Snowed in – In Costa Rica
Pretty catchy title, right?. We all know that it doesn’t snow in Costa Rica. But remember that movie about the Jamaican bobsled team? Well, this is kinda, well not really at all, but it could be, the same sort of thing.
I am sitting in my house in San Isidro. I came up here on Tuesday, it is presently Friday. I had intended to go back home to the coast on Wednesday. I have been unable to return home. The reason? Well, now therein lies the crux of this article. The impediments to me getting back home have been every bit as diverse and non-negotiable as though I were snowed in, just like the good ole days, back in my pre-Costa Rican life in Colorado.
My trip to San Isidro was motivated by my need to get my car’s technical revision (Riteve) made current, as well as some documents that I needed to sign at the lawyers for a new corporation for my Internet company. No problem. I figured I’d take care of those items and then get out to my house, which is just on the Dominical side of San Isidro. There is a screaming broadband Internet connection there that isn’t satellite based, so it seems to work all the time, well… almost.
Rod, my associate in our Uvita real estate office, joined me and we were going to take the opportunity to get some productive time in: getting real estate listings posted to the site and working on the website. Rod and I are also in charge of marketing for the up and coming San Buenas Golf Resort south of Uvita in a little town called San Buenaventura.
Rashid, my partner in Gallery Webs had arranged to meet at the lawyers to sign the docs. So we did, and lo, I had forgotten my passport, which I needed to sign with. So I called my gal on the coast who was coming up the next day, and asked that she bring my passport up, which she did. The second visit to the lawyers was at 1:00 PM the following day, which we discovered wasn’t such a good time to go to a lawyer since they are all closed for lunch at that time. This is a very Latin American scenario.. Not having everything I need on visit #1, and then the office being closed on visit #2. I can’t fault anyone but myself on either of these setbacks. I know that lawyers close for lunch here.
I didn’t want to wait until 2:00, when the lawyer would be back. So I taxi’d out to my house to get to work on Internet stuff and told Rashid that I’d call him when I was able to get back to sign. All of this was further complicated by the fact that my car was at the mechanics and they had discovered an oil leak that made my car un-passable for the technical revision.
So it became clear that we were going to have to spend some time in San Isidro.
Then, it began to rain.
It didn’t stop until Friday morning.
The power, Internet and water, all went out.
This was evidently a tropical storm (at the time of this writing, I didn’t know that they had named to storm, nor that it was an official “tropical storm” - Alma), the likes of which I haven’t seen in my nearly 10 years of living here.
From the window river overlook in my San Isidro house, we watched as the river jumped it’s banks and full rainforest sized trees washed by. Water everywhere.
My car was finally done at about 5:00 on Thursday, and my mechanic offered to drive my car out to me so that we could get going to home on the coast. His shop is on the other side of San Isidro.. He was unable to get through San Isidro. At about 6:30 he called and said he couldn’t make it. So, another night here. Lots of napping, reading, stumbling around by candle light, tuna sandwiches, and conversations.
Friday AM, we have electricity, but no water, and no phone/Internet. We are down to our last few grains of coffee, and fortunately I had a bottle of water set aside for the plants with which to make one final pot of coffee. We have one more can of tuna.
It is a glorious morning outside. The river has receded and is now just a muddy, slightly swollen version of its normal self. I can use my cell phone if I go out to the deck and stand in the North/West corner on tip-toe. We sit tapping away on our respective laptops, taking advantage of the time, waiting till we can call a cab to get to the mechanics to get my car, and get on home.
We still may not be able to make it home though. There is a part of the passage over to the coast that normally gets blocked by landslides during heavy rains. We are hoping that we can drive on through, but it’s hard to know without trying. For that matter, we aren’t even sure that we can get from here to the mechanics. There were a number of power poles lying across roads in San Isidro last night. A couple of houses evidently got washed away.
It really is, in nearly every way, except for the fact that there isn’t any snow, very similar to being snowed-in in Colorado.
Tags: tropical storm alma