Coming...and going

Of the next 24 hours, I will spend nearly 50% of my time in an airport or an airplane. I am presently in the Louisville airport, winding up a great 4-day visit with Sarah’s family. There was horse racing at Churchill Downs, amazing meals cooked in a wood-burning oven, and lots of family time. We’ll return to Boston this afternoon and I’ll be back at Logan airport first thing tomorrow to head out to Costa Rica. I need to be at the airport at 4:30am, and in situations like these, I thank goodness for fiancées!

Though I’ll be landing in San Jose (or, more accurately, Alajuela) in about 24 hours, I still feel a bit unprepared. I don’t quite know where I’ll be sleeping tomorrow night. I found a little hostel but have not received any reply to my email looking for a reservation. This may be due to the fact that I wrote the email in “Spanish”…or what crumbling remainder of my high school language education that might pass as Spanish. Senora Vaimberg would not be pleased. But the hostel sounds pretty neat. Casa Ridgway is run by the Centro de los Amigos para la Paz (Center of Friends for Peace) and “promotes peace through hospitality.” Their website proudly but modestly announces that “a unique feature of our rooms is that they are each in the process of being dedicated to a peace activist.” I’m gunning for the Linus Pauling or Aung San Sun Kyi rooms, but we’ll see! I suppose I can always fall back to my modus operandi for travel accommodations—walk around the city from hostel to hostel, guidebook at hand, hoping to find an empty bed!

Despite the lack of bookings, I do have a tentative outline for my pre-conference week… One night in San Jose, then off to La Fortuna to see Volcan Arenal for a few days (maybe a dip in the hot springs too!), followed by a visit to the cloud forests of Santa Elena and Monteverde.

At present, I think that these blog posts will not be the entertaining and informative (if perhaps rambling) epistles of past blogs. I may feel inspired to write lengthy and insightful entries once I’m on my own (I realized I don’t feel the same need to write things since I’ve already shared all my thoughts with someone—poor Sarah has heard every minor musing thus far!), but more likely I’ll upload a handful of photos with a note or two at each stop.