Road to Retiring- Final Day 12

Sunrise at Esterillos

2/19

Up in the morning and a session down at La Sirena, the Mermaid, which is this pretty cool sculpture in the water at Esterillos.  The sun is just rising and I realize you can see the sunrise and sunset on the same beach due to the coastlines curve and the Equator.  There’s a small collection of SUP surfers and regular surfers out. People are anxious to buy fish straight off the fish boats and a trio of horses runs along the beach. There's an odd bird with some sort of big red goiter throat thing flying overhead.

The Mermaid

                                     

OK SUP surfers.  You can catch waves easier but that doesn't give you the right to take more than your fair share.  2 nice shots of John getting snaked!

An OK wave this morning.  Not the best, but still way better than most days in Florida!

After the session we return to Hotel La Weird and pack up, throwing away lots of junk we don’t need anymore and giving extra shampoo and other little items to the guys working here at the hotel this morning.

The guy at the desk brings us a giant plate of bread and cantaloupe and we eat that, musing that usually there are eggs but this is great this morning.  But wait. Here come the eggs, sausage, rice and beans too.  Too much food for me.  The sausages are cheap but they taste a lot like hot dogs so not a fan.

Uneventful drive to Santa Ana and we gratefully find Kevin’s house easily.  No time to waste at 10:15 AM, David drives us to the Police Academy in San Jose for our finger printing.  A guy out front takes our passport type photos and prints them off on a small printer X 6. We get in line after showing ID and David checks us in so we can wait in chairs outside the fingerprinting. They call us in and we wait in more chairs.  It’s very musical chairs.  One person gets up, and everyone stands and moves over a chair.

The office looks exactly like you’d think.  Dingy, paint peeling, old computer consoles and reams of paper stacked everywhere.  John is called and is being helped by some guy and then I’m called and get a very unhappy looking, stern young woman.  Who speaks no English.  She doesn’t like one of my answers on my sheet – my permanent address.  A relocation company will provide this since we aren’t living here yet.  We get David to translate and it’s cleared up to her unsmiling satisfaction.  Finished, slowly, with the computer and then with what she needs to write on my card, I’m sent in for fingerprints.  The old fashion way with ink.  It’s a mess! Outside where’s there’s a rough sink with water and soap but no towels, LOL.  Ah CR!  We are done and David is very pleased with how fast this has gone.  On a Monday one can wait half the day.  We are in and out in 1 hour and 15 minutes.

David gives us a driving tour of Escazu.  There is a state of the art, soccer stadium that seats 37000,  that the people of Taiwan gifted CR with as well as the bridge at the top of the Nicoya peninsula where it joins the mainland.  There’s also a mall, MultiPlaz, that has every high-end store imaginable. 

We go back to the house and share a beer with Kevin and David and then decide to go check out Art Depot- a place in Escazu where they actually have art supplies.  It’s fairly well stocked plus they are even moving this next month to a larger store, and they will put items that are bought online on the local buses to outlying areas for a very reasonable rate.   But we decide to take Kevin’s advice too and load up and bring many things with us.  A used gas Bar B Q in CR can be sold for around $500.  Many things will be worth it to take and then sell once we get here to help defray the cost of the move.

Still some time to burn and we go to a high-end gallery.  There’s some beautiful work all by Latin American artists and it always inspires. But we understand that we need to turn our car in by 7 PM and don’t want to drive in the dark so we head to the airport. 

HUGE FAIL.  John thinks he knows the way but the GPS is insisting that we are going the wrong way.  Why the hell we would trust this damn thing I don’t know and I claim the responsibility for arguing that we need to follow the GPS as the rental car place is actually programmed in.  Literally a drive that should have been 30 minutes, maybe 45, turns into over 2 ½ hours of inner city driving- including waiting at one intersection for over 45 minutes to get back on a highway while a huge bottle neck crawled along. We stop to fill the gas up- that should have been about $20 but this extra driving climbs that to $35.  John gets directions and we turn off the GPS.  We finally find the rental place and we are FURIOUS!  The first GPS mistake was human error due to the guy putting the settings in to avoid toll roads.  But we cleared all that and this is just unconscionable.  The attendant at Adobe is not sympathetic to our complaint and shrugs saying too bad we didn’t report it sooner on our trip or they would’ve refunded it but we can still report it to customer service with a phone number he gives us.  We also find out we could’ve brought the car back all the way till 10 PM.  Arrrgghh. We didn’t stop to eat because of the supposed time crunch.

Now to the airport on the shuttle and to wait for HOURS until they will even take our luggage.  This is the other bad Spirit deal. Odd flight times. But, this is the first time I’ve been to the airport and haven’t had to collect money for the exit fee for some poor fool who doesn’t know it costs $29 each to exit the country.  2 AM finally rolls along and we load the plane and take off.  We get in at 5:55 AM exhausted but also excited that this trip has had pretty good outcome for our future move.

Update:

-As of this writing 3/10/14, the police apostille did finally arrive in Santa Ana.  It’s being translated and the formal filing will happen this week.

-We DID contact Adobe about the GPS woes- the airport one really being the worst- and they gladly refunded the $109 that the GPS rental cost.  They assured us that customer service is of utmost concern and were very sorry that this occurred.  We were happy with their decision.  The Holiday Inn refund also came through, though I still find that ordeal pretty unsatisfactory and will NOT book there again.