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| Breakfast our first morning |
Evelyn and I were absolutely exhausted. We were dropped off at the Sacramento airport at around 9:00 p. m.
Sunday evening, November 11, 2012. Our
flight didn’t leave until 12:30 a. m. on the twelfth. This was a red eye flight and we would be
landing in Houston
at around 6:00 a. m. after a three and a half hour flight. We had lost two hours by traveling two time
zones. Our flight from Houston
to San Jose, Costa Rica, wouldn’t leave until
nearly noon. It is interesting that our
gate was changed two times in the five or six hours we were waiting in Houston.
Finally, though, we got off the ground on a gull flight to
our final destination. It was another
three plus hour flight and, as mentioned, above, we were exhausted. We went to the rental car desk and found they
had to shuttle us to a site off the airport to pick our car. It was a Hyundai Elantra. It took us a full two hours to finally get
under way with our rental car. We had one
all lined up, only to find out the air conditioner didn’t work. That was not acceptable in a hot and humid
climate like tropical Costa
Rica.
We had to start the process over, again, with a different car. We ended up with another Hyundai Elantra, but
it had air conditioning. Their rental
cars all had about 120,000 miles on them, so they were anything but new.
We had printed out directions from the airport to our first
hotel, where we would relax until time to pick up our friends, Jeff and Jane,
and proceed to the time share. What we
were not aware of, and the employees at
the rental car office were quick to explain was, the directions were totally
inadequate. You see, they don’t have
street signs that show the name of number of the street or highway in most of Costa Rica. It was especially difficult, they explained,
because it was heavy, and I mean heavy, worker’s traffic by the time we were
finished and ready to leave.
Fortunately, one of the employees was finishing up his shift and he
volunteered to lead us, in his car, to the place where we would find the
hotel. The first twenty minutes was
spent going less than half a mile. There
was a bridge that had collapsed the week before, and they didn’t have it repaired,
yet, so traffic was nearly at a stand still.
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| On the veranda outside our Hotel room door. |
When we finally managed to get past that congestion, the
side roads we traveled were over crowded and we had trouble keeping behind our
guide. It was getting dark and Evelyn
was afraid we might loose our generous benefactor. Her fill was reinforced by the idea that if
we lost him, we didn’t have a cell phone that would work, so we couldn’t even
call the hotel to let them know we were lost.
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| View from deck outside our room. |
If you remember my blog about Belize, you will recognize that the
experience was not a lot different. This
time, at least, if we didn’t loose him, we had someone who was kind enough to
try to help us find our way. After just
over an hour, our kind rental car employee stopped and asked us to show him our
reservation, again. He found a phone
number and called to find out where we were in relation to the hotel. Then, after about five more minutes of
following him, we actually came to the hotel.
If anyone tells you traveling on a smaller budget doesn’t have its
challenges, don’t believe them; From uncomfortable hours of flying (red-eye) to
rental cars with high mileage. We could
have used a taxi, but that would have cost around thirty to fifty dollars, and
that would have been just one way.
Nevertheless, we were there, the Hotel Canal Grande, in Santa
Ana, a suburb of San Jose. In fact, for the small cost per night, this
was one of the best hotels we have ever stayed at.
We got checked in, checked out a few channels on the TV (in
Spanish) and decided, as tired as we were, eight o’clock sounded like a good
time to retire for the night. We were so
tired we slept for over thirteen hours.
We couldn’t remember the last time we had slept that long; even after
traveling those many times to Berlin,
Germany.
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| View from our deck to pool |
The temperature, in San
Jose, was perfect.
This is the end of the rainy season, but there was a little rain and a
pretty nice breeze, on our first night.
During the night, it was even windier, but not so much rain. We woke to an absolutely gorgeous
morning.
We went to the dining area, which was outside on the veranda,
under the upper patio. That sheltered us
from the still gusty winds. We ordered
coffee, but chose not to have breakfast because it was $8 per person. We had seen the breakfast the neighboring
table had and decided we might do better at a restaurant outside the
motel. I need to be honest, though. The staff was wonderful. The gentleman who signed us in the first
evening was probably under 25, spoke passable English. The young lady who took care of the guests,
the next morning, was cheery friendly, and also spoke good English. She was cute, but wore her hair short and
kind of combed to the center in a spike ridge.
We introduced ourselves to the Americans who were eating
breakfast at the next table. We found
out they had lived in Costa
Rica for about two years. They were not residents, which means they had
to leave the country every ninety days for three days in order to return and
stay another ninety days. He looked to
be in his early sixties, while his wife looked to be in her early fifties. His name was Dan and her name was Robin. He said he taught surfing in the north
eastern portion of Costa
Rica, known as the state of Guanacosta. While he taught surfing, his wife would take
pictures of the event and sell them to the students over the internet. They were in the hotel with us, because they
had just returned from a visit to the San
Francisco area where they were visiting their newest
grandchildren. They had been out of Costa Rica for
several months and were just returning from there stay in the States. They had landed the same evening we did and
took a cab to the hotel. They said they
were going to take a taxi back to the airport to rent a car so they could drive
back to their apartment in northern Costa Rica.
I asked them if we could drive them back to the airport so
we could see the way during the day. He,
Dan, said they had so much luggage, they would have to tax a van-taxi to be
able to take everything with them.
However, when the taxi arrived, Dan had a talk with the driver who agreed
to take the most direct route to the airport and have us follow him; so that is
what we did. We followed him to the
airport, managed to get to where we would return our car at the end of the
trip. We actually remembered enough of
the previous night’s trip that we were able to find our way back pretty much
the way we had gone there. We even
stopped on one of the main roads, at a Quizno’s subway sandwich shop to have
lunch before returning to the hotel. Of
course, even ordering a sandwich at Quizno’s turned into a small ordeal. We finally had ordered our sandwiches, only
to find out when we got them, they were not what we thought we had
ordered. Fortunately, what we got was
good anyway.
Probably the most difficult thing we had to learn, besides
navigating the streets with not street name signs, was how to covert the Costa
Rican Colones (their form of currency) to dollars and vice versa. It took 442 Colones to equal $1. It is possible to purchase things using the
American dollar, but if you do you have to accept the easy conversion of $1
equals 500 Colones.
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| The owner and one of his Staff, Elizabeth. |
Since we are traveling on a tight budget, it is important to
point out the cost of food and gas is higher in Costa
Rica than in California. In fact, using the easy conversion rate,
allowing one to pay in dollars, it ends up being about 20% to 45% more
expensive to buy things. San Jose has been quite
an experience, all by itself. International
Living makes quite a case for Costa
Rica being such an easy transition. We are finding there are quite a lot of
hurdles to deal with, when coming here, especially for the first time. We will be picking up our friends from the
same airport we landed in, soon. I will
provide more description once we are in our Destination City of Playa Del Coco,
on the Pacific Coast
of northern Costa Rica.
