Spring Break has turned into quite an adventure here! Haleigh and I met this morning to take a taxi to the bus station to meet the rest of our group and buy tickets to La Fortuna, the town by Volcano Arenal where we're staying for the weekend. After just a few minutes in the taxi we could tell that our driver either didn't know where he was going or was just trying to drive us around to rack up our bill. At first we weren't too concerned because we had like 40 minutes before the bus was going to leave. We eventually got dropped off at a big bus station where we saw a group of LASP students.
Unfortunately, it was not the group we were looking for and we had gotten dropped off at the wrong bus station. Our bus was scheduled to leave at 8:40 and we arrived at the wrong station at 8:30! The other LASPers gave us directions to the right bus stop, and we quickly hopped into another taxi and asked the driver to hurry to the other station. Thank God he knew where ti was and we got to the station just in time. Megan was waiting for us with our tickets, and we rushed into some of the last seats on the bus just in time for its departure.
We had fun chatting with some of the other people on the bus, and the 4 hour ride to La Fortuna seemed really quick. As soon as we got off the bus we were bombarded with agents trying to sell us hotel rooms saying the whole town was full for the weekend. We wrote them off as scams and went to find some lunch. The coffee shop we stopped at was awesome and we loved the waffles with tropical fruit and ice cream we got there. After lunch we began hotel shopping and quickly found out that the agents at the bus station were not lying. There's a bike race going on here this weekend and all of the hotels really are full!
Luckily the owner of one hotel we stopped at offered to drive us to another place he thought might have room. It was a little far out of town, and there were no rooms there, but the man there called another place for us to try. Our new shuttle driver took us way out of town to a lodge in the country where we found one room with two beds open. The six of us eagerly reserved the room and asked for extra blankets to sleep on the floor.
The area around the lodge is absolutely beautiful, and this place will certainly do for at least one night. The biggest downfall is that its too far from town to walk, so we have to get taxis to go back and forth. The owner of our lodge called specific taxi drivers who know where the place was when we needed to go into town for dinner. We were all taken aback a bit when two completely black cars drove up to drive us into town, but our host gave them specific directions about where to take us (he had a tour reservation place that he wanted us to check out to make plans for tomorrow).
At the reservation place they tried to sell us all kinds of packages, but we settled for a simple zip lining deal. They agreed to pick us up tomorrow at 10:10, so we'll see how that goes. We stopped at a fruit shop after making the reservations and then found a place for dinner. After dinner we went grocery shopping for breakfast tomorrow and then found some payphones to check in with our host moms who all requested updates to know we were safe. By the time we made our way back to our hotel (this time in a clearly legit red taxi-van), we we all pretty tired and ended up just hanging out for the night. Snacks, movies and girl talk made for a perfect conclusion to our somewhat crazy day.
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