February 5, 2025
Last look back to Costa Rica, and forward to Spain
The whole story of our trip just ended to Costa Rica was carried in a blog we called (of course) Grampies Go To Costa Rica. We did that on blogspot.com, because we did not bring along our bikes. But I must say, blogspot was an incredible bug. It was always getting in my way, with the wrong text size, or photo size, or by playing silly buggers about captions, or unilaterally disappearing photos or putting them in the wrong place. I think Jeff Arnim, who created Cycleblaze (the site you are reading right now) arrived at a genius compromise between simplicity and having needed features. Writing here, I feel complete freedom to express myself and illustrate the story, without the software impeding me or trying overly to help me.
Since we always view ourselves as cycle tourists, rather than as any other sort of tourists, or even as birders, we still think that our experience in Costa Rica is relevant as some part of a cycle touring blog. So go look at the full Blogspot thing. And just for fun, on this page we are dropping in some of our favourite bird photos - they many of the same ones we chose for the Blogspot. Most cycle tourers put in an occasional bird photo. It's part of the whole package, which will normally include photos of food, buildings, churches, landscapes, art, and literally anything else an observant person will see when travelling in the world. Normally we will put in lots of all of that, but we are having a bit of a bird fad right now. We are actually planning to continue that, as we have scoped out some great sounding bird sites in Spain. Two are within 100 easy biking kms of Sevilla, one is on Mallorca, and then there is the Ebro Delta, etc. So watch out, there will be more birds (and cathedrals, and food, and landscapes, + +!) to come. But for now, how about these birds!
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2 weeks ago
These 25 species are among the amazing 134 new to us, that we got photos of in the 13 days. Great as that is in our terms, it compares weakly to the 258 species spotted by the people in our group. Then again "spotted" is one thing, but we have our own photo for each species claimed!
For birding, we felt Costa Rica was a definite success, and we are saving up to go back, though as we say without bikes. And now we are turning our sights ("viewfinder", actually) to mainly Spain - where we can cycle from one great birding spot to another, and continue to build our Life List.
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2 weeks ago
Thank you for allowing us to fly into your avian paradise :)
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