This was supposed to be our first day in Costa Rica. We were supposed to wake up (had we slept at all) at the ungodly hour of three in the morning, strap our forty pound backpacks on our backs and hike the ¾ mile uphill through the dark and creepy campus to meet the AB bus at Broadway and 16th. It was to be part of the adventure. Unfortunately, Continental Airlines intervened.
Mere and I were laying in bed, trying to piece together how I might use my very limited Spanish skills to tell the cab driver at the airport that we needed to go to the Pasada del Museo hotel. At 12:30 am, we received a meticulously enunciated automated message reporting that one of our flights had been delayed or cancelled. The robot demanded I call customer service to receive more details. I learned that our 6am Denver to Houston flight was cancelled.
I might have expected something like this to happen to our flight to Costa Rica from the States. After all, it is a developing country in Central America and our trip occurred during the rainy season. Instead, our flight to Houston was cancelled because the weather in Houston in the morning was projected to be bad. I’ve been to Houston before, the weather can be rarely described as good in an objective sense. One blessed day in midwinter the temperature and humidity index drop below ninety and the sun pokes through the ever present stormclouds. On this day, one might reclassify the weather from “bad” to “tolerable”.
I spoke to a very helpful customer service agent probably from India who rescheduled us on the same set of flights out on Sunday. After watching the Weather Channel, I didn’t have much confidence on being able to make it out Sunday, either. Regardless, I started worrying about the next step. How were we going to communicate with our tour leader in Costa Rica that we wouldn’t be getting in until the following day? The tour was supposed to leave on a bus early Sunday morning for a city 140 miles from San Jose. Would we even be able to join the tour, ever?
As early as I could, I called the Pasada del Museo in San Jose, as those were the official instructions GAP gave in case this situation occurred. I politely asked the person on the other end of the line “!No hablo Espanol! !?Tu habla Ingles!?” (which is poor grammar and disrespectful). Thankfully, he habla Ingles, and was able to tell me that our tour leader would not be at the hotel until after 7pm. Next I called GAP’s Central American office in Mexico, which was apparently not a real phone number according to our service provider. Then I called GAP’s office in Canada, and talked to a rep who told me that I had called the right number in Mexico, but that the phone did not connect because “that’s Central America”.
She was not able to give me step-by-step directions herself, but did reassure me that I would be contacted by my tour leader that day, or in the very least she would leave instructions at the hotel. It was 10 am by the time we had this all worked out and Mere and I had not eaten because there was no food in our apartment, we decided to go out for breakfast.
We regret this. As I was pulling into our parking space at the strip mall where the restaurant is located, I bumped the bumper of the SUV next to me. I never do this – I am in fact a parking ninja. Perhaps I was a little distracted because my mind was already in Costa Rica. I left an apologetic note on the car with pertinent but not entirely thorough contact info and proceeded into the restaurant. I initially ordered the wrong omelet (as I mentioned, my brain had already flown away) and the one I intended to order didn’t taste very good. Our waiter heard our sob story (if having a two week tropical vacation delayed by a single day because of a legitimate reason is actually considered sad by anybody) and provided our meal on the house.
Not wanting to press our luck, we stayed in the house for the rest of the day. By 7pm, we had not heard from our group leader. We had had a full day to consider our options for when we arrived in Costa Rica. We called the hotel and talked to our tour leader. She had been calling our phone all day, but had never made a connection. She reassured us that we would be able to meet with the group. It was going to depend on the timing of our arrival at the airport, and how much time we had to get to the bus stop, and how bad the traffic was in San Jose at that time of day. Clearly, it was completely out of our hands still.
Still, we were excited about going to Costa Rica once again. I went to bed around 8:30, so that I might be able to respond to what was happening around me the next day.
|
