We made it here late last night after a delay of a few hours in Dallas.

We took care of the car this morning -- we have a Toyota RAV4 (5 passenger 4 wheel Drive SUV). It has manual transmission, but tomorrow they will swap it out for an automatic at the same charge. Jim managed to drive from down town San Jose to the hotel without loss of life, limb or limo. Jim offered to drive after we got back to the hotel, but Catalina seemed to prefer her own driving over his -- so he must be blending in pretty well.

We bought a Navsat Navigator GPS for the car. It seems to have all of the features we need for CR, including traffic updates, and it was $100 less than the Garmin. Oops, the instructions are in Spanish.

We struck out on the cell phone -- LARM (the relocation firm we are dealing with) was not aware of rental companies. I know I can find one, but it is pretty expensive, so we will wait and see what they have at work.

We went to a bank to try and open an account. It turns out that we would need original copies of our last 3 bank statements, a letter of recommendation and 3 forms of identification. Silly me, I thought all you needed to open a bank account was money. So instead of opening an account, Jim used his mastery of Spanish to exchange $200 into 107,000 Colones. Even if the money looks fake, having 107,000 of anything feels impressive. Of course, lunch was a mere 13,915. Exchanging the cash required passport and our Costa Rican phone number and address. Apparently they are worried about drug money being laundered through the banks here.

Two and a half week notice

Jim and I have known that we were going to spend a year in Costa Rica since March. We've been busy jumping through many hoops to get a temporary residency. I had always figured that I'd have four weeks for the final preparation, once they had turned in all of the necessary papers and our fingerprints. But, Jim found out on May 12th that he could conduct business without the residency permit for up to 90 days before he has to go back home. By then the residency permit should be issued, so we do not expect to be back. We have been rushing around trying to tie up all the loose ends before we leave on Sunday. Tomorrow the movers come to pack up our crate that will be shipped down. We fly there on Sunday and on Monday we will be busy getting a car, cell phones and bank account. On Tuesday we'll move into our rented house and Jim will go to the plant.