This morning we had to meet our car guy, Cesar, in San Ramon to turn in our Honda Pilot. Cesar is a great guy. He owns a fleet of 7 rental cars and keeps them all in good shape, charges a reasonable rate, and is all about customer service. He brought the Pilot to our hotel on our first morning in Atenas and he’s texted me via WhatsApp every few days to make sure the car is working well for us. Because Cesar’s fleet is small there were two weeks during our 3 month trip where all of his cars were already spoken for at the time we booked with him. As a result of that, we had to rent a car from Adobe from February 15 through March 1. We were in the car at 7:15AM headed for our rendezvous with Cesar.
True to form, Cesar was waiting for us in San Ramon, where we topped the Pilot off with gas and handed him the keys. He then drove us to the Adobe location by the airport in Alajuela.
Things went a little sideways once we started check-in at Adobe to pick up our Hyundai Tucson. We had remembered to bring the physical copies of our passports, but we only had a paper copy of my driver’s license. We made scans of our passports and driver’s licenses to keep in the glove box of the rental cars. My physical driver’s license was back in the safe storage stash at the house. Fortunately Jill had her physical driver’s license on her. The guy at Adobe was the anti-Cesar. He was holding Jill’s physical drivers license in his hand and I showed him a the scan of both my driver’s license and Jill’s (which perfectly matched the one he had in his hand) side by side on the same page. He was steadfast in his refusal to authorize me (even provisionally) as a driver on the car based on the exceptionally high-resolution color facsimile of my driver’s license. It was clearly my fault for forgetting the physical copy of my license, but I have to say that this was literally the first aggressively unhelpful person we have come across in Costa Rica.
Keep in mind that in the agreed upon separation of duties for this adventure, I am the driver and Jill is the navigator. I promised Jill I would not make her drive in Costa Rica. In the end, we took possession of a Hyundai Tuscon from Adobe with Jill as the only authorized driver. She drove it off the lot, pulled over in the first available parking space, and I got behind the wheel. Sometime tomorrow we will make the 45 minute drive to the Adobe office in Grecia and show them my physical driver’s license to get me added as an authorized driver. Also, to add insult to injury, the 2 week car rental with Adobe is $1,352, where as the car rental with Cesar for the other 2 1/2 months of our trip is $2,500. Needless to say, we will be happy to see Cesar when he picks us up at Adobe on March 1!
On our drive back to our house from the Adobe office we got to experience our first toll road. We got on Ruta 1, which is effectively the big daddy highway in San Jose metropolitan area and we couldn’t figure out why we were in bumper to bumper traffic heading out of town at 9:15 on a Friday morning. Then we started seeing some weird stuff. There were street vendors walking between the cars.
After about 10 minutes inching through the gridlock (and trying on, but deciding not to buy some Terminator-style Oakley knockoffs) we saw that we were in a giant disorganized queue to pay the toll for the toll road. That was our first indication we were on a toll road. We had been keeping a little plastic box of change in the glove box for just this eventuality! We squinted into the glare to see if we could figure out which lane we needed to be in and what the toll amount was. Pro-tip: If you don’t have a toll-tag in Costa Rica you need to be in the toll booth lane that says “Manual”. Urban lore says you don’t want to end up in the toll-tag lane with no toll-tag. We successfully bobbed-and-weaved our way through the street vendors to get to the correct toll booth. Our toll was 100 Colones and we paid in exact change!
For those of you keeping score at home, 100 Colones at today’s exchange rate is $0.16. I figure that the attractive receipt they give you eats up about 50% of the toll cost. So how exactly are they making money on this particular toll road? The street vendors however were cleaning up in the 10 minute buffer zone to pay the $0.16 toll. That experience was comical enough that it lightened my sour mood from the Adobe fiasco. We made it home with no further incident.
Today’s big adventure was to do a trial run to the Brigadoon of PriceSmarts in Santa Ana. We all piled into the Hyundai and set off. The Waze lady guided us unerringly to our target. Ironically this route was on Costa Rica’s newest highway, Ruta 27. Ruta 27 between Atenas and Santa Ana is 15 miles of buttery smooth, broad shouldered highway. Just as Profesora Maria foretold we were flying along at speeds of 100 kilometers per hour. Right up til we ran into… toll booths! The amounts of these tolls seemed to be a little more appropriate. We paid two tolls on Ruta 27 totaling 1000 colones each way. After almost 3 weeks of tooling along over hill and dale at 25 mph it was worth $3.25 to drive 30 miles at 62 mph! 🙂 In all seriousness, we continue to marvel at the landscapes and countryside in Costa Rica, which makes tooling along at a stately 25 mph plenty enjoyable.
The Santa Ana PriceSmart was clearly from the rocket car future. The store is built over the parking structure and there’s a moving sidewalk that takes you up from the parking area to the store. It’s all very reminiscent of the Whole Foods mothership in downtown Austin. We bought flavored coffee creamer, wine, cheese, crackers, and a roasted chicken… and we restocked our supply of frozen pepperoni pizzas. And most importantly we executed the checkout process flawlessly! Jill seems to have cracked the code. She flashed a credit card at our cashier at the same time he scanned our membership card so he knew in advance that we were paying by card. The reason I know we nailed it is that this is the first time they haven’t taken my card from my hand to insert it in the chip reader. Our guy just gave me the nod and I inserted the card myself. Victoria pequena!
I may or may not have had a little blood sugar issue on the drive back from PriceSmart, but Jill and Jackie gave me a Coke and a pineapple empanada and I was right back in the game.
Magda and her niece came up this afternoon to sort out the AirBNB situation. I feel like we made progress, but Magda forgot to bring her bank account information. That was the whole point of the exercise so I’m not sure how they thought we were going to move the ball forward without it. I showed them where to put the info in on the AirBNB site, but I have a feeling they’ll be back at some point. We also pointed out some errors in the listing that, if fixed, should result in them getting more bookings. The prime example is that the 3 bedroom, 4 bath house has been listed as a “Studio.” There’s definitely some family drama going on there, but we stayed above the fray and made some measurable progress. At no point did a Nigerian prince come up.
We are taking Jackie to Pizzeria la Finca for dinner tonight. We’ve heard that Friday night is the night that expats gather at Pizzeria La Finca. In our limited experience the average age of the expat community in Atenas is about 20 years older than we are. We will report back.
Jill and Todd in Costa Rica 