Costa Rica (From Day 1)

After a long day of travel I’m finally here at La Montaña in Costa Rica. I’m in a very nice room with the beautiful sounds of the jungle pouring in from outside, filling the room. Joe said that if I sit outside early in the morning, I might see a monkey or two in the trees. He said it’s a great place to spend time with God, and that it seems to spiritually bring him close to what it must have been like in the Garden of Eden, surrounded by the overwhelming presence of God’s creation. I’m looking forward to it. Right now it’s just dark outside, though with the sounds and smells, there’s plenty that my imagination can see.

It sounds like I’m going to hit the ground running and have all the busy, full days on the front end of my visit here. We have a Men’s Conference this weekend, and then days planned out to spend time teaching their staff, then working with them to make a rules video for their “summer” season of camp, which starts in November. Then, next weekend I’ll get some time to relax and tour around a little bit.

The trip was largely uneventful. I spent the night last night at Andy’s new apartment in Fresno, and then he graciously drove me to the airport at 5:45am after dropping my car off at the Fresno Hume office. When we were about to leave in the faint light of morning we realized that we were wearing matching Hume:SD shirts.

On the first flight, I had a middle seat and both people on either side of my slept the whole time. I just read the whole time. The first thing that I did when I arrived in Dallas was to ride the complete loop on the Skytrain stopping at each terminal to see what made each of them unique. Terminal D was by far the best, with high arching glass ceilings and two story indoor restaurant/shop areas. It was clearly the newest terminal. (Unless Terminal E came later, but they chose to model it after the late seventies utilitarian style cues of Terminals A-C) Actually, come to think of it, the whole airport was like LAX, just spread out bigger and wider over miles of open land with Terminal D, corresponding to the Tom Bradley International Terminal that we have at LAX. The whole airport was pretty boring except for a few fun interactive art sculptures in Terminal D (the kind that you have to walk through to get where you want to go).

There were many white, middle-American-looking travelers. It seemed that 95% of the non-white people that I saw were airport employees. I noticed lots of army people everywhere. I even stumbled across two USO events happening in the terminals! The funny thing was that they ran the audio feed for these shows over the annoncement speaker system in the terminals; the boarding announcements would always override whatever else was going on. One of them even had the National Anthem being sung, which made it especially funny because people where awkwardly standing, but not sure if they should be since they couldn’t see what was going on from where they had been sitting. Most of the people near me sat down when they heard the first “LAST CALL FOR BOARDING GROUPS 1-2 ON FLIGHT 6128 WITH FINAL DESTINATION, NEW YORK”, interrupting our beloved national anthem.

I almost got some Fried Chicken at a Popeye’s, or a fatty Big Mac at MacDonald’s just to be able to say that I tried some local culture. But, I just couldn’t bring myself to do it. I ended up getting a bagel sandwhich at Einstein’s and then satisfied my Mid-West fix with a Styrofoam cup of Dunkin Doughnuts Coffee. It tasted like gas station coffee, and the DD reminded me of Timmy Horton’s in Canada. I think I liked Timmy’s better. Karley, I’ll still have to believe that the Dunkin Doughnuts that you have in Wisconsin serve different coffee than the on at the Dallas Fort Worth Airport.

The flight from Dallas to San Jose, Costa Rica was on a larger plane that was not full. I had a whole open row to myself in the back. I think I fell asleep before we even got on the runway, because I remember waking up to hear the captain say that we had reached cruising altitude and somehow I already had my seatbelt on. I read most of the rest of the flight.

I made it through customs just fine, my bags went through the xray, but they either weren’t looking at the screen or they didn’t care. I was a little nervous, so it was a relief. When I got out on the street I didn’t notice anybody with a sign for me, and didn’t notice anybody that might be trying to notice me, so I borrowed a cell phone from a friendly stranger and called Joe Pent’s home. His wife answered, said he was there, then hung up to call him on his cell phone. Before he could answer my friendly stranger friend started yelling in Spanish for anybody from Campemento Christiano. It worked. Joe turned around, saw me, and we had a nice hour long ride in the cloud forest getting to know each other.

I’m looking forward to a good week.