Well we are off for our annual tropical anniversary vacation with the Johnstons! This year we headed to Costa Rica for a week in Tambor. We often use Luxury Link to search our locations we want to travel to and this year we tried out the luxury link auction – success! (you know mark, just like Ebay he watches the auction and bids at the last possible time!).

We will be enjoying Casa Pacifico in Tango Mar for the week!

Yesterday we headed out to the airport with what we considered to be a light load (we would soon find out that scott and julie packed everything into just one suitcase making us again look like overpackers!). We flew to Houston Texas where we met with great excitement Niko (cuco), Julie (JuJu) and Scott (cott). Niko immediately gave us hugs and kisses and shared his bugs with “baby elsie”.

We all boarded the flight to San Jose (funny johnstons were able to fly from San Jose, CA to San Jose, CR!) sitting next to each other. (Good Job Mark and Julie!). The flight was great – we had a nap, some snacks, videos, dad had a margarita, mom had some wine – by the way Continental was amazing, we had snacks and dinner provided on the flights!. Just as we started our descent, we got some news that there was fog in San Jose, we would hold for a bit and if it didn’t clear we would need to divert to Nicaragua for more fuel. A few minutes later the pilot said it looked clear and we went in for a landing … just as I could see the blue lights on the run way … acceleration and we aborted the landing. Back up to the holding pattern. Twenty minutes later we tried again and as we came through the thick fog, the pilot went for it … the ground seemed to come a bit earlier than he expected and he slammed on the breaks (I squeezed Elsie, stomach in my throat and mark reached over to me and said breath!) – the plane broke into applause!! We were here!

We entered the terminal to find a maze of people standing in line for immigration – with two tired and somewhat irritable kids, the line seemed daunting. This was the disneyland line from hell … Niko kept saying “all the people, all the people”. After about 15 minutes in line a Costa Rican man came up to us and escorted us to another area. Once we gathered with a few other people, he escorted us to the front of immigration (past the loooong maze) to the special needs line – along the way he grabbed any families with small children. First Experience in Costa Rica SUCCESS! In the end it benefited all – as both kids were on the brink of meltdowns.

We had a van waiting to shuttle us to the Hampton Inn where Julie had secured us rooms with cribs. We were off to bed! This morning we take a small plane over to Tambor where we can settle in for the week (and you will be overloaded with Costa Rica photos! 🙂

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Interesting notes: We are in the Mountain Time zone and like clockwork Elsie slept until 7:00 am, we woke up turned on the TV and it has our Denver News Channel. I am writing this while elsie takes her re-rack (morning nap).