Our Arrival in Costa Rica

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. 

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. 

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.

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. 

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.