. Ugh!
We had a really nice breakfast, then my sister and I took our boogie boards into the pool. We stayed there for an hour playing, but then we had to drain out the pool, and we found tadpoles! Then we got ready to go to the town and the beach. There were a few river crossings. When we were driving along, we saw monkeys right beside the road. They were white faced capuchins.
Then we drove to the beach. At first I was scared of the waves. Then Dude (my grandfather) helped me learn that the roller waves are not so bad and you can just glide over the top. The water was so warm it wasn’t relaxing. It was as warm as a tub after it has been sitting for 10 minutes. The bottom was sandy and comfortable. The top of the water was the blue you see as a crayon in a coloring set.
We went to town and got some groceries, then we drove home. I saw a squirrel monkey on the side of the road. We have now seen all four types of monkeys in Costa Rica.
When we got home, we had a delicious lunch and a siesta. Then we went down to the beach to help release some green sea turtles. First we went into a cool little shelter that had netting all around it. There was sand inside with turtle eggs buried inside. Our guide came to a particular spot and started digging the sand up. He found two baby sea turtles and a lot of unhatched eggs. Then we went outside to a particular spot and we separated the loose shells from the untracked eggs. We counted both, I don’t know why. Then we had to crack open the uncracked eggs. My sister didn’t like this process. A lot of the eggs were just yoke. But three of them were going to hatch. One was in stage one, one was in stage three, and one was in stage four. Stages are how much growth the turtle had inside the egg.
Then we went back and dug up another nest. This time there were no baby turtles, only cracked eggs and whole eggs. We went to the same spot, and separated the cracked eggs and the uncracked eggs. There were three uncracked eggs. Two were as small as pills. And one only had a turtle at stage five inside. We counted them all again.
We took the baby turtles and each person got to put one out and watch it race to the surf. They were so cute. Then Parker was playing in a wave, and boom, she went under. She was OK, but pretty sandy. We washed off in the oasis on the beach and headed home. My parents decided to stop and watch the sunset.
Finally we went up, and when we got to the top, Parker and I were out of breath and wanted water. We asked Grace for some water, and she gave it to us. We had a delicious dinner, and fell asleep.