Unintended Adventure

We needed some essentials so we decided to head to the local Wal-Mart. After hooking up the GPS, we were on our way. Less than 1 km from the hotel, the GPS had sent us up a gated road to a guard shack where two security guards, one holding a large rifle, were posted. Clearly the GPS had let me down. We retraced our steps and eventually after ignoring repeated commands to make a “U-turn when possible”, a new route was chosen and we were on our way.

The roads around town are narrow, and there are areas where they just seem to send you in three circles to get 100 yards. Despite that, our GPS dutifully guided us to the nearest Wal-Mart, but when we arrived all we saw was a building with the Wal-Mart logo, pallets of boxes, and an empty parking lot. It appeared our GPS had sent us to a Wal-Mart distribution facility. So I picked the next nearest Wal-Mart in the GPS (11km away) and off we went.

By this time we had passed a group of men painting the road once… remember that J. Although the GPS seemed to send us directly to the Wal-Mart, it was along a surface street the entire way, and so it was slow going. We eventually arrived and went inside. Our impression of Wal-Mart that we brought from the US was not changed by our Costa Rican Wal-Mart visit… the store was big and made no sense to us, granted we couldn’t read the Spanish signs. I decided to try my hand at getting a SIM card form my phone so that I would have cellular service. The nice lady behind the counter did not speak English, so I fumbled my way through muy mal espanol, but I ended up with a SIM card… but no minutes L.

We left Wal-Mart and found a little pizza place to eat lunch (yes I said pizza place in Costa Rica). By now it was nearing noon, which was our supposed checkout time, and we still had a 3 hour drive ahead of us to get to La Fortune, our next destination. I figured we would be back at the hotel by 1:00, leaving us plenty of time to pack and drive. What I did not plan on was the GPS having a very poor sense of roads and continually trying to send me to roads that do not exist. The matter was made worse by my erroneous sense that the hotel was north of an east-west highway (actually that was correct, but I didn’t realize there were 2 east-west highways and the hotel was between them). So I was convinced the GPS was garbage. After over an hour of being lost, and driving past the same road painters three more times, Karen suggested we stop at a McDonald’s we had passed to get the boys a treat, take a break to relieve the frustration and anxiety that had come to a head, and regroup.

If my phone had minutes, I could’ve called the hotel, to get assistance. I tried to call the cell service company but even though I spoke to someone in English, he was unable to help me purchase minutes. Luckily McDonald’s had free wi-fi. I was able to connect, retrieve precise hotel location info and plot the course on my iPhone GPS app. Ironically, from the McDonald’s the car GPS had no problem getting us back to the hotel on roads that did exist. We arrived around 2:30pm… a four hour Costa Rican Wal-Mart adventure finally concluded.

The hotel had already begun the cleaning of our room… all of our luggage was packed, sheets stripped off the bed, and a bucket of bleach was in the bathroom. I apologized profusely to Manuel for our tardiness, but he was very understanding. Apparently the roads in the city are atrocious and even locals get lost.