Day 36, Jaco, Costa Rica
Travel day. Paul is going to Atlanta for a week. Before he left we did critical things, like picking up 25 gallons of water and watching the Canadian vs Costa Rican soccer game.
It just so happened that Kier’s friend was flying in on the same plane Paul was then flying out on. We booked a private shuttle with a guy named Steve. We see him almost daily in the coffee shop, he was a former fire fighter in California. Kier rode in with her dad and then picked up Derek.
Everything went smoothly until about 1:30 am when the headlight fuse blew in Steve’s car. There are no streetlights on the road from the airport to our town on the coast. The roads are twisty and unpredictable, with no lines, black asphalt, in the pitch black night. The road, jungle, and night are just one black abyss.
Steve turned on his flashers but couldn’t see very well even at 25 km an hour. So Kier turned on her iphone flashlight and stuck her hand out the window. She shone it on the right hand side to illuminate the edge of the road. When cars approached she would point the flashlight in their direction and wave it to make them more visible. Kier is level-headed in a pinch, good at thinking on her feet. When she told me the story the next morning, it reminded me of another.
When I was a kid, we did summer road trips in cars with issues. Some repairs were higher up on fix-it list than others. As we drove through the Rockies there were often single lane tunnels. At the entrance a sign read, Honk your Horn Before entering. Our horn didn’t work, so my mom told us to stick our heads out the window and scream. My brother was way to cool for that and used his whistle. These days there’s probably an app for that.
Back to now. By the time they got to Jaco, Kier said her arm was cold from being out the window, but they were safe.