Click on the picture to select another country in Central America.Saturday November, 6th 2004
At last! Emma will make her first large trip. We are a bit nervous. Didn't we forget anything?! Emma is awake early, so we take her into our bed for a while. She remains restless. That's why I give Emma her first feeding at six o'clock. The coming two weeks she will only get udder feeding, so hopefully she won't mind getting a bottle when we return! A little before half past seven we get up. There is enough time to give Emma a bath. Afterwards we leave by car for Schiphol. We park our car at 'short parking' and we check in. Then Michael drives to Frank and parks the car in front of his home, while Emma and I are waiting for his return at the Burgerking. When Michael returns we go through customs immediately and then we have just enough time left to feed and change Emma. It's time to board. We get a hanging basket for Emma and that is very nice, even though Emma doesn't want to lie in it a lot. Emma is very awake today and she only sleeps a couple of minutes from time to time. Sometimes she cries softly for less then a minute. She gets udder feeding every three hours, so she gets enough liquid. At take-off and landing we also give her a little water from a bottle and we give make sure she swallows a lot to keep her ears open. Emma doesn't seem to have any problems as a result of flying. Even tough she already has a cold and coughs terribly. The stewards and stewardesses check her well doing regularly. There are new security rules in the US, so customs authorities take our fingerprint and a photograph of our face. They don't even want Emma's fingerprint! Emma gets a first stamp in her passport, whereas the official must search for a while to find an empty page in our passports. While we wait for the next flight Emma sleeps nicely in the maxi cosi. The flight to San Jose leaves half an hour later than planned. To our surprise the american security rules about seatbelts appear to be much less strict then the Dutch, as a result we don't have a seatbelt to attach Emma to my seatbelt. Fortunately Emma is again a perfect child during the trip. This in contrast to a child of a about three year old that keeps crying loudly most of the flight! We land at ten minutes to ten in the evening on the airport of San Jose. The time lost at departure has been made up for. When we leave the plane we immediately get the buggy back, so we don't have to carry the maxi cosi. We go through customs rather fast because we take the line for invalids. Strangely this line has the narrowest passage and the buggy just fits through. We have nothing to declare and are not checked so we can start our search for the employee of Europcar. But I look everywhere and I can't find the employee from Europcar. Someone rings the central office for us but of course there's no one there. But someone else tells us they have seen an employee of Europcar about ten before our arrival. One thinks that that person won't return, but someone else explains the office of Europcar is close to the airport and he has probably gone there to drop off other travelers. We try to think positive because we would not know what to do if they do not come. An American couple arrives a half hour after we've arrived and they have also booked at Europcar. When we almost gave up hope, the bus from Europcar arrives. At the head office it takes some time to get the car. But by half past eleven we can finally leave for hotel elcolibri47 elcolibri47 in Turrúcares. It goes perfectly with the description of the route that we received in advance. The last bit of the road is indeed very bad. The hotel should be lying behind a green door and a green fence, but that color is not very clear from our side and there is hardly any light. We don't see a name or number on the fence either. Because we doubt if we are in front of the right fence we go a bit further down the road. But then the road gets rapidly worse. We even go back to the beginning of the street to see if there is a green fence at the other side of the road. Since we don't find any, we return to the house that was pointed out by our description and based on the numbers at the other houses we conclude that this must really be number 47. Michael decides to hoot, because we can't open the fence from the outside. We are so happy when a men in a bathrobe comes to the door a couple of minutes later. He tells us we were no longer expected because we had not paid in advance. Strange that I missed that message in the e-mail. The owner of the hotel shows us our room and helps us with our luggage. It's almost half past one when we have Emma's bed ready and we can go to sleep. I give Emma a last udder feeding and unfortunately she doesn't want to go to sleep afterwards and it's near half past three when I give her another udder feeding and she finally falls asleep so I can go to sleep myself. Michael is already asleep for ages.
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