Yep…that’s the way the Disney tune goes and it’s clearly true…as evidenced by a happening last Saturday night.

Throughout their time together…Connie and Neil have experienced a smattering of serendipitous events that individually pretty much defy whatever odds you might think…presented here in no particular order.

• When we lived in the RV…we were up in Minnesota and went to the commissary (grocery store) on an Air Force Base there to pick up some groceries. Neil as he was want to do had an Alabama baseball cap on and this African American fellow about his age came up and said “Roll Tide”…and they got to talking about where they were from. Neil said Alabama and the guy said “where from?”…and after a series of increasingly more specific answers to that question it turned out that he lived in what used to be called the colored neighborhood that essentially came up to the back of the yard where Neil grew up…and he lived 3 doors down that street. They went to different schools so never met and just happened to run into each other 40ish years later in Minnesota.
• When the human kid Bryan was just a little tyke in grammar school…Connie went on a field trip for his class someplace as one of the chaperones. There was another parent there and he introduced himself as something or other Memoli as his last name. Now that’s a pretty obscure last name of course and Connie had been telling Neil for years about this girl in her class named Emilie Memoli and wondered how the parents could possibly have named her that. So she asked the guy if he had a sister named Emilie and he reported he did. He was her older brother and was a year ahead of her at her high school.
• When he was in Nuclear Power School in Orlando back in 1977…there was a meet and greet for the wives that she attended. She saw this woman there with New Jersey plates on her car so they got to talking about where in NJ they were from. The woman (Pat) told her she was from nearby where Connie grew up and after a series of “where froms” similar to Neil above they both went to Immaculata High School and the woman was a year ahead of her in school. They exchanged original names and this woman stood in front of her in gym class.
• When they were in the RV life…they made a lot of friends that towed the same New Horizons 5th wheel that we had. Mostly we saw those folks every 18 months or so at the New Horizons Owners Group (NHOG) rally and occasionally had some email chats. At the time there were less than 1,000 New Horizons ever made and only 30 or so at each rally so it was strange to even see one in a campground at all or driving down the road. Nonetheless…at least half a dozen times through the 8 years we did that we would see one going the other way on the highway and recognize the truck and wave at each other via email and about as many times we pulled into a campground and found not only another New Horizons but one owned by people we had met at multiple rallies.
• And that leads up to last Saturday night. One of the long time members at our Elks Lodge was having a 70something birthday so there was BBQ and cake in her owner. We attended (well, the humans did since the lodge isn’t zoned for bears) and they started at their usual seats at the bar. As I might have mentioned before…in the going on 48 years of marriage they’ve probably eaten 95% of their eating out meals at the bar for a simple reason…you meet a much better class of bum that was as Neil so elegantly puts it (and he’s only pissed off 1 person sitting at the bar in all the decades he’s been saying that). Eating dinner at the bar is hard since there’s a raised lip on the front and no good place to put your plate…so when friends Joe and Suzanne came in they headed over and sat with and another couple from a different lodge who also knows Diane. They were chatting with Joe and Suzanne about the serendipity of small world meetings and then Connie got to talking to the other woman (Jeanne) about what they did and they were swapping tales and showing off I phone pictures. Connie mentioned that she had been in London last summer singing with the choral group and Jeanne said she was there too. Connie pulled out her photo of John Rutter to show Jeanne and said “Hey, that’s you in the background”…and airdropped her the shot. Another serendipitous moment to be sure.

Otherwise…things around are still pretty much copacetic…it’s Florida in the summer so it’s hot and humid. We’ve been having rain…a lot…more than most summers past but hopefully in another month or so it will start cooling down. We’ve got a couple short trips planned for the fall to a Ladies of Elks thing and then a couple of Saint Sáens Organ Symphony concerts…we’ll piggy back those with a visit to the human kids and out to Arizona for some sightseeing and photography.

And I see that NASA has finally made up their mind how to get the stranded astronauts back from the ISS instead of putting them on the fundamentally broke Boeing capsule…they’re gonna hang around up there until February and the next crew rotation headed up in late September will only have 2 crew instead of the normal 4. Butch and Suni will become the replacement crew members for expedition whatever it is and do ISS things until February. The SpaceX capsule will carry up some spacesuits for them to wear during reentry as the Boeing suits aren’t compatible with the SpaceX capsule…you woulda figured that NASA woulda been smart enough to require that the suits be cross compatible. The only drawback to this recovery plan is there’s currently no parking space available at the ISS for a US craft. There are 2 docking ports, one taken up by the current crew’s ride home and the other by the broke Boeing capsule. The latter will have to be reprogrammed with autonomous software to get home. Again…the thing has already launched twice and docked/undocked/returned twice with that software but the geniuses at Boeing and NASA removed the autonomous software from it before sending it up with people. You woulda thought they were smart enough to leave that capability installed…but the cynic in me says that Boeing knew there were issues with the thing and deliberately removed it to try and ensure that in the event of an issue it would come home with people rather than the embarrassment of being ditched…but nah…that wouldn’t happen would it?

Ok…enough of that so let’s get into Costa Rica Day 6…although it is going to be a 3 post day for the blog as he processed a metric buttload of images for me to post…it was one of the two largest number of images taken that day with over 4,700 on the card by the time he got back to the resort.

So…monkeys. You’ll see some monkeys on this and the next 2 posts but it occurred to me that I haven’t really talked much about the various species available in the country so let me digress a bit and do that.

There are a total of 4 species discussed here in size order…and they’re all sub classified as New World Monkeys by the biologists.

• Howler monkeys…or more properly Mantled Howler as there are multiple species of howlers. They’re the largest at about 15 pounds and 30ish inches long plus the tail. The name comes from their extremely loud calls. All brown…they eat almost exclusively leaves so spend a lot of time napping to digest their nutrient poor food very similar to what a koala does. They spend almost no time on the ground.
• Next largest are the Spider Monkeys or more properly Geoffroy’s Spider due to multiple species. They have prehensile tails and essentially long fingered hands on all 4 limbs Dark brown with a tan chest and a black face with white around the eyes very similar in appearance to a raccoon. 
• Capuchin or more properly White Faced Capuchin again due to multiple species. This is the most common species and got its name based on appearance. Dark brown mostly but with tan chest, head and shoulders and they were said to resemble the hooded cowl worn by Capuchin monks from the Middle Ages.
• Finally…the Central American Squirrel Monkey…it is the rarest species in the country and has a very small range much smaller than the other 4 which are found through the country. Squirrel monkeys are found only in the lowland forests on the Pacific side of the country. Usually no more than a couple of pounds…they’ve been used as pets for a long time and are the typical species that used to be owned by organ grinders at carnivals and such.

So…day 6 the photographers headed off to the far southeast tip of the Osa Peninsula…it was about a 2.5 hour drive without stopping and naturally they stopped…frequently…so it turned out to be a really long day. I’ll let you know in the shots when they actually got to the Bosque del CaBo lodge that was the destination for the day and I gotta tell you plush doesn’t really do the place justice. The average price per night was up in the $700 a night minimum range and although that does include food but not booze it’s still pretty expensive and there weren’t all that many rooms in the place. And it was the day that Connie went out fishing so there’s some shots of that included as well.

Amazonian Black Throated Trogon (although I have to tell you black throated wouldn’t have been the name I came up with)

Fishing trip shots as Connie and her captain left port.

Plain Brown Woodcreeper

Common Poo-too or Stickbird as the locals named it. It perches on the end of a branch and angles itself so that it looks like an extension of the branch or trunk…very similar to what the Australian Tawny Frogmouth does. There was a very narrow window to see this one so the shooters had to take turns…there’s about 20 minutes between the first and second image and the little sucker never moved. This bird was sitting about 5 yards off of the road and about 10-15 yards up in the tree and our intrepid driver Eduardo spotted it looking pretty much straight up. Even after they stopped it still took the rest of the shooters 5 minutes to find it in the foliage as it is the same color and texture as the tree it’s sitting on…and even after finding it it took Eduardo and Dennis a few minutes to find a window where one could actually get a shot, and while this is still a fairly obstructed shot it is the best they could do.

And since we talked about monkeys…here’s a Capuchin, you can see the cowl like appearance that influenced the name selection.

Interesting things found on the net.

Fun fact…the northernmost point of Brazil is closer to every other country in North, Central, and South America than it is to the southernmost point of Brazil.

And finally…remember this critter from the Serengeti? It’s a Caracal which is a 16-20 inch high cat to the shoulder and weighs 15-40 pounds.

Notice those extremely large ears and if I recall correctly I talked before about how the ears move to help it locate and isolate prey including birds which it snatches out of the air. Well…turns out that there are 20something muscles that allow it to do so and Neil happened across this video showing the ears moving. Sorry…it’s from the application formerly known as Twitter. Yeah…we don’t think much of it after it basically turned into a dumpster fire under it’s new owner…but hey, it is what it is..It wouldn’t be ethical to repost the video so you’ll have to go look at it there but it’s free to go see.

Cyas.