In The Beginning........

I thought I would write a little about what I expect on this trip. We are leaving on Tuesday, July 8th at 10:50am on American Airlines flight 552 from Ontario. We fly into Dallas/Fort Worth arriving at 3:50pm. We leave Dallas/Fort Worth at 6:00pm on flight 2167 and arrive in San Jose, Costa Rica at 8:55pm. I am planning on taking 3 or 4 carry-ons, 3 suitcases to check, 1 computer and my purse. Albert will also have 1 suitcase and 1 carry-on.

We will go through customs (which apparently will take forever) and look for the driver who will take us to our first hotel called Finca Rosa Blanca. The drive to the hotel should take about 30 minutes. The hotel is in the city of Santa Barbara de Heredia. You can check out this hotel at http://www.finca-rblanca.co.cr/ . We will be staying in the Villa Laguna for the first 2 nights and then we will move to 2 junior suites called Cafetal & Ventana. I think we will rest the first day there, Wednesday, swimming and getting acquainted with the hotel. I am bringing the Amish Friendship Bread and will need to add flour, sugar and milk on Thursday. I hope the hotel will let me borrow some. On Thursday, July 10, we are planning on touring the hotel as it is a working coffee farm. The tour is called Cafe Britt and we will be taught how the experts taste coffee. It is a short tour and lunch is included. Sounds good to me! On Friday, I think we will do an all day tour. As this is the day we will be leaving this hotel, we will pack and leave our bags downstairs and retrieve them before heading to our next destination.

After our tour, we will come back to the hotel, get our bags and take a shuttle to Turrialba where we will be staying at Turrialtico. You can look up this hotel at http://www.turrialtico.com/ . The trip into Turrialba will take about 1 hour. We are staying in 2 cabins. I am not sure what these rooms will be like. This hotel does not have a swimming pool nor tvs in any of the rooms. Yikes! What will we do! We really onlyhave Saturday to roam the town and check things out because Albert will be heading back to San Jose tonight so he can catch a 8:55am flight home. Albert will be staying at the Adventure Inn near the airport on Saturday night. Look up http://www.adventure-inn.com/ if you want to check out his hotel. Saturday night it is just me and the kids.

On Sunday, we will meet our host family and move into their home. Hopefully the 2 boxes I sent ahead have arrived and I can retrieve them as those boxes have the gifts I purchased for our host family. They are the Quiros Family. The mom and dad are Rolando (age 62) and Marjorie (age 51) and they have 3 children, Ricardo (age 24), Diana (age 21) and David (age 18). Their address is: Calle Puntarenas al frente de ALMACEN DIGRASA, contiguo a Agencia Sthill. And their phone number is (00-506) 557-2897, if anyone needs to reach us. We will get settled in and rest because Monday school begins!

School begins at 8:30am and lasts until 12:30pm. On the first Monday, we will need to test and see how much we know. Quinten will be in a local kindergarten class and Abbey and Jenna will be in a class with children ages 8 to 13. Kasondra and I will be in adult classes depending on our ability. After school, we go home for lunch and siesta! Yeah! Everyone naps! In the afternoons, there are supposed to be optional classes we can take like cooking and dancing. There is also a public pool that we can go to which costs $.50 to enter. I'm a little afraid of the public pool but we have had all our shots.

I am told the activities director at the school will tell us about different excursions we can do on the weekends. I hope to be able to travel to one of the beaches on the Pacific Ocean for one weekend.

Of course there will be the usual....laundry, helping with meals, cleaning up, school work, breaking up fights (hopefully in Spanish). But I also hope there will be laughter, fun, new and exciting experiences and lasting friendships.