We have finally arrived in Costa Rica. We spent 2.5 weeks in Montréal with our family and then took a direct flight from Toronto to San José.
It has been a hectic few months packing up our house in Victoria, BC and then trying to fit everything we need into only ten fifty-pound bags. You can’t take too many Barbies or Playmobil items when you are dealing with those limitations.
When trying to limit the items that we were going to take with us, ten bags doesn’t seem like very much but when you are finally lugging them through an airport, they definitely look like a lot. When we were checking in at the airport in Montréal, two young guys within earshot remarked to each other in French that, “they are going to fill the plane with their bags”.
The kids are great travelers at this point (being born into this family, they don’t really have a choice) and the flights were pretty smooth. We were only asked about twenty times, “are we there yet?”, but, you can’t blame them because we were all pretty excited to finally arrive.
We were nervous to go through customs in San José because this time we weren’t merely tourists arriving for a two week trip. However, besides having to lift up our two younger kids for the customs official to be able to match them up with their passport pictures, we weren’t even asked a question.
At the baggage claim, we were happy that nine out of the ten bags made it (a better average than we have had recently just flying within Canada). We had booked a “microbus” in advance to be able to carry five passengers plus tons of luggage but unluckily, the company that we had rented with does not honor reservations so a last minute change of plans had us renting a minivan. Fortunately, we pulled out one row of seats and everything was able to be crammed inside. (Ironically, the one box that didn’t make it allowed this to be possible.) With everyone packed in the car, we set off to drive to Atenas (more info here), a small town 30 minutes from San José that none of us had ever even been to.
