And… We’re back!

We set out from Austin yesterday at about 1PM and arrived in Houston with plenty of time before our flight to San Jose. After getting home from New Orleans at 9AM on Monday, we are still trying to figure out which end is up. We were not too disoriented to have Pappasito’s fajitas (my all time favorite) in the Houston airport.

After her flight from Dallas to Houston was cancelled, Jill’s sister Stephanie was at risk of not making the connection in Houston. The travel gods were smiling on her yesterday as she still managed to make it onto our flight just before they closed the door and, in a minor miracle, her bag made it too!

Jill and Stephanie were in touch all afternoon so Jill was able to acquire dinner for Stephanie and have it waiting for her when she boarded the plane. I managed to man-spread sufficiently to hold an entire exit row for us. I sweet-talked the flight attendant into standing in the aisle seat until Jill and Stephanie were in sight.

Once everyone was strapped in the flight to San Jose was totally uneventful.

When we got to San Jose the immigration line was mercifully short. I thought we were golden until the immigration agent asked to see my return ticket to Austin. The Southwest iPhone application chose that moment to disavow me. We had a tense couple of minutes until Jill realized we could probably search gmail and find it, which we did. A thing I will say about Costa Rica’s immigration officers is that they are pretty inconsistent. You never know from encounter to encounter what they are going to ask you.

While Jill and Stephanie waited for our luggage, I made a surgical strike on Duty Free and picked up a couple of bottles of gin. Since we left all of our stuff here when we went back to Austin the only things we brought back to Costa Rica were:

• Our Dopp Kits
• More sunscreen
• An Amazon Echo – because we missed Alexa
• Body butter – to help Jill combat the unexpected dryness of Costa Rica
• The book 501 Spanish Verbs
• Two bottles of Old English furniture polish — as a personal favor to Magda

Our car guy, Cesar, was waiting for us as we exited the arrivals hall. No surprise there. Cesar continues to be the model of customer service. We bid Cesar adieu (his friend Eric was driving him back to San Ramon) and the three of us piled into our now-familiar Honda CR-V and began the trek back to our house in Atenas.

It was oddly comforting to be back on the winding roads heading into Atenas. It was even more comforting to arrive at our home away from home. Everything was just as we left it.

Jill gave Stephanie the tour of the house while I got all of the climate control systems back online. We chatted until it was time for bed. As we all headed off to bed we firmed up a plan to go to La Fiesta de las Pupusas for lunch today and then hit a waterfall afterward.

I was still pretty excited to be back at HQ so I flopped around for a while, which kept Jill from getting to sleep. That meant sunrise felt extra early today, but we both made a good start of it and got caffeinated and cleaned up in short order. We left the coffee pot prepared for Stephanie, who was still sleeping when we left.

Jill and I both arrived at Spanish school today with some trepidation because we did not do as much practicing as we would have liked over the last 10 days. We needn’t have worried because we KILLED IT today. Profesora Maria was effusive in her praise and announced that she and Profesora Ana had decided that from here on in we are going to be shifting the majority focus to conversation with a side of vocabulary expansion. Jill and I aren’t quite sure that we are doing so well, but we’ll take it!

We got home from Spanish, loaded up the day pack with granola bars and water bottles, threw on our water shoes, grabbed our rain jackets, and headed for La Fiesta de las Pupusas.

At La Fiesta, we introduced Stephanie to the magical beverage that is the Batida de Cas (sour guava slushie) and ordered a round of pupusas mixtas. Stephanie was appropriately enchanted with the new addition to her beverage arsenal and the pupusas were extremely well received. After lunch I went up to pay and chatted with my friend in the caja (cashier’s booth). He asked me how the Spanish school is coming. I told him Spanish is going well and “Volvimos despues diez dias in estados unidos” (we have returned from 10 days in the US). He gave me a fist bump. I was inordinately proud 🙂

Pleasantly full from lunch, we piled into the car and headed for Las Cataratas Bajos del Toro (today I learned that Bajos del Toro means “Low of the Bull” — which I assume means the waterfalls mimic the sound a bull makes). About halfway through the drive to Bajos del Toro we climbed into the cloud layer and stayed there for the rest of the day. A few minutes later we were threading our way through a herd of cows that appeared to be out for a stroll on the road.

When we arrived at Bajos del Toro it was apparent that it had been raining for a while and it was still raining. This finally gave us a chance to try out the rain jackets we bought specifically for this trip. A plus to the wet weather was that we had the entire place to ourselves. We paid the entry fee and set off on our adventure.

Bajos del Toro continues to be a a magical place for me.

We were all a little soggy when we made it back to the entrance to the park. Stephanie and I both ended up on our butts once. Jill managed to remain upright the whole way. We took advantage of the clean up station at the park office and washed all (or most) of the mud out from between our toes.

On the way back from Bajos del Toro we stopped in Zarcero, which is a cute little mountain town at 5600 feet above sea level. Zarcero has a fantastic topiary garden in front of the la iglesia (the church).

We stopped by La Coope and got dinner fixins and some limes to go with the Duty Free gin. Jill made her signature pico de gallo. I made the Costa Rican variant of Nana’s Tacos.

Not a bad first day back in the saddle…