A group of lucky Boothbay Region High School students is heading off to the southernmost “isthmian” part of Central America.

They will be leaving on April 18 and will be staying for nine days, four in Nicaragua, then the rest in Costa Rica.

The group of 15 Spanish students will be accompanied by their teacher, Karol Clark, and two chaperones, art teacher Manon Lewis and English teacher Tanya Hammond. Clark's daughter, Natalia, will be joining them.

Clark, the Spanish teacher at the high school, has taken three previous trips to Costa Rica and one to Spain with her students. Before teaching at BRHS, she taught at Lincoln Academy and took students to Spain and France while there.

Clark said that the trip will be partly educational and partly just plain fun. Though she has taken kids on trips to Costa Rica before, this will be the first one to the northwestern region. “This whole trip is exciting for me,” she said.

While in Granada, Nicaragua, the group will participate in an educational workshop in a cafe. Next door to the cafe is a hammock shop run by deaf mutes. “They're going to teach us to make hammocks,” Clark said.

They will also be going on an evening tour of active Masaya Volcano, near Granada, and hiking through a bat cave to get to it. It should be an adventure. “We get to look inside an active crater,” she said. “I have no idea how often it erupts.”

On their third day in Nicaragua they will take a boat tour of Lake Nicaragua Isletas, a group of 365 small islands in the lake, many of which are occupied, and visit a small school on one of them.

The last day in Nicaragua will feature zip-lining and a little time to relax on Nicaragua's most famous beach in San Juan del Sur.

On the fifth day the group will cross the border to Costa Rica. While there they will visit a volcano park, go horseback riding to a waterfall and visit a hot spring.

The craft village of Guaitil will make for a fun and interesting day of shopping and checking out some of the famous pre-Columbian-style pottery made by local artisans. The entire town is dedicated to the pottery trade, using local clay. The village is also known for some of Costa Rica's traditional cuisine.

The day before returning to Maine, the group will cruise on a river boat through mangroves in the Palo Verde National Park.

All in all this trip should be one these kids and their chaperones will remember for a long time.