Tag Archives: travel

On the Road

Costa Rica or Bust!

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I was truly bursting with excitement about our upcoming trip to Costa Rica. This girl needed a dose of nature. George, our latest pet sitter for Ella (from trustedhousesitters.com), arrived on Friday, so we took him to Tiramisu for our now traditional pisco sour toast.

Awwww… here we are, feeling all optimistic that things would go as planned. (counterclockwise, Tony’s giant face, our friend Lisa from Nido, me, our visiting friend Brian who worked with us in Delhi and now works at our old school in Shanghai, our petsitter George)

Tony and I hit the road on Saturday morning at the crack of dawn.

And then it all went to custard.

We called an Uber at 5 a.m., but when it arrived, the driver refused to take us to the airport. Another Uber answered my call, but he also refused. I later found out an Uber driver had been shot by police at the airport the other day, so I understand their trepidation. Still, we were stressed. Our concierge called a taxi for us, and we got the airport with plenty of time to spare.

As it turned out, we had way too much time to spare. Our 8 a.m. flight was delayed. And delayed again. Until eventually it became clear that we would miss our connection in Lima, Peru. I was determined to get to Costa Rica on time so that we could kick off my amazing itinerary and head straight to Tortuga Lodge and Gardens. Check it out. Can you see why I felt eager to get there?

We had already planned to spend one night in San Jose, Costa Rica, and then drive to La Pavona on Sunday to catch a boat to the lodge. However, if we got stuck in Lima, we wouldn’t be able to get to that paradise till Monday. Maniacally, I researched flights and thought I found a solution: We would book on another airline.

So we finally boarded our Latam Airlines flight from Santiago to Lima. The plane had to have been from the Wright Brothers era. I mean, our seats felt like they were made from plywood, and our armrests had ashtrays! I started watching “Pitch Perfect 2” on the in-flight entertainment, but the system broke down about halfway through the movie and never recovered.

When we arrived in Lima, our luggage didn’t. We were among about 20 people who had missed connections and whose luggage had gone AWOL. We waited at the luggage carousel for about 30 minutes while a Latam representative calmly and kindly kept reassuring us that they would find our bags. Finally, she gave us vouchers for a hotel in Lima. It was Novotel, which I know to be a lovely and fairly upscale hotel chain. Unfortunately, it turned out to be mediocre. Tony called it the “No Votel.” But, whatever, they gave us three free meals.

I continued to research alternate flights to Costa Rica, but we couldn’t do anything until our suitcases surfaced. Dang it.

I’ve been doing a 7-day gratitude challenge on an app called Calm, and today the meditation was all about feeling gratitude in the face of adversity. F**K that. I was cranky.

I washed my underwear in the sink, and Tony ventured out to find toothbrushes and toothpaste. (Yes, yes, we’ve been traveling for umpty million years and we should know to pack a change of underwear and toothbrushes in our carry-on. Please don’t lecture.)

We were so exhausted that we crashed at 7:30 p.m. and slept all night. In the morning, I checked with the hotel’s front desk. No call from Latam. No luggage. Tony thought he was so funny with his jokes like, “What are you going to wear today?” and “We have to leave in 30 minutes and we still haven’t packed!”

We headed back to the airport at 8 a.m. The Latam lady said our bags were still lost. She asked us to check back in an hour. We wandered around the airport until the designated time, at which point she told us to come back in 30 minutes. So we did. Still no news. She gave us a voucher for lunch at the food court. After our greasy lunch, we wandered back to the Latam counter, where she told us our luggage had been found! It was put on our flight to San Jose. Hooray!

We walked buoyantly to our gate, feeling like FINALLY we were kicking off this vacation. We hunkered down to wait for our flight to Costa Rica. I had come to grips with the fact that we were going to miss one day at Tortuga Lodge. I was disappointed, but more than anything, I just wanted to get there.

Suddenly, a crabby Latam Airlines lady invaded our tranquility to ask for our yellow fever paperwork. We were like, “What?” She asked if we had stayed in Peru … because apparently you need a yellow fever shot if you travel from Peru to Costa Rica. “Well, yes, we did stay one night here because Latam lost our luggage,” I told her. She huffed and stomped away with our passports. Another passenger, a British guy who we now call Tony’s doppelganger because they looked freakily alike, overheard our conversation. He had also missed his connection to Costa Rica and stayed at our same hotel the night before. Apparently, the airline had warned him that he might encounter some problems because of his lack of yellow fever certification.

Eventually, crabby lady brought our passports back with “OK” scribbled on our boarding passes.

When we arrived in San Jose, we hustled to the immigration line, sweating about whether we would be asked about the yellow fever thing. The doppelganger was a couple people ahead of us in line. We watched him with bated breath and sighed with relief when he got his passport stamp without any drama. When it was our turn, our guy was pretty friendly and chatty. He didn’t balk at the fluorescent pink Peru stamps in our passports, but simply asked us about our professions, made a little small talk, and then found a spot to plant that coveted Costa Rica stamp. Whew!

We proceeded to the baggage claim, where – hallelujah! – our suitcases actually plopped on to the carousel with a smug sense of accomplishment. We got local SIM cards for our phones and cash in the local currency (colón), which is confusingly .0018 to the dollar. Then we caught the shuttle to the rental car agency, picked up our Suzuki Jimmy, and headed to a nearby hotel for the night. Tomorrow morning, bright and early (because we found out there will be a protest about some proposed tax), we’ll head to Tortuga Lodge.

Here we are, all stinky and greasy and relieved to finally get our luggage.

Stay tuned for our Costa Rica adventures!

Daily Life, On the Road, Uncategorized

Why travel?

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“This is what it’s all about,” I thought to myself as I stared out the window of our 787-8 Dreamliner. I had never seen anything like it. At first, I thought it was sky. Hazy, pewter sky. Then I spotted a boat and realized we were buzzing the Persian Gulf. Soon, swirly barren islands created a paisley pattern in the water, and clustered buildings rose like a sandcastle city from the sea. Beyond the city, the pale desert stretched to the horizon.

My crankiness over the impending layover in Qatar immediately subsided as we approached the airport. I kept smacking Tony’s arm and pulling him away from his movie to witness the weirdness. “That is surreal,” he said, leaning over me to peer out the window at Doha. It reminded me of our trip to the Grand Canyon on our honeymoon, hushed visits to the underground cistern in Istanbul, hikes on the Great Wall of China, our first time attending a baci ceremony in Laos, or participating in the lavish wedding of our Indian landlord’s daughter in Delhi.

And, again, I thought, “This is what it’s all about.” The uncomfortable hours crammed in tiny airline seats, the jetlag, the expense, the inevitable tummy issues, the mind-boggling layers of planning, the currency conversion confusion, the sleep deprivation, the omnipresent risk of cultural faux pas, the exhaustion. However, the minute we see something for the first time, learn something fascinating, eat something we hadn’t tasted before, or meet someone with a unique story, it’s all worth it.

We chose this lifestyle for many reasons, but living abroad can be tedious. Errands that would be simple back home take longer and involve several steps -and often many missteps. The fascination of your host country can pale in the blinding frustration of daily life. (Yes, there’s an elephant blocking my parking space. That’s wacky and totally worth at least a tweet, but the fact is, I need to park my car, so now what do I do?) Sometimes I worry I’m getting lazy as a traveler. When Bangkok is your go-to city for an easy laid-back long weekend, where do you go from there?

The sight of Doha from the sky probably doesn’t impress people who have traveled in the Middle East, but for Tony and me, it was that moment as a traveler when your heart speeds up and you can’t think of words to describe what you’re feeling so you keep muttering, “Crazy.” Once we landed and discovered our connecting flight to Jordan had been delayed, my euphoria faded.

But it’s nice to get a reminder now and then of what it’s all about.

Daily Life, Michigan, On the Road

Twelve Years of Christmas

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I just dug through 701 email messages and pages of old blog posts, as well as photo albums uploaded willy-nilly on shutterfly, picasa and flickr to reconstruct my memory of the last 12 Christmases. I knew for sure that we hadn’t spent a single Christmas in the States, but I couldn’t remember exactly where we HAD spent them. Now I know. And I’m documenting the details here so I’ll be able to find it easily next time. If you traveled with us and/or think I got some of this wrong, please let me know!

When we lived in Turkey, we didn’t actually get a break for Christmas, so we attended and hosted parties (and even flew to Germany for the weekend once) to rouse some holiday spirit. Here’s the run-down on our post-Christmas semester breaks:
2001-02 – Cappedocia and Ephesus, Turkey, with Koc School colleagues Marcos, Renee, Steph and Sarah.
2002-03 – Koh Samui, Bangkok, and Chiang Mai, Thailand, with Marcos and Amber.
2003-04 – Cairo and a Nile cruise in Egypt with Lisa.
2004-05 – Miami and Carnival Cruise with Lisa, followed by the job fair at the University of Northern Iowa.

After moving to China, our two-week semester breaks coincided with Christmas.
2005-06 – Phuket, Thailand.
2006-07 – Malaysian Borneo with Scott and Amy.
2007-08 – Dickinson family reunion in Ramstein, Germany.
2008-09 – Yangshuo, China, followed by the job fair in Bangkok.

During our two years in Laos, we got a whole month off for the semester break!
2009-10 – Krabi, Thailand, followed by a visit from my sister Megan, who traveled with me to Cambodia and Luang Prabang, Laos.
2010-11 – played host in Vientiane to house guests Scott, Amy and Blake, and then headed to the Bangkok job fair.

So far in India, our semester break has been 3 weeks.
2011-12 – Garmish, Germany, with my parents, brother and sis-in-law.

And that brings me to NOW. After all that, I can confidently say we spent Christmas 2012 in the United States for the first time since moving abroad. Why would we do that?

Here’s the short answer:
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His name is William Augustus Warren, and he is the latest addition to my nephew collection. Will, aka Guster, aka Love Bucket, was born Sept. 29 to my sister Megan and her hubby, Britt. The devastating loss of their first son, Benjamin, made William’s arrival all the more poignant and powerful. I simply couldn’t wait till summer to meet this little guy. A bit shy at first, he quickly warmed up to all the Dickinson chaos. I cuddled the stuffing out of him, and my eyes more often than not teared up with love. Tony enjoyed bouncing him while singing inappropriate lullabies (such as “Two Beavers are Better Than One” from the TV show, “How I Met Your Mother”). By the end of our two-week visit, William had changed so much! He gained more control over his wobbly head, and he began to kick and wave with gusto. His wide blue eyes started tracking to whoever cooed the loudest … or to whichever ceiling fan caught his fancy. Best of all, he started smiling! Big, gummy, perfect smiles!

Here are a few more shots of that sweet doll baby.

Of course, I cherished every minute with my other two nephews, Nico and Paul, too. Hilarious, curious, talented and cute as can be, those two little guys rock my world. Stay tuned … I have heaps more Christmas coverage to come …

Daily Life, India, Teaching

Winter break is here! Halleluiah!

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It’s the last day of the semester, and only a half day at that. You know what that means! Lots of squirrely, excited teachers students. Kids shared their travels plans – from Alaska to Australia and everywhere in between, said their good-byes to children moving on permanently, made play dates with friends who were spending the holiday in Delhi, watched movies and discussed their holiday traditions.

For many international students and teachers, winter break is especially anticipated. Some of us chose this lifestyle for the opportunity to see the world, and this is our longest vacation of the school year – three weeks of travel time. Some of us struggle with living so far away from our loved ones, and this holiday season is a time for reunions. Some of us just need a break from all things unfamiliar and frustrating.

That sappy stuff doesn’t stop kids from being kids, though.

First thing this morning, I went to my usual third-grade classroom where I chatted with the teacher while students arrived. A burst of giggling got our attention, so we both turned to see what was so funny. Two boys had curled into balls, stretched their hoodies over their entire bodies, pulled the drawstrings closed and were now rolling around the floor, bumping into desk legs and eliciting howls of laughter from onlookers. The teacher and I couldn’t help but crack up. Yep, it’s time for vacation!

Later I headed next door to see my other morning group of third graders. Remember those three little boys who had the deep discussion about U.S. presidents a few months ago? During “free choice” writing time this morning, they decided to write comic books. I sat down with them to admire the creative collaboration. Brilliant stuff.

Boy 1: Look! We’re starting every comic book like this, “I was walking down the street when suddenly…” And then something exciting is gonna happen!
Boy 2: We’re all different superheroes, but we’re like a superhero team.
Me: What are your super powers?
Boy 1: I can shoot ice out of my hands.
Boy 2: I can jump really far.
Boy 3: I can teleport.
Boy 1 to Boy 2: Oh! You can be rainbow colored, so when you jump really far, you make a big rainbow and the bad guys will be all “ooooh, look at the rainbow!” and then I’ll shoot ice at them and freeze them.
Boy 2 to Boy 3: And then you can grab the bad guys and teleport them to another dimension. Like they could be trapped in Captain America’s shield!
Boy 3: Yeah!

In 11 hours, Tony and I will be heading to the airport for our long journey back to the States. This is our first family Christmas in America since we moved overseas 12 years ago! Man, I sure wish I could teleport.

Bye-bye, kiddos! See ya in 2013!
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