Hi again,
As you probably know by now if you've been reading along, I'm a frugal guy. What you might not know about me is that there are several people in my life who are even better with a penny. My friend Adam is such a person, and many of my new friends in Costa Rica are even more so. I mean frugality in the best sense of the word though - it is a quality, described by Ben Franklin as thrift, that we Americans and indeed much of the world should strive to emulate.
This trip began as a dream between two friends on a hammock camping trip in the early spring. I had just renewed my passport at the behest of my girlfriend. Her urging, with no expectation of benefit or gain for herself, was that a random beautiful stranger might invite me to Paris someday, and I'd have to decline because my passport wasn't renewed. After a few weeks of gentle nudging, I gave in to Anna and filed all the papers. That was somewhere around June 18th.
After I filed, I started thinking about what to do with my passport and then had a conversation with my college friend Adam. We met at Bates in the fall of 99 at Clason House, and he has been one of the most consistent and steadfast friends a guy could ask for. He is reasonable in many of the ways I consider myself to be, and totally cheap (oh sorry, I meant thrifty). He, like me, has blue collar roots and self describes as "salt de la terre" or salt of the earth. This is the highest compliment he pays to others, and I have been lucky enough to be a recipient. So when he said he found tickets to San Jose Costa Rica for $400 from Logan, I said that it sounded like a great adventure.
Since Adam found the tickets, I got the rental car and chose a small 4wd - Suzuki Jimny. I hadn't driven stick in a few years, but I missed the feel of absolute control over the car and the ability to pop start in the case of a dead battery (I thought it might be useful, since on trips there's so much to charge and so much to think about that it's easy to forget to turn off a light and end up with a dead battery. I made the assumption that since Adam and I are so similar in so many ways, he'd pick up driving manual transmission like he was born to it (although he hadn't had a manual since 1998).
That last bit was a mistake. I didn't realized that Adam hadn't driven stick in so long, or that he was so nervous about doing so in a foreign country with narrow roads and many one way bridges and strange intersections. In my hubris and my excitement (as well as my implied friendship/brotherhood assumption that he could do and feel confident doing anything I could do) I pigeonholed us into only one driver for the trip. I don't mind driving, but that became problematic in a few instances.
The trip began, as so many do, in a flurry of excitement and adventure. I applied for my passport 5.5 weeks ahead of the trip, and thought I could get away with not expediting because my girlfriend got hers in 3. I waited patiently for 4 weeks, then called and paid extra for the espediting service. With a few days to go, I still didn't have a passport in my hand. I researched the options, and the day I was to depart for the trip I waited rather impatiently to hear back from my postal carrier that my passport had indeed arrived. Anna advised me to check my credit card statement to ensure that the nation passport agency had charged my card for expedtion.
No passport. After several hours on hold with operators who didn't know the status and couldn't talk to the National Passport Center, they told me it might be at the processing center in Portsmouth NH. So I gathered all my paperwork and embarked on my trip, fully packed for Costa Rica just in case I got my passport that day. I probably drove too fast, but I arrived by two. They were able to find my passport, apologized for not expediting, and turn it around in less than an hour. Worth the drive. To celebrate, I had a great burger and a beer at a local hangout, and amused the bartender by telling her my story of woe.
Then I drove to Boston, after a short stop at the NH liquor store. One can't travel without cheap booze, now can they? I got to Boston for 4:30, picked up my friend and went to Boston Beer Works just outside of Fenway. We re-packed, decided to risk street parking and slept for a few hours (11-3 if I remember correctly). No ticket in the morning, and then we drove to the long term airport parking and got on our flights. It was dark and we were in a rush, so I forgot a few things (most notably my camping supplies, bluetooth headset and digital camera) but we got on the plane with no issues.
