Hi.  My name is Mike Novemsky. I have a Master of Science in Engineering Science from New Jersey Institute of Technology.  I'm a physics teacher at Columbia High School in Maplewood NJ.  I have been teaching physics for six years.  The first five were at Science High School in Newark, NJ. My favorite activity is racing bicycles, on road and off.  I went to Costa Rica with my wife Amy to study some really cool rainforest, wet forest, and tropical dry forest stuff.

Amy

Some stuff about the trip.

We flew into San Jose on 7/14/1999 and stayed at the Best Western Hotel Irazu for the first three days.  We heard a lot of lectures on Costa Rican Ecology and related topics.  We took a ride up to Volcan Poas and hiked up to the top of the volcano and looked into the craters.  The active crater was spouting steam.  Cool stuff.
On 7/17 we hopped on a bus to Estacion Biologica La Selva.  It was pretty squishy on the little bus, but it was only a 3 hr ride.  La Selva had some serious rain forest where I got to see some wild stuff.  We stayed there for six days.   I did a project on tree frogs, where a research scientist and three teachers, including myself, studied the dynamics of the frogs in flight.  I took a lot of hikes into the forest including some night hikes.  It's something that you just gotta see.
On 7/23 we went to Estacion Biologica Las Cruces and Wilson Botanical Gardens, located in a premontane wet forest.  Back on the squishy bus, this time for 11.5 hrs.  Real Squishy.  Lots of stops made it survivable.  Las Cruces is a beautiful place.  It is also cool and the living facilities are outstanding.  Here we went skinny dippin' in the river and did a project on pollination.
We hated to leave, but on 7/28 we took off for the beach.  A five hr ride (squish) to the beach resort town of  Dominical.  Almost a whole day of vacation at the Hotel Rio Mar.  We went to the beach, swam in the surf and in the pool (more skinny d, uh-oh, busted by the man), and had a good time.
On 7/29 we grudgingly packed up and headed to Estacion Biologica Palo Verde, in the tropical dry forest region.  This was a loooong and bumpy ride (SQUISH).  We arrived at the hottest, most remote, least equipped, most mosquito filled place ever.  It was tough but it was beautiful.  Here we did a project on soil succesion.

Back to top