Lola Kutcher's

I am going to start this story in Houston Texas, not that I have a choice though because really, the past is the past and all I’m doing is telling you about it. So Houston Texas; It’s not at all what I expected. When I think of Texas a few things come to mind: deserts, cowboys, and drought instead we were greeted by rainy and green. But, despite what I thought Houston was very green and the air felt clean and fresh. When we got off the plane we were brought to two different lines each with a sign. One sign said “U.S. RESIDENTS ONLY” and the other sign basically just said “EVERYONE ELSE.’’ Beside the U.S. residents sign there was a woman reading out the sign in a very thick accent. I heard her say “ and Canadian residents” but since the sign clearly said U.S. residents only nobody really believed me. Not enough to go stand in that line anyways. So we went and stood in the ‘Everyone else’ line for around 45 minutes without moving more than 5 meters when we decided to go ask somebody if what we heard was correct. Well, turns out that we could have been in the faster line all along! So 15 minutes later we were through customs and in another line so that they could check our passports again (just incase we had gotten through the past 30 passport checks with a fake passport). Then finally, we were through security with all our bags. We were booked to stay at the Marriot Courtyard and there was supposed to be a shuttle bus running every hour to the airport. Over an hour later there was still no Courtyard Bus like they said there would be. We saw every other Marriott bus but every single one refused to take us because they said that we had to take the Courtyard bus because our hotel wasn't on their route. Finally we decided to take a taxi to our hotel and we arrived and got ready for dinner. We decided to go to Chile’s and so we took the shuttle bus over. Looking back now, we should have left the second we saw how crowded the place was since it was a Friday night but we stayed and waited 15 minutes for our table. We ordered our food and then an hour later it arrived. By then we were tired, grumpy, and sick of waiting. We went back to our hotel and slept as much as we could before having to get up at 6 the next morning.

The next morning of travelling was uneventful. We got to Costa Rica without any problems and from the airport we took the shuttle (that was on time) to the car rental place and we got our car. Looking back, its funny how the car rental company failed to tell us that the lock button on the key doesn’t actually lock all of the doors. From there we drove the 4 hour drive to Tamarindo, a small little surfer village. We arrived at our rental place that was just outside of town and it was a house out of 7 in a little gated area with a small pool. We got out of the car to collect our keys and 3 minutes later we came back to our car to get our luggage and our family bag and computer bag where both missing. That meant 5 passports, 2 computers, 5 birth certificates, my great grandpas pen, and some clothes and other stuff. That was the cherry on top of our stressful traveling day and we were all feeling pretty upset. It sucked. The sad thing was that we didn't really enjoy that week in Tamarindo because it was filled with dealing with all the stuff we lost and trying to get our passports figured out and trips to the police station and the Canadian Embassy. Tamarindo was really nice though and the waves where pretty awesome. Everyone was really nice, understanding, and helpful. Tamarindo was over in a flash and we were back in the car to go to Nosora.