(I love the Valley Market in Eden, but whenever I go to Ogden I try to stop at a "real" grocery store for things I can't find at the Market).
While I was standing in the checkout line, I remembered I had forgotten to get glue. I instructed Price that when the people in front of us had finished putting their groceries on the belt he should put down one of those separator bars and start unloading our cart. When I returned, he had unloaded everything and the checker was just about finished. So I swiped my ATM card, payed for the items, and we put the bagged groceries in our cart and headed to the car where we unloaded them and drove home.
When we got home we carried the bags into the kitchen and I noticed there was a bag of items that weren't mine. Then another bag, another, and yet another. Somehow I ended up with not only my groceries, but someone else's groceries as well. Of course I felt terrible that I had acquired someone's food until I looked at my receipt and saw that I had payed for all these unwanted items:
3 cans chicken broth
2 cans evaporated milk
chicken bouillon cubes
strawberry jello
2 packages cream cheese (cheap brand)
2 packages margarine
bag of lettuce
asparagus
6 bananas (I had already bought three)
2 packages cubed beef steak (no idea how to cook that)
box of strawberries
some yummy bread
2 loaves of sliced wheat bread
When I asked Price how this could possibly have happened, of course, he had no idea. And on the receipt these items and my food were all mixed in. It wasn't like these were all the first items and mine were the last. How Price managed this I do not know. But I will be more careful next time I ask him to unload the cart.
s unprepared for how easy it would be to see birds and then identify them. Jenna had gotten me a laminated sheet of Costa Rican Birds and Animals before the trip and my hope of seeing such varieties and colors ran high. Jenna agreed that a trip to Cabela's was in order and we got a nice pair of 8 X 42 binoculars (Cabela's Brand, rubber coated). After our first night spent in San Jose, we drove through the mountains on the way to the coast and stopped at a hotel with a short cloud fores
t hike. We were totally inside a cloud. We saw some hummingbirds and then a Cherrie's Tanager. 
At the end of the walk, I saw something hopping around through the tree roots. It was a huge bird, like a pheasant. Long black-and-white-striped tail feathers. Copper-colored body. I showed Jenna as it hopped through the trunks and roots. I commented that it looked more like a squirrel than a bird. It was a Squirrel Cuckoo. Looks like a squirrel, huh. Anyway, then we drove off to the coast, but I was officially hooked for the remainder of the trip.
d for a while, taking turns with the sets of binoculars. Here is a close up of one.
he next day and I saw the first of many Great Kiskadees, Baltimore Orioles, Great-tailed Grackles and Clay-colored Robins. And, of course, dozens of Black-Headed Turkey Vultures.
On the beach I saw two large Brown Boobies (birds), 4 soaring Magnificent Frigatebirds, bunches of Brown 
Pelicans diving for fish and two Osprey. 
tiful black crests on their foreheads. (I would still shoot them and count them on my 12 and 20 Club tally - they are pests. One even was stealing packets of mustard and butter from tables in a restaurant and was very artful at carving through the foil top to extract the butter.)
We went off to the dry forests to do some canopy zip lines on Saturday afternoon, and on the way I saw what I thought were some parrots, but the bus was too bumpy to confirm. I had already seen pairs of parrots flying, but hadn't seen any resting. I did see a Green Kingfisher at a
rests along the coasts are so dry that the leaves all drop. Great for sighting birds. I saw yellow-throated Euphonias, seven orange-fronted parakeets, a big gr
ay and rose colored tree pigeon, called the Ruddy Pigeon, and then I came over a rise into a little greener area, with some grasses. I saw eight or nine of the strange
st birds I have ever seen. Their eyes were so big it was almost creepy. Their backs were greenish-blue-black in that translucent mix that shimmers a bit 
and they had these huge eyes and they had little white corners on their tails. Then one turned around, and they were bright yellow breasted with striped white and black tails. Beautiful. Violaceous Trogons. I just turned off the car and watched from twenty feet away. They slowly worked their way over the next rise. As I watched and listened in the humid Easter afternoon, I heard a big howl and I saw a Howler Monkey eating some kind of tree fruit on the other side of the road from the birds. After a bit, I drove another 50 feet and sat waiting to see if the Trogons would come back. I saw some movement on a huge trunk and saw and watched a Lineated Woodpecker for about
twenty minutes. On the way back I saw a troupe of about ten Howler Monkeys and then a group of maybe twenty fighting and chirping parakeets. An amazing two-and-a-half hours.
And on our way back to San Jose, we saw what we thought were three Three-toed Sloths hanging from some tree branches. A great trip. For the little time I spent looking for birds, I saw 37 different species.
