Costa Rica, Day 1

Last night I was so tired I completely knocked out.  Head hit the pillow and I was out.  That never happens.  It felt good to come, not to a hotel, but to my friend’s home.  It’s good to see his younger daughter,  Sophi, all dressed up and going to her new job as an attorney.

We got up and by 10 Danny had cooked breakfast, we’d done laundry and run some errands.  We got me a Claro sim card, taking advantage of a special that gives unlimited data and texting for three days (the amount of time I remain here), and doubling the ₡1,000 minimum recharge to ₡2,000.  So for ₡1500 (about $3.00; ₡500 for the card and ₡1000 for the recharge), I have unlimited service while I’m here.  It will expire after 3 months, or I can recharge it for about $1.00 a month and keep a Costa Rican phone number.  Now I have a Costa Rican number, a Jamaican number and, somewhere, an Egyptian number.  The cost of the Jamaican and the Costa Rican sim cards combined is slightly over what ATT charges to ACTIVATE international service, so I think this is the solution that will work for me.  Recharge the SIM on the internet before I go, and have service the minute I set down.  By way of comparison, ATT charges $0.50 per text with international service.  The Costa Rican and Jamaican costs are about 10 cents per text.  It may seem trivial, but pennies make dollars.  Developing the practice of saving where I can allows me to squirrel money away to take trips like this.

Danny is a tour guide, so he always wants me to see and do things in Costa Rica.  I’ve pretty much done all the touristy things, but I wanted to go ziplining, so we went by Expediciones Tropicales.  I started with their online brochure and picked out two things:  the Doka, Grecia, and Sarchi tour (coffee and sugar cane plantations, an old church, butterfly farm, and oxcart factory); and the Monte Zurqui Canopy Tour.  We went by their office only to find that the Monte Zurqui Canopy Tour no longer exists – it’s now enhanced and is the Canopy San Luis Tour.  It includes something like 12 zips with 18 platforms, a superman line, and a rappelling line.  I was excited, but this is the end of the tourist season, and they didn’t have enough people to do the trip.  So I booked the Doka, Grecia, Sarchi tour (which now has only a drive through the coffee plantations, and no butterfly farm).  They gave us a couple of names of other  zipline tours, one of which is close to one of Danny’s other properties, so we left his number with them in case something opened up, and decided we’d check out the other tours.

We ran some errands, including a trip to the grocery store where I bought food/snacks for the next three days for under $20.00.  We got something called peibaye, which is a date but isn’t sweet and looks and tastes like a small yam.  That’s my new food for the trip, I guess.  We went out to lunch, trying first at a Chinese joint in San Jose then moving to a Columbian place in Escazu.  Before we’d finished, Expediciones Tropicales called to let me know that they would, in fact, be doing a zipline tour tomorrow.  Not sure how that’s going to work out since this is the rainy season and it is POURING right now, but I’m excited, and they will allow me to use my gopro. So we shall see.  The zipline tour is scheduled for tomorrow and the coffee plantation tour for Thursday.  I leave on Friday morning.

On the trip from Jamaica to Costa Rica, I wore these Tommie’s Copper compression thingies.  They’re supposed to be for my knees, but they don’t seem to do much good.  They did, however, manage to really irritate my skin, causing first something some kind of irritation that turned into some nasty looking bumps.  My friend Danny went into his garden, cut some aloe vera, and came to put it on my sores. Honestly, they don’t make friends like this any more!!

I’ve just transferred my dolphin pics from cd and dvd to my hard drive.  I can never figure out how to upload a dvd to youtube though, so that may have to wait til I’m home. This has been an amazing trip. (note to self:  take the external hard drive tomorrow and see if they can load the pics directly onto it rather than onto a dvd.)

 Prayerfully, I’ll be energized to go back to work.  It seems we got the last contract we bid on, and they’re asking me for budget numbers.  That’s always something worth interrupting your vacation.