Hello!!! This is Random Paul, and I will be your host today or tonight or this morning or whenever you’re reading this post. Me, Tony, Will, and Abbie will all be cooperating to write the best and longest post on Boys Adventure Club, Teribithia: A Village in the Woods Part 4!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Ok, to start it off, we’ll have me telling you about… uh… I’m not sure actually. Let’s just start at the start and go from there. At the end of this post we will also have a surprise! (Note: More than one of us might comment in each other’s parts, so pay attention to the fonts.)
Or, of course, you could skip to a particular part!
- Click Here To Skip To Scuba Diving
- Click Here To Skip To Cubing
- Click Here To Skip To Teribithia Part 4
- Click Here To Skip To Teribithia Part 4 Video
- Click Here To Skip To Other Stuff
Ok, so if you didn’t know, this mastermind (blogging family meeting) was in Costa Rica, near a city called Liberia. We flew into the Liberian airport and from there we had a hired driver drive us to Playa del Coco, where our resort was.
The building was a 4-minute walk to the ocean. Usually, the resort would have been a hotel sort of thing, where different people who didn’t know each other would be in the same building but have different rooms, but we were such a big group we booked the whole building so we had free run of the place. I mean seriously, we could basically do anything within reason. It was pretty cool. The pool was big, with a waterfall going into it. At the top of the waterfall, the most totally perfectly heated hot tub. It was awesome! I’m going to say that a lot today.
Picture break!
View from the resort
Sunset at a different angle at only 5:15!
Weird blue birds that stole food if you left it alone for a second, bar in the background
Pool with waterfall and a sit in the pool kind of bar
View from hot tub at the top of the waterfall
View from one side of the pool
Second-floor view over the pool
Another random view
Another side of the pool into the meal and bar area. Oops, there’s my mom!
Sweet tree at the beach
Picture of the dock at the beach
We have more pictures of different parts of the trip but those will come later.
Now, here’s Tony with our adventures going…
I’ll take it from here, Paul.
Scuba Diving!
One of the super awesome things we did in Terabithia, Costa Rica was scuba diving. On the first day of scuba, a taxi picked us up from the resort and brought us to the local dive shop to get our diving equipment. This part was kind of boring but whatever.
So after all that boring stuff, we all (instructors included) went back to the resort and started training. The first thing we learned was how to inspect and put together our equipment. So after all that, we had to swim 13 lengths back and forth across the pool. The even harder part was treading water. Unfortunately, the pool was only like 3 feet deep, and we weren’t allowed to touch the bottom with our feet.
Time to get into the exciting part! After all that we got into the fun stuff like breathing under water and doing drills like how to inflate and deflate our BCD’s (Buoyancy Control Device). The last thing we did was swim across the entire pool under water, which was pretty cool. It turns out that Scuba Diving also makes you really tired!
Before we continue scuba diving, I want to talk about this thing called SS Diving. Abbie’s brother Caden couldn’t do Scuba Diving because he wasn’t old enough (you have to be 10 or older. We think it should be 9 or older, but rules are rules) so, he experimented with bottles and breathing under water and came up with this thing that allows you to breathe the carbon dioxide you breathe out. At first, we thought he was crazy, but after trying it out we all wanted one.
Sorry, Tony, I have to interrupt to say, IT WAS AWESOME!
I definitely agree with you on that, Paul!
Now, time to get into the really exciting part. The next day after lunch (I don’t remember what it was, but I’m sure it was good) we got another taxi that brought us to the dive shop again. After we got all our equipment, we went to this deeper pool (it was a hotel pool and the scuba shop was paying the hotel to use it). We got to do a lot of fun stuff like breathing without a mask, swimming without a mask, buoyancy control, and this one thing where you have to stay completely still under water. After the end of day 2, Will’s dad said he would give whoever got out of their wet suit first a chocolate bar, and Abbie won with Will a little behind. (Abbie ate that chocolate bar faster than I could say Exploding Kittens)
Another scuba related thing we did was skin diving at the beach. Skin diving is where you just have a mask and sometimes a snorkel or fins. We dove for shells, coral, and other stuff on the bottom. After we were done, we had a ton of shells.
This is a piece of coral I found.
The last day before we did ocean diving was by far the hardest. One thing that really stood out was where you have to swim like 25 feet under water while making an ahh-hh hh sound. In another drill, the instructor cut off our air so we could get a chance to be able to tell what out of air felt like. After all that we got to swim in the pool which I thought was really fun.
The next day was our first ocean (Fun fact: This was Paul’s first time being at the ocean. Crazy right?) dive. Once we woke up we had a big breakfast. At 10 o’clock we went to the scuba shop but instead of going to the pool we went to the beach where a boat picked us up and brought us to two diving boats. Then we went to a place around Tortuga island for the first dive. It was really cool, but not much to talk about.
We saw coral, scorpion fish, schools of fish (even schools of puffer fish!), eels, crazy sea urchins, and tons of other stuff! The only drill we did on the second dive was to fill our mask completely with water and empty it by blowing through our nose. One of the instructors tried to find us a shark, but unfortunately didn’t find one. When we surfaced Will almost got bit by an eel, but one of our instructors pulled him up just in time! After that dive, we were really really really tired (guess what we did after? You guessed it… cubing).
Another Diving thing we did was SS Skin Diving. We decided to go to the beach to try them out in the ocean. Unfortunately and very sadly they didn’t really work very well. We might try them again in Part 5.
The last diving related thing we did was of course ocean diving. Our third dive we did some drills and stuff, but nothing too interesting. On the fourth dive, half way down, something horrible happened… I had to go to the bathroom. So I frantically motioned to the instructor that I needed to go up. We ascended and I swam back to the boat with one of the instructors (Note: Any new divers out there, remember to go to the bathroom before your dive because if you don’t it’s not very comfortable).
After I went number #2 (Now Paul will tell you I took 10 minutes but I’m here to tell you the story the way it actually happened. And I think Paul just thinks it was that long because he had to keep treading water. He wasn’t too happy about that.), I swam back and we went down again.
He’s right. Tony didn’t take ten minutes. He took 20!!! And he’s also right that I didn’t like treading water, I mean, I can’t help it, the waves were huge! They were actually the biggest they had been in the entire trip to Costa Rica.
We saw this reef with scorpions fish, coral, fish, long fish, and even some eels. Again, we unfortunately didn’t find any sharks ( Most of you guys out there are probably thinking “you guys are crazy!” or “that’s so dangerous!” But in reality humans kill millions of sharks each year, when sharks only kill around 11 humans every year. And sharks are Awesome!!!!! Sad right?). After we surfaced, the boat picked us up and brought us to shore.
Don’t worry, we’ll get to the real Teribithia, but first, here is Abbie with our adventures mastering the art of…
Cubing!!!
If you don’t know what cubing is, let me explain. A Rubik’s Cube is a cube with 9 squares on each side and 6 sides. Each square has a color sticker on it, and each side matches with 9 stickers on it. The pieces move around and mix up the colors. The point of a Rubik’s Cube is to solve the cube so that the colors match. If you don’t understand, you can view this website. Or you could just search a picture or a Rubik’s Cube.
So at the beginning of the mastermind, Tony and Paul knew a how to solve a few Rubik’s Cubes. But Will and Caden and Me didn’t know any. So Paul and Tony had to teach us all the 2×2. At the last mastermind I learned the 2×2, but since I didn’t have one at home, I quickly forgot and the boys were annoyed that they had to teach it to me again. So after I learned the 2×2, they taught me the 3×3. Caden and Will still hadn’t learned it.
So Tony, Paul, and I kept practicing and soon got pretty fast. Our records were; Tony; 4.48 Seconds on the 2×2; Paul; 15.27 Seconds; And me; 25.23 seconds. Since Tony was best at that time, he sort of started doing tutoring lessons for us and we both improved our time by about 15 seconds.
And then Paul, amazing guy that he is, figured out the megaminx with out a video!!
We were all pretty impressed and Paul started teaching Tony, but since I was still learning the 3×3, I just watched and listened.
And then Me and Tony got the notion to start a youtube channel!! At this point, Paul was already gone, so it was just us.
We started it with my Gmail account. Tony got all of his cubes, and I got all of the mine, and we just started solving all of the ones we could! But we didn’t know how to solve all of them, so we just solved one side, and then tried to make it look that the whole thing was solved. So then we stacked all of them in a cool way and did a video on my mom’s phone.But it was really hard because everybody was so noisy and nobody could say anything without being interrupted. So we asked every body to be quite and it sort of worked, but they were still noisy. When we finally quieted them down we got one good shot until… Tony’s sister Gigi walked through and messed everything up! But we were so frustrated we decided to just post it. But the internet was so bad there that it took like 2 hours. So we had a bunch of smoothies and these drinks called mojitos. Except that since they normally have alcohol in them, so we got Virgin Mojitos. When we finally got it posted, we waited by the computer for views until it was bedtime.
Another thing we did when Paul was gone was online Rubik’s timers. It was so cool. If you have ever seen a cubing timer, it’s like that, but just using the mouse for the hand spots. So Me and Tony timed each other for a long time every day when Paul was gone because it was so boring and we had nothing to do. We both improved majorly and we bragged about it the everybody. Tony was still better than me (Tony: Yes You admitted it finally.), but I was getting better too!
This is going to be awesome!
Teribithia Part 4…
So the first day we were in Costa Rica we didn’t think we could build Teribithia because we couldn’t find anyway to get behind the property. So we decided to go around and went under the house. Once we got to the woods we got to this hill (we named it The Teribithian Mountain) with lots of brush and stuff. We kept exploring and found this natural dome made from vines and stuff that Mother Nature had made, which we decided would make an awesome palace. So we gathered as many of our siblings as we could, and started building. We started cutting down palm leaves and throwing them on top of the dome to disguise it and to make it more waterproof. We also got soft plants and put them on the floor for comfort. It was so hot though that we had to take breaks like every hour and get smoothies. Since we also had Scuba Diving we only got to work about 4 hours a day. Despite all the distractions, Costa Rica’s Teribithia was AWESOME!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
So after building the palace, Paul was like “Lets go explore the valley down below the palace,” And we thought this was a good idea so went on to adventure into the Great Teribithian Beyond. It was pretty awesome and had some great building spots and materials. We had brought Holy Water, I don’t know why, although I think it was Tony’s idea. We found lots of big leaves for seats, and dug holes to put Holy Water in. On one of the days down in the valley, this one guy kept motioning toward us like we were crazy, so we decided to go back tot he resort and order some drinks and cube. We eventually decide to make 2 Teribithian cities: Upper Teribithia, and Lower Teribithia. Unfortunately not many kids came to help so we had way to much space. We still played and built like normal just slower due to the lack of Teribithians. The day before Paul had to leave we did the annual Good Bye Teribithia Ceremony. Basically we said our favorite things about the trip and looking forward to the next Mastermind and Teribithia. It was an fantastic Mastermind and everybody had a great time. Sorry everyone for the actual Teribithia Part 4 section being so short, there wasn’t too much to say n words. But keep reading for a special prize at the end of this post.
Here is the Teribithia Part 4 Video!
Other Stuff
So before the Costa Rica Mastermind, we went to the same resort to scout out and make sure it would work for so many people. With the resort came unlimited drinks (just like the Mastermind) and so we had a bartender, Rafael. He is a great bartender and is super nice. He was also our mastermind trip bartender, and makes the best drinks humanly possible. The other bartenders were good but he was my favorite. So I just wanted to share that.
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