Our last night in Costa Rica and trip home did not go as smoothly as we had originally hoped. We took an early morning $20 taxi ride to Tamarindo to catch our bus at 8:15. This was our last chance to ride on the traditional rocky Costa Rican roads before headed back to concrete highways. We arrived around 8 to wait for the Grayline bus. Most of the time we spent looking around for the bus to make sure we didn’t miss it. It was about 20 minutes late, but it eventually made it. The ride back to the San Jose airport was relaxing and comfortable in an air-conditioned ride. We made one pit stop at a cafeteria where we got another glimpse of howler monkeys. These creatures were not afraid of humans and dropped several melons on top of our vans. They had a little fun setting of alarms. There also were a couple wild macaws that flew right up to where we were eating. Only in Costa Rica.
We made it to the airport around 12, and found out that we couldn’t check in to the airport until 10 (our flight was scheduled for 1 am). The only store that was open around the airport didn’t even sell sandwiches. We purchased Peanut M & M’s and some Doritos for around $10. We finally found a small pizza shop near the exit of the airport where we each bought a personal pan pizza and a soda for $5. Now we just needed to kill 10 hours at an airport. I (Sauer) did a little souvenir shopping and bought some coffee/chocolates for the family. We then found a balcony above the main floor of the airport which was completely empty. We set up camp there and traded off between movies, the dot game, talking about buying cards, and sleeping. Aside from sitting on the hard floor, the wait wasn’t all that bad.
At 10 we rushed over to the Spirit booth to check in for our flight. We noticed that no other booths were open at this time meaning this was the only flight in the entire airport this late. We thought there wouldn’t be any problems with taking off on time. However, Spirit has a way of messing things up. There was some type of problem with the airplane (Spirit says weather, the lady at the front desk tried to say maintenance, who really knows what happened). Either way we had no idea how long the flight would be delayed and we would miss our connection in Ft. Lauderdale. We checked in and knew there was nothing else we could do about the situation till we heard more. By this time we were starving (we had two small pizzas, soda, M & M’s, and Doritos for a 10 hour span). However, nothing was open right away in the airport. We wandered around looking for a vending machine, but had no luck. Eventually they opened up a small shop around 12 am where we bought two waters and a $9 sandwich that we split. It was pretty basic with ham, cheese, and maybe lettuce. I was too worried to sleep so I ended up watching 3:10 to Yuma. Austin took a nap on the floor until they finally told us around 2 am to head to a different gate. Our flight had arrived and we were set to take off around 3 am. They still had no idea if we would get a connecting flight to Chicago and we were worried about missing our Megabus that we had already book there too. We finally left Costa Rica shortly after 3 and heading back to the US.
After filling out customs forms right away, they let us sleep on the plane till we landed around 7 am. We obviously missed our connecting flight, but hurried off the plane to find out more info about our new flight. We flew through customs with no problems and made a bee line to the information table. There we found out they book us another flight to Chicago but it was scheduled to arrive at 6 pm, much later than our Megabus. Since our final destination was Minneapolis we tried to get a different flight there. They told us we could talk to the other airline (US Airways?) and see if we could switch the ticket. Otherwise they could give us a refund of the cost of this ticket. They also gave us meal tickets for the airport equaling $28. Side note: Spirit Airlines did not go through this much trouble with us when our first flight was delayed for weather reasons leading us to believe it was something else. Anyways we headed off to US Airways to try and change our flight to Minneapolis.
We got to the US Airways information desk and found out a flight through them to Minneapolis was around $400, and our ticket was non-refundable. Nothing we could do there. Our options were to fly to Chicago with this ticket or book separately our own ticket to Minneapolis. We eventually decided to take our flight to Chicago (which was actually a flight to North Carolina and then Chicago) and book a $200 flight out of Chicago for Minneapolis. We got all ready and we went through the security checkpoint. We ignored a couple calls during the line from my mom because we figured it wasn’t urgent. However, when we got to the other side we found out that she found a flight for $150 from Ft. Lauderdale to Minneapolis in a couple hours. This was the cheapest and most direct flight so we had to take it. We booked those tickets quick and headed out to try and get our ticket reimbursed. We headed to Spirit first and they told us we had to call some number to get our money back. She also mentioned the little fact that we had already checked in so it looks like we are no shows right now. At this point we had about 13 minutes until our original flight was set to take off. So we sprinted back to US Airways and quickly asked that they cancel our tickets so it says we did not fly this flight. Afterword we called the Spirit airlines numbers and found out that they could see our information, but we needed to talk to an agent to get our ticket reimbursed. So we ran back over to Spirit airlines and started talking to another man. This guy was extremely rude to Austin by asking him to give him the short version of his story when that obviously wouldn’t explain anything. However, God works in mysterious ways and the first lady we talked to after we got off the airplane was working farther down at another desk. We talked to her and she knew exactly what to do. She set us up for reimbursement and it sounds like we will get the money back. Finally we were off to check in at another terminal for Chicago.
After going through security and finding our gate, we finally had a chance to breathe and enjoy our meal coupons. We bought two chicken Caesar wraps, some fruit smoothies, water, and chips for $28. A ripoff but it was all free to us. It tasted great after not eating a lot in the last 24 hours. I also got some Dunkin Donuts coffee, which we need to get in Minnesota. Our remaining flights went without any problems. We made it to Chicago on time, and grab some McDonald’s quick to hold us off till we made it back to Austin’s. We got to Minneapolis on time and were finally home. Anne was there to pick us up and drive us back to the Savat household where they had a nice dinner set up with black beans on the side. Our adventure to Costa Rica was finally over. Was it worth all the extra traveling/headache? I would say the trip was worth every penny. We enjoyed sites that we will probably never see again in our lives.
It didn’t all go smoothly as planned, but when does life ever go smoothly? God is still in sovereign control over our lives and everything worked out one way or the other. Until next time. Pura Vida!
