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Outdoor Excursions in Costa Rica

August 21st, 2010 - by Jeff Wagner

My wife and I were in Costa Rica over the past two weeks for our honeymoon and we had the opportunity to go on a few outdoor excursions with two very highly recommended companies…Wave Expeditions and Sky Adventures. Needless to say these two companies were fantastic, very professional and they just flat out love their jobs.

With so many different excursions to experience we decided to try the following:

Canyoning – (Wave Expeditions)
White Water Rafting – (Wave Expeditions)
Zip Lining – (Sky Adventures)

My favorite excursion that we tried was Zip Lining. I had always wanted to do it and finally I got the chance with Sky Adventures. These lines were about as extreme as you can get. They have 8 different runs that you go on that work their way down the mountains of Costa Rica. The longest and highest line was about 1000 ft. high and about 1/2 mile long, we also got up to speeds of about 55 mph. We had one of our guides take a video of the run with our camera after we had all gone across (see below). Our guide went across with a boy who was a little nervous about going alone. You can see the active Arenal Volcano in the video as well. At the end of the trek across you’ll notice my wife and I in the back of the group waving at the camera. You must try zip lining if you’re ever in Costa Rica, it’s absolutely amazing.

The second excursion we tried was Canyoning (repelled) down 5 different waterfalls and 1 dry (rock) wall. All repels were at least 80ft high with the highest being around 125ft and of course it had to be the first one. We would’ve be lying if we said we weren’t nervous but after the first time down we really couldn’t wait for the next repel. Transportation, lunch and snacks were also included in the expedition. I highly recommend anyone to try this even if you have a slight fear of heights. Make sure to bring your cameras because they do have dry bags for them to go in. We made the assumption that ours would get wet and left it at home.

The final excursion on our list was White Water Rafting. We actually did this and canyoning as a 2 part excursion package with Wave Expeditions. All I can say about this adventure is “fricken fantastic!” My wife and I had always wanted to try rafting and I am so glad we did it. We tried a class 3 river that’s on a scale of 5 with 5 being the hardest. The whole run lasted about 2 hours with a short break in the middle for lunch. It also had rained a lot the previous couple of days so our guide said the rapids were probably ranked at about 3.5-4 with the higher water levels. Not only was this a crazy fun ride it was also a great workout, you paddle constantly even in the middle of huge rapids. This is an absolute must try for anyone.

We had an amazing time and Costa Rica is truly a fantastic place to visit. I’ve included some pictures from our adventures below to give you an idea of the excitement we had. Enjoy.

Tags: Costa Rica, Excursions, Outdoor
Posted in Events, Marketing | 3 Comments »

Emerging Print and Web Designers

March 12th, 2010 - by Jeff Wagner

Recently I attended an AIGA meeting (The Professional Association for Design) that was focused on tools for “Emerging Designers” to help them with their portfolios and web presence. The meeting was held at Mono, a very well known and renown agency in Minneapolis, MN.

The AIGA provided three very creative and very informative speakers
Carl Schultze, Evan Stremke, and Aaron Shekey. Each speaker talked about a few tools that they use on a regular basis that helps promote some of their work.

Carl Schultze, an extremely talented print and web designer, shared with everyone a tool he uses for his own personal online portfolio called Cargo Collective. Cargo Collective is a very simple web publishing (CMS) platform that allows designers to upload their work to the web and use a variety of different templates to display their creativity. Cargo allows for some customization as well if you’re handy in HTML and CSS. I thought it was a great tool for those you aren’t too comfortable creating their own personal portfolio and to upload a new project takes literally seconds (I timed Carl and he did it in 52.8 seconds).

Evan Stremke, our second speaker, is a huge fan of Cargo as well and uses it regularly. He also talked about a very slick print publishing tool called Issuu. Issuu will take your print designs (pdf’s) and publish them in a very nice interactive flip magazine online. You can then embed the code for your publications on to your website or your Cargo Collective account. Evan also mentioned that he was a fan of Tumblr, a very easy to use service for blogging.

Aaron Shekey, the final speaker, a young and very creative web designer talked about his love with WordPress. Yet another CMS (Content Management System) that is very popular as a blogging tool but is very exandable and can be used as a complete website management tool. WordPress has such a following of developers that create so many different templates and plugins that you can use. It’s really, I feel, the best option as a free CMS. Aaron also shared a very cool plugin called Flutter. Flutter is a feature rich WordPress CMS plugin that focuses on easy templating for the developer and simplifies content management for the admin by creating custom write panels that can be fully customized (radio buttons, file uploads, image uploads, checkboxes, etc).

After the presenters were done AIGA provided pizza and refreshments for everyone and gave us time to mingle with the speakers, Mono staff and other designers that were attending. If you’re a member of the AIGA you really should be taking advantage of these meetings. Even if you aren’t a member, like me, you’re more than welcome to join at a very small fee (this one was $15). I had a great time and I look forward to attending future AIGA meetings.

For more information on upcoming events sponsored by the AIGA checkout their website at: http://minnesota.aiga.org/events

Tags: Cargo Collective, flutter, friendfeed, Issuu, Tumblr, Wordpress
Posted in Events, Print Design, Web Design | No Comments »