And on to Costa Rica...

After several delays, some due to the standby nature of my travel arrangements, others due to my inability to read a flight schedule at 3:30am, I am finally on my way to Costa Rica. Well, Houston and then if all goes well to San Jose, Costa Rica. I will be in the capital for the day and then I will head off to Manuel Antonio for a few days to zip line through the rainforest and, likely, get rained on a lot. I brought a GoPro Hero 3+ with me to capture my experience on film. The GoPro does not belong to me and after pressing several buttons to no avail I had to download the user’s manual just to get it turned on. I now know how to turn it on and change modes and put it in wireless mode (for what I am still not sure) but the device does not have a screen or anything so how I’m supposed to tell what I’m recording I have no idea. I haven’t made it to that page in the user’s manual yet.

I was supposed to be on an earlier flight out of San Francisco this morning so I would have landed in San Jose tonight at about 9:00pm but I had the bright idea to take the United Express flight out of Monterey up to SFO so I didn’t have to drive in morning commute traffic. I booked myself on standby for the 5:42 flight out of Monterey, which landed at SFO at 6:26 – a little more than two hours before my flight was due to depart for Houston. I arrived at Monterey Regional at 4:45am, got through security, and sat at Gate 5 waiting for the gate attendant to call me up for my boarding pass. The flight was wide open so I wasn’t really that worried about getting on but after the 5:30am flight left for San Francisco the gate attendant started preparing for the next flight’s departure – a 5:45am flight to Los Angeles. Turns out I had booked myself onto a 5:42 PM flight to San Francisco. This was unfortunate for two reasons: (1) I had not driven myself to the airport like I usually do; and (2) I wasn’t going to be able to drive to SFO in time to make my flight to Houston.

I would like to say that this is the first time that I have misread a schedule but I would be lying. My mom and I used to go to Pier 39 to kick off our Christmas shopping every year and we would take the Ferry over from Vallejo and spend the day wandering through the shops and eating at all our local favorites, then we would take the last Ferry back to Vallejo. One year my mom made the mistake of leaving me in charge of the ferry schedule and instead of departing out of Pier 39 like we always did we had to walk all the way down to the Embarcadero terminal. While she was grumbling about my lack of attention to detail a man dressed in a zoot suit proposed to me; there are few places quite like San Francisco. She never let me read the schedule again.

She neglected to pass this information along to my now ex-husband and we ended up taking the bus back to Vallejo because I thought that the last departure was for the last ferry and it was actually for the last bus. I think we were still dating then so he still found my idiosyncrasies charming. I ended up in DC an extra day last May because I booked the wrong date and just this last January I booked my hotel for the Consumer Electronic Show for November because I failed to notice that the 1 and 11 were right next to each other in the dropdown menu. My attention to detail is impeccable with my clients – my own life maybe not so much. I cannot read a map either despite repeated lessons in cartography and the importance of being able to read the squiggly lines indicating a change in topography. So here I am on the late flight to Houston.

My business banker told me that there has been a significant shift of American corporate capital to Costa Rica over the last few years so if all goes well I won’t have much trouble finding an American lawyer to interview. Then I can blog about something related to my field of expertise (obviously NOT anything related to scheduling – thank heavens for Clio, my practice management software). From what I understand, Costa Rica has a similar legal system to that in the U.S. I don’t know what that means exactly – are they based on the English common law system? Do they have an adversarial system? I’m not even sure who was the first or last to colonize the area. These questions and many more will be the subject of my next blog. Plus lots of pictures because I remembered the camera cord this time.