Day 11 - February 13th
We had planned to leave for the airport around 10am. We were about an hour away and figured dropping off the car around 11am would get us to the airport at 11:30am, two hours before our flight.
After eating breakfast and packing we were ready about 20 minutes early so we decided to head out anyway which was good because a bunch of things went wrong!
The drive to the car rental place went fine until about 200 feet away. We had planned to get gas at the gas station literally right next to the car rental office but that gas station was closed. We looked on the GPS and there was one about a third of a mile around the corner but in front of us there was a wreck involving a cement truck and a car so the road was blocked. We sat in traffic a good 10 minutes or so until we could turn then we had to inch by the cement truck which was really precarious because there was a HUGE DITCH on the side of the road that I guess is a sewer or something? Anyway regardless of what purpose it serves it is the perfect size for a tire to get stuck in which is what almost happened.
After getting gas we had to sit in that mess on the way back to the car rental place again.
Dropping off the car was really quick but then we just kind of waited around for the shuttle for a long time. When it finally came we all hopped in and were driving off but then the driver got a call on the radio and we had to turn around and wait for a bunch of other people to drop off their cars too. I think we were all super annoyed and next time we rent a car I will try to make sure we get a rental office closer to the airport.
We get to the airport finally and go into the Southwest line but are turned away because have to pay the departure tax. At this point I think the tax is included in most airline tickets but we bought ours soon after Southwest started selling them and I guess that wasn't in place yet. I was pretty annoyed at this too since I had spent almost all of my cash and had to put it on my debit card and pay yet another foreign transaction fee. My credit card doesn't have foreign transaction fees but the sign at the desk said credit cards transactions would be processed as "cash advances" and I wasn't too clear on what that meant.
After that we finally got in line at Southwest and despite diligently checking in the MINUTE we could yesterday neither our check in nor our friends had worked so we ended up at like C 25 or something horrible like that and none of us could sit together. I was seriously annoyed AGAIN since I think this was an issue with the Southwest app. It's always worked for me before but I've never tried to check in internationally with them so maybe that's the issue? I have no idea why it wouldn't work for me or my friend.
Then we had to wait in line in security forever- it seemed like at least an hour!
Once we were finally through security we got some seriously overpriced airport food, spent our last colones at a store where I bought a few bottles of water for the flight and went to the gate. We were promptly told that you can't take ANY liquids onto the plane- not even a sealed bottle of water so I drank what I could and threw it out. They even have people searching every single person's bag! It was a little silly.
Once were on the flight everything was fine. I paid for the wifi which is how I found out Justice Scalia died and I wanted to talk to everyone around me on the plane about it but I didn't. I just went and found my friends and told them.
We landed Saturday night at BWI and the windchill was about 10 degrees and we were all very underdressed but happily stopped at Taco Bell on the way home where we knew our tacos wouldn't come with french fries and mayonnaise on top.
I think I'll do one more post about Costa Rica and kind of a lessons learned wrap up! There's no pics in this post since I was grumpy most of the way to and in the airport so I didn't take an pics.
No comments:
Post a Comment