Promised to post some interesting previously-unpublished photos from our trip... so here they are! The first is a shot of Steve driving along a "road" from Fortuna to Tilaran. In fairness, the locals did say that the road was impassable... but we decided to take it anyway. The second shot is of a pretty little valley further up the "road", almost at Monteverde. Both taken back in June of 01.

Ok, that may be a slight exaggeration, but Steve really doesn't like San Jose. Driving in San Jose is even worse. But due to circumstances beyond our control-- we had to go pick up our renewed residency documents-- we spent a night enjoying the hospitality of our friend Laine, which included a fantastic meal at a restaurant that might be called Olio, but on account of needing to finish a second bottle of wine to obtain the cool-shaped bottle the details of the restaurant's name and location are slightly less than razor-sharp.
While in SJ we also finally got the paperwork for the purchase of Louie finished. Ok, not really finished, but at least signed. Now we are waiting for the up-till-now-borderline-negligent lawyer to submit the papers such that the vehicle becomes fully legal. We have no confidence at all that the transaction will move forward in a timely manner. Note to selves: Next time, use our own lawyer because at least we are familiar with his attention span and he is here in town vs. having to travel four hours. Note to everyone: In our experience, all Tico lawyers are much less attentive to time than what we have expected, even correcting for the fact that we are in a time-inattentive country. It is actually an understood joke that most of us gringos tell to laugh instead of cry out of frustration.
So we made it there and back in Louie, enjoying yet again the amazing mileage improvment of driving a diesel cruiser instead of a gas powered one- total fuel consumption for the roughly 600 km travelled was just under 50 liters. That works out to 8.3 liters per 100km.... which is really good mileage for a hilly freeway drive combined with a bit of city driving (and SJ is definately city driving-- gostopgostopgostopgostop avoid killing scooter driver who is inexplicably splitting lanes in opposing directions to run a red light gostopgostopgostop swerve to miss street vendor carrying 200 steering wheel wraps gostopgostopgostop slam on brakes to prevent getting killed by bus that couldn't be bothered with stoplight... etc) in "we are too lazy to use the same units that the rest of the world uses" terms that works out to 28.34 mpg (according to www.pege.org, I didn't check their math so don't blame me if it is dead wrong). In any terms, it is really excellent fuel mileage for a vehicle that weighs more than 2 tonnes (or tons, either way it is close enough).
Caly was very happy to have us home again after our journey. We've gotten into a morning ritual with her in which we put the beadspread on the bed and she jumps up to get attention. This morning we forgot and got up without petting her. When Jocelyn returned to the room to grab something, Caly actually sat, staring at the bed, with her begging face on (dog owners, you know what I mean) until J covered it, whereupon Caly immediately jumped up amidst tremendous tail wagging. Cute.

Labels: travel

While poking around the web looking for iPod content I came acrossaurgasm, which bills itself as "your favorite music you've never heard". Not sure I'd go that far, but so far the recommendations are worth listening too.
Now if only we had a faster connection and had figured out a good way to listen in our truck (ok, headphones work, but are far from ideal) we could really get this working right.
Even the most interesting travel destination is that much better with a soundtrack.