Wet

We brought a double stroller to Costa Rica, it was our personal luggage cart in the airports and hotels, it was handy in flat beach towns for pushing around our "rice and beans" kids, Audrey and Autumn, and we actually met another couple who did the same but reported that it rusted into a pile of trash and they had to dispose of it. I thought they exaggerated a bit, or maybe they left it out in the rain or brought a really cheap Chinese knock off... nope.  They lived in the cloud forest. To give you an idea of a cloud forest you need to marry a few things in your mind, first, the weather of Seattle (as of this writing it has been raining 22 of the last 23 hours and it is not yet rainy season ) as in lot of rain and very nice temperatures, about 70 usually; mix that with the humidity you get when you cook rice in an enclosed room and everything is covered in a thin layer of moisture, then add clouds.  We are actually in clouds about 1/4 of the time. a grey ghost-like mist that rolls and envelopes the jungle like a slithering snake, bringing with it moisture that is unprecedented.  The jungle canopy shows the full foliage then retreats again into curtains of ghostly smoke.  From this dream-like trance enters real life...  Without a dryer there is no such thing as dry clothes here.  We are thankful to have access to one, however it is shared between over a dozen other people it still is a functioning dryer.  We had to move the double stroller into the house and off of the covered deck because mold was starting to overtake it.  I am sure one year out there and it would be a pile of plastic parts and moldy fabric with only hints of the metal remaining.  When I get dressed in the morning it is like putting on clothes that were removed from the dryer too early, only they weren't, they just spent the night hung up.  Mold seems not to act like I have seen it before, it is not in the corners, the dark areas, etc, here in the could forest I keep thinking that one of the kids put dirt on a wall, when I go to wipe it off, a small brown patch in the center of a wall, I realize it is a lump of mold. Very odd..  We had friends whom returned to the states for a couple of months, stored their Land-rover by the airport, returned to drive home after the long journey only to find the ENTIRE interior of the car fuzzy with mold.  My cellphone is only warranted until you expose it to humidity, meaning there is no warranty.  Even my Ipad was covered in a layer of fog on the glass the other day, making the picture on the cover look like the view out my window...  living up here though has been awesome.  I love the cloud forest; sleeping to the sound of rain, the temperature, the rapidly changing views that nature provides nearly in a continual movement, the 1000 hues of green from black forest to brilliant neon that we have mistaken for spray-paint on more than one occasion.   At night the little girls go to bed saying "good night jungle, good night clouds, good night.......  The journey continues.