Joey home from Costa Rica

As lovely as that last photo posting was, I just had to add a couple of Joey's travel photos from Costa Rica. He has hundreds of photos, but I've selected just a few to share on our family blog.

Because I am partial to the beauty of the flowers of South America, I guess most of what I have selected will reflect that bias. When Ed and I hiked through the jungle and rain forests of Peru, there were the most amazing orchids just growing along these remote trails. It was awesome. When I get to that part of my photo albums, I'll scan in a couple of those photos just for fun.



Joey's trip was action filled. They hiked to the north central part of the country, visiting waterfalls, volcanoes and the most verdant mountain areas of the country. Looks like Costa Rica is south of Nicaragua, and north of Panama. Somehow I thought it was actually in the continent of South America, but Costa Rica is in the middle part below Mexico.

Ed's Birthday Celebration December 1984

Here we are at Thomasina's annual gathering to celebrate Ed's Birthday! I love this photo, it is a good photo of everyone involved.

From looking back at my photo album, we had lots and lots of terrific gatherings at and with Thomasina. Not just Ed, me and the (our) kids, but all of us. It is a such a great pleasure for me to look at these photos, it would be a shame not to enjoy them again! I'm thankful the old albums finally fell apart and made it necessary for me to actually touch and remove all these thousands of photos. I'm having fun rebuilding the original albums, weeding out a few (very few) photos, scanning some and building new online albums. I think I've reached the end of the old falling apart albums. They had adhesive pages that were very hard on the photos. I've been as careful as possible, but some photos were lost to the glue. I've bought nearly a dozen new albums at Target with acid free pages and no glue against the photos, but some damage has been done, of course. I've decided "NO" to matching albums, instead choosing to make each album unique. I'm basically trying to keep chronological order for the physical albums, but in the online I'm doing by topics. The beauty of my Adobe Photoshop is tagging and sorting is easy.
I've purchased a back up hard drive that is external and I'm doing some photo storing online at sites such as Flickr, photobucket, snapfish, picasa and some others. I would place them all in one online site, but if that site goes bankrupt, then I would lose too much. Another advantage of various sites, is that each site offers unique toys I can implement with my photos. Its just plain fun.

From time to time, these gatherings involved all the various aunts and uncles of Ed, including Sara, Tony, Freda, and of course, Aunt Rosie. Thomasina really knew how to put out a spread we all enjoyed. She didn't worry about having a relatively small space to party in, she had a packed house for sure!

The Pirate of Costa Rica

Joey made it to Costa Rica!! Yay!!

After seeing this photo, Ed asks: Was it a rough flight?

No, but it was a rough walk through a beautiful gardeny jungle! You
should be proud of my driving in Costa Rica abilities. Skinny and
windy potholed roads all the way here! And insane drivers!!

So far I've had a pot of coffee this am. Today doing horseback riding
around volcano Arenal and zip lines through jungle, then hiking to swim
in a waterfall. :)

You guys would like it here.

A note from Joey's Mom - I think he looks like he can take care of himself there. Might scare away the muggers! I wish I were there!

New River Gorge Bridge 1974