Planning The Trip
While we were at a barbecue at our friend Assana's house a few months ago, we found that she and our friend Dan were headed to Costa Rica after visiting Florida for Christmas. We decided to do the same thing and Randy and Assana started planning hotels the next week. After a few dozen refusals from hotels that were full, Assana was lucky enough to find Kevin of Costa Rica Travel Site, who worked with us to find three hotels, a four wheel drive vehicle and a bunch of activities at different locations. We really lucked out finding him. Now we just had to wait for the trip to start!
Getting There
We woke up at 5am, excited for the next part of our journey. We had spent the previous week in Florida with Randy's family, from Vero Beach to Tampa. This morning we had breakfast at Randy's Dad's, said goodbye to him and Eileen, then headed to the Tampa airport. We caught a quick flight down to Miami, where we met our friends Dan and Assana for the flight to San Jose, Costa Rica. Our cabin crew in First Class (Luis and Bill, the Queens of the Sky) were in a very rambunctious mood, and had fun with us during the entire flight. Luis even gave us all two bottles of wine as we got off the plane (after telling us we were nice 'eye candy').
Ready to go!
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Luis, he was lots of fun
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After clearing immigration we waited for our bags. And waited. And waited. Two of the bags never came out on the conveyor, and we thought we were in trouble. Fortunately when we walked over to the baggage agent we saw the two bags sitting on the ground. We grabbed them and headed through customs. Outside Assana said "Kevin's People" were supposed to be waiting for us, but after waiting a bit and checking all the signs, we asked someone to call the car company for us. After a ten minutes or so they showed up and took us to where we filled out the paperwork for the car. It turned out to be a brand new diesel Toyota 4Runner, with only 280km on the odometer (did we mention it was diesel). We managed to get directions to our hotel by looking at their website and printing them out on a black and white(!) dot matrix printer.
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Los Angeles Cloud Forest
The directions were fairly straightforward, except for the two turns they left out just past the town of San Ramon. After backtracking a bit and asking directions, we followed a twisty winding road through some very dense fog for another 15km where we arrived at the Hotel Villa Blanca, in the Los Angeles Cloud Forest. We had two cute little bungalows that overlooked a green valley. It was time for dinner so we headed to the restaurant for dinner, which of course included rice and beans. At the bar Randy and Assana tried to get something to drink but the girl who was acting as bartender had never been behind a bar before. They ended up settling on what we later referred to as a Costa Rica Cosmo: Orange Fanta and Vodka.
After dinner we all watched a bit of Raiders of the Lost Ark on the laptop, then decided to go to sleep. Just as Dan and Assana were heading back to their room, we spotted a huge spider in the corner. It had to be 5 inches across! Dan wanted to take a picture, but Randy, Rick and Assana insisted on squishing it ASAP, which Dan reluctantly did. After spraying 'Off' in a perimeter around the bed, we calmed down enough to get some much needed sleep.
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