After 22 hours travelling door-to-door, we finally made it to our hotel in Costa Rica - hurray! But it wouldn't have been a proper start to our travelling adventure without a few hiccups along the way... Let's see, there was me trying to drag a "minimally packed" 22kg rucksack from our house to the tube in the rain by a side handle, to arriving at the airport to find out that the reason Michael had not been assigned a seat for the second leg of our journey from Houston to San Jose was because he needed an ESTA (nothing a quick call to mother/(superwoman) couldn't fix). This is possibly the most absurd thing I have ever heard considering we were going to be in the US for a total of 76 minutes and had our printed connecting boarding passes in hand. Oh well, once sorted and through security we made an ever so slight fast-paced walk to the gate and arrived "in good time".
At Houston, we had the pleasure of the ever-friendly and helpful US airport staff responding to my question of whether we would make our connection with "we don't expedite anyone" (pretty sure that wasn't my question... only in America?!). Thankfully, though, we did make our flight and after some bad Spanish and many hand gestures ended up sat together.
But, of course, we should have known better than to think landing in San Jose was the end of our journey. Of the very few "phobias" I have, one that is right at the very top of that list is my luggage not appearing on the carousel. And appear, it did not. After my blood pressure calming (slightly) upon realising that others on our flight were in the same situation, and we were not about to start a 4-week adventure with 0 belongings, we hopped in a taxi to our hotel for some much needed sleep.
