here's to The Real World (he said after six hours of reading and xbox).

...but I figure you wouldn't want to hear about that, so this is me signing off from the Gnome From Home.

hope you enjoyed it and, if Reality doesn't catch up with me, maybe you'll be reading this again at some point.

the drinks with which I have been toasting the past 40 hours have evolved from orange juice to champagne to wine to coffee to more coffee to green tea.

here's to the fancy premium members lounge.

here's to ignoring the sleep-in-comfort verticality feature in business class chairs.

here's to just sitting up enjoying in-flight entertainment whilst getting relatively pissed.

here's to arriving home.

here's to toilets you can put toilet paper in.

here's to warm showers.

here's to home-cooked meals that involve neither rice nor beans, and neither waffles nor maple syrup.

here's to my extremely senile cat holding out whilst I was away again.

here's to nearly falling asleep on the train.

here's to walking in the cold to stay awake.

here's to caffeine-induced heart palpitations.

here's to beating jet lag.

...better save that last one til tomorrow. Can't be too sure yet.

can you have a hangover from queuing? (note correct spelling, had to wait until girlfriend was off the computer to look that up and satisfy my linguistic itch)

if you can... I have one. But nothing a few free meals, a nice hotel room and some Business Class tickets on the next flight to London, courtesy of the lovely/guilty people at Delta Airlines, can't fix.

Hasta la proxima Costa Rica.

Wendy from Hotel Trotamundos in Alajuela (I really have to start focusing my attention on talking to other travellers, not the staff of various resturants, hotels, bars and shops) asked us why we cut our trip short. "It can't have been three weeks."

...Guess time flies anywhere in Costa Rica. But we've still got two days, so that's a little bit of time before we have to fly.

Today went to the Manuel Antonio National Park... saw a few sloths, a massive toucan, a group of howler monkeys, the most bad-ass spider ever (yellow, spiky and in the shape of an arrow-head) and the beached remnants of a bjillion purple and orange crabs. Didn't see the howler monkey, though it did make its existence known.
Also went to the beach... saw Jen get burnt (again, you see, it ain't just me), palms tree actually on a beach and a sizeable hermit crab. Didn't see the wave that ended me and my board, though it did make its existence known.

finding ourselves in roughly the correct timezone, we decided to spent our evening watching the Oscars. Disappointed Toy Story didn't win Best Picture.

This was part of a recovery from travelling by bus for 5 hours and getting scorched (just a fate I'll have to accept my fate) on the beach. I blame my book, which is so dense and so un-beach-friendly that I refuse to accept that I could have gotten burnt in the time it took me to read ten pages. Curse you A. S. Byatt.