Last week has been a blur of heavy workload, fun times with friends, and enjoying a great visit by the parents. Hopefully in a day or two we'll have some pictures off of their digital camera to share. For the time being we'll just have to enjoy one of Louie crossing a water obstacle *on the main highway*. Beautiful country this... not only do we have great surf, fantastic beaches, friendly people and nice weather, but you get to go wheelin' on a daily basis, like it or not.

Labels: travel

She had a great time in Spanish school up in Guatemala and returned a much more fluent speaker.
Steve is feeling a bit of envy that she got to go to Guatemala without him, but mostly just feeling happy to have her around again.

Well, here we go... famous again.
Traveling with AutoHome Rooftop Car Tents
Ok, maybe not famous. Maybe not even recognized outside of a very small circle consisting of people who are highly interested in overland Central American travel. But at least someone is tooting our horn, which is always kind of fun.
The tents that these guys sell, incidentally, are fantastic. We still have the maggiolina model and it is still the best camping structure I've ever slept in. Good stuff.

Labels: landcruiser

Man, of all the stupid things I've heard recently, this is in the top ten, for sure.
A close friend is flying to the States soon. Her ticket is from here to Atlanta, where she clears customs and immigration, then on to Charlotte, NC.
Her travel plans have changed and now she wants to stay in Atlanta. We called Delta and the stubborn folks on the end of the phone insist that she has to pay $159 in order to change the ticket so that she does not continue on to Charlotte.
It is super-important to understand here that she is already off of the plane with her bag at the customs/immigration. Then she has to get her bags, check them, and go BACK on a plane to Charlotte.
What Delta is insisting is that she must PAY EXTRA in order to NOT use their services!!
Have you ever heard such a thing? And why on earth has someone at Delta decided that this is an acceptable thing to do to clients?
Here's the biggest kicker- Why not just leave the airport? It would make their records screwed up, costing time and money. It would create a problem with bording the next flight. It would mean that Delta could resell the seat. It would mean at least one and possibly two happy customers. Where in that equation does it indicate that Delta loses money?
And before anyone asks, yes, we did talk to a supervisor.
If it were me, I'd be sorely tempted to just walk away...
The most surprising part to me is that I've always been very happy with the service I get from Delta. This seems out of character for them.

Labels: travel

Ok, she isn't actually missing. More like I'm missing her. After years of talking about taking some Spanish classes, Bb finally decided to head up to Guatemala for two weeks, live with a Guatemalan family, and study five hours of Spanish daily. Four days into it and she is very pleased with her progress.

Of course, her being away puts me back into psuedo-bachelorhood, which isn't nearly as fun as it seems like I should think it would be. Mostly I miss my best friend.

Apparently pseudo-bachelorhood for me involves insane amounts of work. I've been doing 12-14 hours/day. Doesn't leave much time for anything else once you factor in taking care of the pup, sleeping, and eating. And the pup is definately getting the short end of the stick- I manage to get her to the beach for a half hour almost every day, and she hangs out at the office, but I'm sure she misses having two owners to play with instead of one.

Yesterday was fun- went down to Nosara for some business... the client I was with had another meeting as well so I hit the beach for a few hours of surfing, then had some lunch and read a book on the beach for an hour. Great little mini vacation!

Then we checked out a beautiful property, which is always fun and reminds me that while I was stuck working on a Saturday, it could have been a lot worse!

BBQ'd a chicken for dinner, went to bed earlyish with a huge thunder/lightning storm blasting the house- I actually got woken up twice by thunder. The poor dog was freaked out and kept wanting to go outside to look around (which involved her whining at my face, then when I got up, trotting to the front door and barking... annoying)

But I still managed to pull my tired bones out of bed this morning at 5am to catch some surf. The waves weren't all that great, and the break was unusually crowded, but I had fun and got a few hours of exercise. Now I'm sipping my coffee, catching up on email, and trying very hard to resist the temptation to "just take care of a few things" at work. Need a day at home to take care of stuff here- the house is a mess.

Looking forward to Bb's return, but I'm also very excited for her- based on her typing I can already see an improvement in her Spanish, which is GREAT.

Labels: travel

Trying really hard to not work on the weekends these days. Not an easy task- most of my US clients are accustomed to the notion that real estate is sort of a weekend job. Fortunately, Costa Rica in general rejects the notion of accomplishment on Sundays, no matter how hard we try, so I'm frequently reminded of the futility of putting my nose to the grindstone seven days a week. And of course there is the constantly expanding list of things to do at home and on the 'Cruisers, which can more than fill my weekends if I'm feeling the need to be productive.
Like Saturday, for example. The starter was starting to act odd on the HJ60 so after looking around for some info online I dove into rebuilding the starter contacts. The big mystery of the project was "Can I find new contacts that will work, here, in a day?". The answer, as it turns out, is "sorta". You get pretty accustomed to that answer when you live in Costa Rica.

Starter from the HJ60 (diesel) on the left and starter from the FJ60 (gas), big difference!	Worn out contacts on the hj's starter	New contacts, almost the same... sorta. Hopefully close enough.

Labels: landcruiser

Came across this photo online today.
Now I'm not sure if it is a hoax or not, but... if real it definately reinforces my belief that sometimes people complain about the wrong things. Sheesh.

This may seem like a trivial issue to some, but for years I've been a little puzzled at how to effectively plot GPS data onto the local (pretty darn good) topographic maps. See the problem is that the maps are made according to Costa Rica Lambert North (and South, but I live and spend most of my time in the "north" part). Thus the maps will have data points that are measured like 320030 253712 (which is somewhere near my office) but the GPS was spitting out coordinates in standard Degrees, hours, minutes...
so it was very difficult to use the GPS and the map together.
Fortunately for me, a client of mine spoke to an engineer and got started down the path to solving the problem. With the information he provided, I got online (boy Google is handy) and found a text in Spanish that specifically addresses configuring a Garmin GPS to read Lambert North.
On my eMap it is done as follows:
1) push "menu" twice
2) select "Setup"
3) push left twice
4) on the Advanced tab, go to Location Format and select "User UTM Grid"
5) enter Longitude Origin W84* 40.000', scale 0.99996, False Easting 499800m, False Northing -885244m
6)hit save
7)scroll down to Map Datum and choose "NAD27 Central"

There, you're done. It's just that simple. Hope this helps some of you out there, I think it'll help me quite a bit both with having fun and work.