One of the lovely courtyards at the Grano de Oro. This picture was actually taken on our return, after the tour.

First day of travel, December 17

I started my journal for this trip with the words, “It’s 1:00PM now, and we have to walk out the door around nine. And I’m getting panicked.”

I did finish my packing in good time, and we did hop into Mark’s car around nine at night, for a flight to Houston leaving at 0030 on the next day, the seventeenth. Traffic at that time is moderate—to see empty roads in Los Angeles County you have to be driving at three in the morning or so—and we got to LAX, forty minutes away from our house in Pasadena, in good time.

Mark is very proud, or at least quietly satisfied, to have achieved Platinum Elite status with Continental, thanks to several very tedious and tiresome trips to Frankfurt on business this year. There are all sorts of perks, but what he did to get us First Class passage to San José was to use our accumulated points. You don’t necessarily travel at a convenient time if you do this. Thus the red-eye to Houston on the seventeenth of December. I don’t know whether Platinum would have allowed us to wait for our plane in the President’s Club at the Los Angeles airport. What certainly did it, though, was the fact that we were traveling First Class internationally. Over to the left, you see him sitting in the Continental President’s Club at Los Angeles airport, doing Sudoku on his iPhone. (Big image, small.)

The flight to Houston was uneventful, but it’s not surprising that we didn’t get much sleep then. We were allowed into the President’s Club in Houston even though we are not oil barons. I may have dozed there a bit, but I did take advantage of the free bagels, cream cheese, and coffee. When I suggested that we go out onto the concourse for breakfast, Mark reminded me that we would be fed on the Houston-to-San José flight. And you can rely on the first-class food on Continental being not at all bad. With real metal silverware! Over to the left, Mark sits in the Houston lounge, not doing Sudoku, but checking his Olympus camera (big image, small), a real nice one that he uses in addition to the little waterproof Olympus that we bought for going kayaking in New Zealand. As it turns out, the smaller, relatively cheaper, camera is responsible for many of the most spectacular pictures that were taken this trip, since Mark found that he could pair it up very successfully with our guide Leo’s telescope.

The flight from Houston to San José was rather rough throughout—only a few short periods of perfect calm. In spite of the roughness, though, I managed to get a little sleep. It was late morning now (Costa Rica is in the Central time zone, same as Texas) and whatever sleep I could get, I definitely needed.

My journal says:
The arrival at San José was smooth in every sense. Naturally enough, there was a long line to get through the passport check, but no glitches. The customs declaration forms that we filled out were collected en masse and without a glance, while all our bags were passed through an X-ray machine with suspicious rapidity.
That is, I don’t believe that the X-rays were turned on.

We got a taxi easily once we got to the street, and it took us to San José in about twenty minutes. There seem to be no controls on vehicle emissions, and the trees along the roadside show the result, with greatly blackened trunks. We arrived at the hotel, the Grano de Oro, in very good time. The gold in question is not the mineral kind, but Coffea arabica, which seems to have been what brought the country out of its status of backwater as soon as the crop’s cultivation took hold.

My journal continues:
The Grano de Oro is a very elegant place, in an old-fashioned way. Lots of wood paneling, lots of fountains, and (of course) tropical flowers. In deference to the season, though, there are also plenty of Poinsettia.
And, I might point out, in the dining room, plenty of Chrismas music arranged in often unusual ways. I would have preferred for less of this music to have had its origin in the United States. We were traveling in a foreign country, after all!

Door to our room at the Grano de Oro (Big image, small)

Immediately after arrival, we went down to eat. I had a pleasant enough cheese tart, but Mark’s Salade Niçoise looked spectacular, with seared tuna beautifully presened and sliced magnificently thin. He said it was delicious, too.

After lunch, we told each other we were lying down for just a little nap, but woke up only a quarter-hour before our 7:30 dinner reservation! The meal was fine, but what I liked the best about it was the dessert, a “Sinfonía de Limón” that was three different small treatments of the lemon flavor, arranged on a plate. Not excessive in size nor too rich, but a nice and interesting end to a pleasant meal. To the left, some shots I took after we came back from our meal, showing the good taste and decor of the room. Far left, Mark is reading the map of Costa Rica he picked up earlier (big image, small), and then a shot to show the nice ceiling the room had (big image, small).