Red eye

I had a direct flight to San Jose, Costa Rica with an hour "stay on the plane" stop in Guatamala and arrived at the San Jose Airport around 9:30 AM.  I had never been on a true "red eye" flight before, just super early flights, and actually didn't intend on ever taking one.  My original flight was booked for 7:30 AM with a layover in El Salvador, where Cora, flying from Houston, would meet me and we would fly into San Jose together.  The partner airline, however, decided to cancel the 7:30 flight or get rid of it altogether, and moved my flight up to 1:30 AM with the same layover in El Salvador.  I had no intention of waiting in a foreign country for 10 hours, so I gave customer service a call only to find out that even though the flight change was the airlines' fault, I could only change flights if they had one available for the same number of miles I had used to redeem my initial flight.  I don't know if that even makes sense, but after another phone conversation with a super nice customer representative, I was able to get the new "direct" flight and even get Cora one too!

So, I arrived a good two hours before Cora's flight in San Jose and just like last year in Santa Fe, I had planned to greet her at her gate when she arrived.  Airport security wouldn't allow me to "re-enter" the airport nor wait in front of customs, so I found myself waiting outside with a slew of annoying taxi drivers with no cellular connection or Wi-Fi.  I just hoped that Cora would figure it out and make her way to me somehow, and after two hours, she did!  We took a taxi to our hotel and soon made our way to Multiplaza, the largest shopping center in Costa Rica.  We had lunch and smoothies, and spent the afternoon window shopping as the clothes were way overpriced.  The mall, interestingly enough, also held mini soccer games, pool competitions, swim demonstrations, and even cheer leading performances, so we were never bored.

We asked our hotel for the 7:15 PM complimentary shuttle back and we waited for a good 20 minutes, so when 7:20 rolled around and a driver shouts out our hotel name, we immediately get in and believe that we are on our back.  We were very wrong.  Apparently, our hotel forgot us entirely and the guy who picked us up was supposed to pick up another person going to the same hotel in a different city!  So, of course, we realize this when we are almost at the wrong hotel, so the driver has to swing around and take us back to the mall to pick up the other guy and then figure out how to get to our "out of the way" hotel.  *sigh*  We eventually make it back to our hotel and go to sleep by 9 PM, exhausted by the flight and day's events.