(MATT) The entire day has been full of stress and anxiety, but I think we are finally on our way out of Chicago. We started the day off bright and early at 10:30 am (Nothing like 11 hours of sleep to get the body grooving). Our original plans were to get some of our hairs cut and take a tour of downtown Chicago/a local art museum. We decided instead (thankfully) to contact our first hostel in Alajuela, Costa Rica to make sure we could get there at 1 am. We tried for a couple hours to call their number in Costa Rica, but apparently we didn’t learn the international calling skills in college. Nevertheless Austin finally had the idea to call through Skype. This was our first chance to try out our Spanish skills. Apparently they also speak English at this hostel and my Spanish skills still need some improvement. Anyways we talked with the hostel over the phone and we had everything lined up perfectly for our arrival at 1 am. We took the bus/”L” metro to the airport on our way to Costa Rica…or so we thought.
Alright so here is where things get interesting/stressful/challenging/panic-attack filled. We get to Spirit Airlines 3 hours before our flight and check in to find that our flight is delayed 2 hours due to weather. This makes sense because we could barely see the top of Trump Tower this morning in Chicago, but it wasn’t what we wanted to hear. After some discussing we got our flight moved to this evening. We will stay the night in Fort Lauderdale and leave Florida at 10:52 am on the 20th. Not too big of a deal because we bought travel insurance right? Well wrong because the fine print says travel insurance doesn’t cover “weather related delays”. What exactly does travel insurance cover? I will leave that one for you to imagine (maybe surprise unicorn landings, fairy dustings, or freak black hole appearances). From this point on we are scrambling to try and cancel/change our hostels and buses. Thanks to some family friends (Anne/Dawn THANK YOU!!) we were able to cancel our hostel with a small fee and find out other hostel/hotel information. After many phone calls and time spent on Austin’s droid, we finally have everything figured out. We are only losing about 4 hours of total time and around $50 in non-refundable fees. Not too bad for everything that happened today. God willing we will be writing next in Costa Rica!!
(AUSTIN) The flight from Spirit went pretty smoothly and we arrived in Fort Lauderdale at 12:30. We met a guy named Josh next to us and had a good time socializing with him. He bought us each a Bud Light (not cheap on an airplane) and we chatted during the flight. Sauer and I also planned some day trips by studying the Costa Rica book that we brought…So upon landing we called the hotel that we had made reservations with – they didn’t have them. Also, the free airport shuttle promised to us doesn’t run midnight to 5:00 AM. Perfect. We took a $26 taxi ride to the same hotel anyways and they had space for us. Although we’ll only spend about 7 total hours here, it’s pretty nice (two double beds and complementary breakfast) for only $82. We’re heading back to the airport at 8:30 AM and enjoying some cooling MAX A/C before heading to hot Costa Rica. We still haven’t checked the Costa Rica forecast…maybe we will tomorrow. Love you all!
Matt & Austin
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