I took the 8:45 bus to San Jose where I met Patti at the bus station. We Ubered (illegal, but everyone uses it for the control it offers the consumer) to SJO to pick up our rental car.
We'd inadvertently booked late and had to scramble to even find a car to rent. Luckily Patti found a smaller organization called U-Save, which has excellent customer service. The rental guys were great, even though we showed up two hours early to pickup our Fiat Uno.
The guys at U-Save insisted that the app Waze is the end-all-be-all of CR driving directions, so we both downloaded the app right there in the office using their wifi. And they provided us with the paper maps I requested, just because I don't trust I'll always have a signal in the hinterlands.
We set the destination for our AirBNB of the first two nights, which was in the Central Valley and actually only 35 kilometers from the airport, and hit the roads.
Never ever equate driving X distance in the US to driving X distance in Costa Rica. You'll be eternally, head bangingly frustrated. It took us about 2 hours to go that 35 kilometers, in a combination of learning how to use the car, learning how to use Waze, going through small towns, curvy mountain roads, back tracking when we didn't follow Waze's instructions properly, changing the instructions in Waze after a quick call to our AirBNB host.
And then we made it to our site in San Pedro de Poás. The unit was beautiful, the yard was beautiful and the weather was beautiful. There was a sweet dog in residence named Rosita. At night it was in the lower 60s and we could look out and see the lights of Alajuela and all of San Jose.
