By sail, you ask? No. We lead many lives, and this is a new one. United Church of Two Harbors, with our fearless leader Mike Gaboury, coagulated into a loose, then tight, group of 17 people, ages 13-69, to join the Strong Mission for a week of construction projects, crafting with kids, school and sewing supply, and evening soccer games, all with the acknowledged assumption that God is the source of all goodness and certainly the reason for our week which was chock full of blessings and a life-changer for most of us. It was for me, and I fear I will never do it justice.
But in order to keep the good from becoming the enemy of the perfect, here goes my written attempt. Part 1: Getting There.
Getting there was a huge part of the trip for me. Mentally, I struggled in the days prior. I love my home, I love winter, and frankly (I now admit), I love being comfortable. It has been a long time since I've gone far outside my comfort zone. Different as this zone may be from many people, it is still my zone and I like to stay in it! Travel has always carried with it a carbon-guilt-attachment as well as a discomfort zone, and big snowstorms were predicted for our takeoff time, so I did get a double whammy.
But as they say, worry gets you nowhere. What you worry about will never happen; it's what you never think of that happens! And so it was with us. The morning of departure from Two Harbors, we discovered that our life raft, which we lugged down to the basement after a biannual service test in Chicago, detonated overnight in the basement! Exploding even the hard fiberglass cover and wooden shipping crate. Apparently Lamar (the only one up at midnight) had heard a loud THUMP from the shower, worried about thieves, and then went to bed. Luckily it did only minimal damage in the basement, and the servicer in Chicago whom we promptly called was as flabbergasted as us. But, Mark commented, "If I had had a list of 10,000 things to worry about this morning, that would not have made the list."
What I did worry about--getting to the airport in a snowstorm--went off without a hitch. We left on a Friday morning to beat a snowstorm. That was successful. We stayed in St. Paul with friends who heroically drove us to the airport at 5:30 a.m. Sat. through what turned out to be just a few inches of snow. All went well until we were sitting in spread-out, far-back seats in the plane, (service trips are discounted--and we were definitely at the bottom of the priority barrel) in the MSP airport, heading to Chicago. With a sinking heart I heard that fatal tone in the pilot’s message: “I hate to be the barer of bad news……”
The problem was a shut-down Chicago airport. We ended up sitting in that plane for 4 hours total. However, our flight to Miami was also delayed, so we caught the connection! But not before being aware that the connection Miami-San Jose was not going to happen Saturday night.
By a stroke of luck, mechanical problems compounded the weather problems so American Airlines had to take responsibility for our lateness. Late Saturday night, in Miami, after several hours of waiting in a group and re-booking 17 flights (Lesson no. 1: being in a group means a lot of waiting around. It also means I didn’t have to worry about things. Someone else always took care of it!), we were awarded hotel and food vouchers, and after another long wait, boarded a shuttle to the hotel. Food by 9 pm., and bed. No clothes or toiletries. Thankfully, our 31 pieces of luggage (many of which would stay in Costa Rica, full of supplies) stayed in the system. But now we had sleep, and showers.
Sunday morning brought new energy. Our flight was not til 6 p.m. We Gordons broke off from the crowd and demonstrated a little bit of modern prowess by scheduling a Uber to a Goodwill which happened to be in the middle of the Cuban neighborhood
which my friend Betsy, world traveler and my personal travel advisor, had highly recommended just hours before. And, we were there with an Uber driver/tour guide who could provide political, social, economic commentary. He even waited outside for 20 min. while we bought bathing suits ($7 each), and then took us straight to the beach.
The three of us (Mark guarded daypacks) swam in the waves, watched the crowds, and smelled Florida. As Cedar noted, the scents brought it all back. Humidity, fruit, gas, grass, sweat. We actually found the place we’d walked to the beach from our boat back in 2013. We bought fresh smoothies, continued to eat out of our food stores when tongues got sharp, and even found a tiny National Geographic Gallery in the midst of the spas and t-shirt stores. The Gallery was small but sported, amongst about 20 huge pictures from all over the world, one beautiful shot of the Grand Marais harbor!
The Airport Express bus took us straight from the beach to the airport, where we met up with everyone else. Then all went well, if long, until we were deposited on a rickety (for us) bus from the San Jose airport on Sunday evening. Within minutes the airport, streetlights, even 4-lane roads were history, and we craned our necks to see Costa Rica. Really we felt it more than saw it, since it was dark. Curvy narrow roads wound up and down. Switchbacks are perpetual. Inches away on both sides were small adobe houses, or shacks, or stores with their garage doors down (closed), or fields of...sugarcane? Roadsides were very clean, we noted, for such a poor area.
After 45 minutes we went up yet another impossibly steep incline (wondering aloud how often they have to replace clutch and brakes) and then turned a sharp corner and rolled down a deeply potholed gravel driveway towards a lit building, the Strong Mission, about as big as our Community Center. Mike and Paula (who had taken the early morning flight, alone) were there to greet us. It was a muted reunion, with us stumbling and mumbling in weariness. We were given sandwiches, shown our bunkhouses and the bathrooms. Soon we had all fallen into bed, grateful to have arrived.
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