early returns

After a pair of flights that left at an unconscionable hour, we returned from Colombia early enough this morning to go out for Sunday brunch at our favorite local restaurant in San Jose — the final act of a two-week escape from both kids and adult responsibilities. Already, chores and looming work tasks are beginning to erode the reservoir of rest we have built up. We’ll get a few more days of relative peace and respite before the kids return to Costa Rica midweek. 

We’ll need those days too! We vacation hard — especially when children are not in the picture. We covered a lot of ground during our two weeks in Colombia — a lot of it stressfully uneven ground, as many of the mountain roads we traversed left quite a lot to be desired. Ordinarily, we try to stretch our vacations to the max, at times returning late in the evening on a Sunday only to head into the office early the following morning. This time, we’re actually glad that flight patterns forced us to return a bit early, thankful for the opportunity to have a low-key Sunday at home and decompress from our travels before returning to work tomorrow.

Though we did not unplug completely during this trip, several of the places we stayed had dubious internet connectivity, providing a welcome (if not total) respite from the typical onslaught of social media and awful news. We lost ourselves in good books for what seems like the first time in forever instead of mindlessly scrolling on our devices as we’re won’t to do at times at home. S did endeavor to find WiFi hotspots to at least check in on the kids on something close to a daily basis. While Munchkin exhibited little desire to videochat with us during his summer in the States, Junebug craved this connection, exhorting S to read her bedtime stories over WhatsApp whenever S called. 

Limiting our screen time during the last two weeks also means that we’re way behind on writing about our adventures and sharing photos. There are about 5,000 of the latter that we will endeavor to sort over the coming weeks. At least 90 percent of these are of birds. Though birding was not the sole aim of our vacation, we did spend a lot of time walking through pristine forests in search of some of Colombia’s nearly 2,000 recorded species. It will take D some time to go through them all, especially since an inordinately high percentage of these photos are frame-by-frame shots of hummingbirds.

In the meantime, here are a few early pictures of some of our favorite new finds, their names nearly as colorful as the birds themselves. From top to bottom: blue-winged mountain tanager; ornate flycatcher; crimson-mantled woodpecker; rufous-crowned tody-flycatcher; orange-bellied euphonia.