Costa Rican Boot Camp

It’s not a good trip unless Mom throws up but I am getting ahead of myself because the trip didn’t start out that way. I set the alarm on my new iPhone for 5 am and put it on the table by my bed. When I heard ‘beep, beep, beep’ in the middle of the night, I got up, showered, and dressed – feeling a little tired but hey, it was 5 am after all. Only it wasn’t. It was only 10 pm and I had simply received a text message. Whoops #1. So I went back to bed fully clothed and needless to say didn’t sleep all that well the rest of the night.

In the interest of extravagance and convenience, I had booked a local limo company to drive us to and from the airport. They were due to arrive at 5:45 am for our 8 am flight to Costa Rica. At 5:46 am (they usually come early), I called them and woke the owner up. Whoops #2. She had completely forgotten about us despite my two phone conversations with her and signing up via their website. We loaded up the car and sped to the airport and made our flight just fine but what if I hadn’t called?

On the plane, my husband wrote on a napkin ‘Oscar Eustis à’ pointing to the seat in front of me. When this man got up to go to the bathroom, I laughed. Not even close and Oscar would be positively insulted to be mistaken for this portly gentleman whose only resemblance was some facial hair. You remember Oscar? He was regularly in the news when he was the Director at Trinity Rep, before he left for NYC.

Back to the throw up, silly me. After 12 hours of travel, a meal of rice and beans at a local soda (that’s what they call ‘em), and a three hour trip from the airport up winding, winding mountain roads, I finally had enough and told our driver I didn’t feel well. He stopped at a super market near San Ramon and once the mothball smell from the toilet bowl hit me – it was all over and I threw up. Whoops #3. In fact, I threw up so hard there were small burst blood vessels showing on my eye lids for days after. But I digress, because I did feel a lot better (except for a splitting headache) and for all future mountain drives and most other drives, I took a Gravol – kindly purchased for me by our guide Johan. It helped immensely. Overall, the trip was good but it didn’t get better for days.

Day one involved a horseback ride in the pouring rain and an afternoon of zip lining in frigid rain. Think COLD and needles stinging your face. In the instructional training for the zip lining, they told us to open our legs wide (Think CHILDBIRTH) to slow down. As I was going at breakneck speeds across hundreds of yards of canopy below, I panicked and open my legs. And there I was - eyes closed, stuck hundreds of feet from the platform, dangling in midair. I knew from the training, it was time for hand over hand maneuvering. After a few minutes of this, my arms where extremely tired and a young man came out to rescue me. There were something like nine more cables to go and I just wanted our version of Costa Rican boot camp to be over. We still had a week left. Once we got out of the rainforest and the weather, well, stopped raining, it made all the difference. What a difference a sunny day can make!