Pete + Latin America = Adventure

I had the timeliness to schedule a business trip to Costa Rica on what would be game 6 of the NBA finals. A co-worker also noted that I scheduled a business trip on the night of the NCAA basketball finals as well. I guess I need to do a better job of looking at the calendar for major sporting events before I schedule any more trips. So as Boston was clinching world title number 17, (ALL HAIL THE CHAMPION CELTICS!!!!!!) I was tracking the game while watching Spanish SportsCenter and calling home for updates. But, that was nothing compared to my trip down to San Jose.

Apparently I'm not allowed to have any easy trips to Latin America. Hurricane Wilma will hopefully never be topped, but this was an interesting flight to say the least. Everything started well enough. We landed in Houston early and there didn't appear to be any troubles when boarding the flight for San Jose, Costa Rica. We were scheduled to land at 8:45PM. After being in flight for a while, I checked my watch and noticed that it was 8:45. No worries, maybe just a little late. 9:00 passed and so did 9:15 without any announcement from the crew. Finally at 9:30 the pilot announced that the airport in San Jose was closed due to fog and that we would be landing in Liberia. I hurried to find Liberia in the Continental magazine. It is a small resort town in the northwest corner of Costa Rica.....about a 30 minute flight and 3 hour bus ride from San Jose.

The pilot made a quick landing and told us that we were going to try to wait out the fog and get into San Jose that night. After 3 hours on the ground (and in the plane) in Liberia, the crew gave up hope. Unfortunately, the customs crew had given up on us and went home. They were called back in while we waited for another hour. There was another bit of bad news. Since it was tourist season, there weren't enough hotel rooms available, so we would have to double up. Yup, we had to bunk up with complete strangers. The ground crew originally tried to even have different genders bunk up together, but that didn't fly.

I was one of the first out of the airport with my new buddy, a guy who had moved to Costa Rica a couple years ago from Arizona. Nice enough guy, but a smoker. The hotel was on the coast, about a half hour bus ride away. Continental was great enough though to pick up the entire tab, including phone calls and food. The weather also brought down the AT&T line, but my new buddy had an internet phone that allowed me to call home and worry the heck out of Julie. Yeah!!!

After a few hours of sleep, we were bused back to the mini airport to be flown down to San Jose. Just another adventurous trip to Latin America. Glad to be home again.