Shannon Wenk

We started our life together living in the basement apartment of our friend Sharon Watson.  We had a long talk about us and I agreed to give our marriage a try for a year.  I continued to work full-time and take night classes.  David was just going to school.  He said that I was smarter than him and that he couldn't do school full-time and work too.  We were very poor.  I think I made $10 an hour.  Luckily, we didn't have to pay rent, we just paid the utility bill for the house.  After awhile I told him that it didn't seem right that he was sitting at home most of the day while I was working.  I wanted him to get a job so he got a job at Home Depot.  

Intimacy was really difficult between us. I had a UTI for the first several months of our marriage and wanted nothing to do with sex.  Things were not good.  I felt like I was stuck in a marriage that I should have never entered and I was depressed.  

About 8 months after we got married my dad offered to pay for me to go study abroad for my last semester of college.  I only needed 8 more credits and I could complete them in 5 weeks in Costa Rica.  I was so excited.  

Costa Rica was so beautiful!  During the first 4 weeks I lived with another student in the home of a Costa Rica woman.  We would take a bus into the city every day to go to Spanish school.  We took classes during the week and on the weekends we went on fun excursions.  One weekend we went to Jacó beach and watched a surf competition and went dancing.  David came down that weekend, so I spent one night with him.   The next weekend we went to La Fortuna to see Volcán Arenal.  We went to Tabacón hot springs which were stunning.  From the warm pool we could see the lava run down the volcano as it erupted.  We then stayed on a ranch and rode horses to a natural waterslide the next day and participated in a rodeo that night.   The next weekend we did a river rafting excursion which was a blast.  The water was actually warmish which made the experience so nice.  We also went ziplining through the canopy and to Manuel Antonio National Park where there were monkeys in the trees.   One weekend we spent in San Jose. We went to the theater and went dancing.  The last week we explored the cacao fields, small villages and cathedrals.  We also stayed in a rain forest.  We went on a guided hike and it started pouring rain.  We were all slipping and sliding down the trail just like in the movie, "Romancing the Stone."  We saw lots of huge iguanas, poisonous dart frogs and a sloth.  We spent the last few days on the Caribbean side at the beach.  It was such a wonderful experience.  Pura Vida!

We went to a national soccer game. 
It was wild.  Everyone was chanting and 
dancing the entire game.

Manuel Antonio

Ziplining through the canopy

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