I hope that everyone is having a nice holiday.
In spare moments the past few days, I’ve pieced together a couple of panoramas from the Costa Rica trip. We saw a number of vistas that are impossible to adequately replicate with standard, static images. These panos should play in any web browser with Java turned on. Just click in the pano image and drag your mouse back and forth to move around in the image.
The first pano is a 180-degree shot back toward the beach from Punta Uvita, which is a sandy spit that juts out in the ocean in the Ballena (Whale) National Park. The spit is covered at high-tide, but at low-tide, it stretches out from the jungle about a half-mile into the ocean, coming to an end at some very jagged rocks, all set at a 45-degree angle, with big breakers just beyond. This is not a place to fall asleep at low-tide and find yourself stranded.
This shot is taken from the jagged rocks over the spit back toward the jungle. Click on the image to load the panoramic version in a separate window.
The other panorama is a 360-degree shot taken at Rio La Leona, at the entrance to Corcovado National Park, on the Osa Peninsula. It rained heavily for two nights while we were there, and we were able to see the beach landscape change a lot where this river emerges from the jungle to touch the Pacific.
This shot was taken at sunset from the sandy rise between the river and the ocean. Click on the image to load the panoramic version in a separate window.
I created another panorama, of sorts, a vertical one, of a tree that we saw at Cabo Manopalos, on the Osa Peninsula. The idea behind this image is to convey a bit of what it is like to stand at the bottom of one of these monsters and look up.
On a totally different subject, I found a totally hilarious business that I kicked myself for five minutes for not thinking of first: The Post-Rapture Post: The Postal Service of the Saved. This site allows the devout among us to write letters, notes, or cards that will be delivered when the true believers are whisked off to Heaven and the rest of us are left below. Their FAQ page will crack you up (especially “How do we know that you will not ascend into Heaven with us?”), and with the prices they are charging, the guys that thought of this will be able to have little Heaven on Earth, assuming anyone is falling for this.
And something tells me more than a few are.