Arrival in Costa Rica! February 25

Leaving the hotel in ft.lauderdale for the airpoto

   We had a good night's sleep at the Cambria Suites in Dania and got the shuttle to the Fort Lauderdale airport. We flew JetBlue to San Jose in just under 3 hours on a very smooth flight. We paid for extra leg room seats which were well worth it. We flew over Lake Arenal and Arenal Volcano, which was a treat, but we did not get to the camera quickly enough to get a photo, so it will have to remain in our mind's eye.

   Arrival in San Jose was very easy. We found the Economy rental car and took a shuttle to get the car, a mid-size SUV, a Hyundai. The price was considerably more than we had anticipated because of the mandatory insurance and we worried that we were getting scammed, but other travelers seemed to be paying the same, so....we went with the flow. It was also confusing trying to figure out how to use longitude and latitude in the Garmin, but, with the help of one of the guys at the rental car place, we figured it out.

    We stopped at a Walmart {ugh - yes, a Walmart] to get some essentials, like a little knife, a case of water.....
     Then, we put in the coordinates, or so we thought, for Vista Atenas B n B, 30 miles from the airport. Well, as we have heard, the roads are a bit rough, narrow, no shoulders, hairpin turns...and, I think we were on pretty main roads, Route 1 and Route 3. The GPS took us past Atenas and we just followed. Then, we went up a really narrow mountain road and took a fork which took us onto pretty much just a rock track. Mark turned around (not easily) and we took the other fork which took us to a remote cement business, or something. Clearly, we were quite lost. So, I tried to put in the B n B into the nearby lodging mode on the GPS and it took us back 8 miles to the right spot. It is still up a major hill, but.....not a rock track. We are in a B n B with 9 rooms; ours is called Orion. Our terrace overlooks the valley of San Jose, beautiful. We were too tired to cope with finding a place to eat, so we went to the supermercado, got some lettuce, a roasted chicken etc and ate it in our room. Whew.

   First impressions: really mountainous, beautiful vegetation and flowers, already seen some colorful birds, drier than we thought it would be - more like southern California than the Amazon rainforest, but that may just be the region we are in.