Unlike my usual ornate prose that I like to use on my blog, I’m trying my hand at a few updates from my Android phone while I’m on my vacation in Costa Rica. The last time I tried to do this was in Salzburg on my trip a little over a year ago with my Jordanian friends. Pardon me if there are some spelling and punctuation errors!

Our trip started off with my usual trip from Madison on the bus, and we took the front two seats. The difference was this time I discovered that our driver was the uncle of one of my best friends back when I went to school in Janesville almost two decades ago, so we began chatting. Then he continued chatting with me as I started to take a nap, and Christine muttered to me in Arabic “mumkin hatha kursi mish kwayis” – maybe this wasn’t such a good seat. However, I enjoy bantering and learned that Illinois drivers are terrible, and also that the Texas Roadhouse is a darn good steakhouse.

Out of the two modes of transportation for today, though, Spirit Airlines was definitely the worse of the two. We weren’t overly perterbed when we saw that our flight from O’Hare to Fort Lauderdale had been bumped back an hour (apparently because it had been struck by lightning and it needed to be “safety checked” or something silly and inconsequential like that) but we became less happy when Spirit told us they were booting us from our second flight from Florida to Costa Rica. I knew Spirit was budget, but they basically just screwed up the travel plans for at least 2 dozen people (it was a long line to get the answer to my question, with only one computer and no screen with times on it at the gate) because the second Spirit airline wouldn’t wait 15 minutes for our flight. Then, the discounts that they offered us for a hotel for the night were approaching $80 (and that’s with the so-called “discount code” they provided me). I called their hotline and left them a formal complaint, but what could we do?

I regaled my companion with the story of when my family spent the night sleeping in O’Hare airport after returning from Colorado, but she wasn’t going for it – a hotel was needed. Thanks to some quick smartphone searching, we found a Rodeway hotel for $60, only 1.5 miles away from the airport and with a free shuttle. Of course, as it was now 11 at night, the shuttle was no longer running and we had to pony up for a $22, 10 minute taxi ride by a disgruntled guy with a Carribean accent. Jordan pricing, this was not. And Spirit will never get our business again, that’s for sure – an extra $80 because of this ridiculous delay means it’s not so budget anymore. Hopefully the post title will show up in some search engines for other people thinking they’re getting a “bargain.”

It all seemed worth it, though, after getting checked in at the hotel and confirming our shuttle times for the next morning, with a bottle of wine out by the pool (“it’s closed now,” said our hostess, “but if you’re quiet no one is going to care”) and watching a few shooting stars coming in from the Perseid shower.

Hopefully tomorrow will go better.

I have no way of posting pictures from my actual camera now (and I shan’t insult people by using cameraphone pictures) but I’ll have to add them all into my posts when I get back to America.