Costa Rica Expedition - Day 1

I figured I should update this as I go because I could probably already write a small novel on the past 24 hours of our adventure. Last night Deshay, Jordan, Ryan, and I got on a bus from Panama City to the Costa Rican border at 10:45. Stephanie ended up not being able to go and this was the disappointment of my year. Anyways we got to the border around 5:30 am. First we had to "check out" of Panama, then walk 200m and "check in" to Costa Rica. Or something. I have no idea how this border thing works, and I suspect that the officials there don't really understand it either. It took about 5 hours before the four of us were legally in Costa Rica, due to some serious complications with Deshay's possession of both an American and a Jamaican passport. But then we find that we can't take a bus from the border to Puerto Viejo... instead, all buses go directly to San Jose and branch from there. This means that we would eventually spend over three hours on a bus just back tracking. So by about 9:15am Costa Rica time, which is an hour earlier than Panama, we were on a 7 hour bus ride to the capital. When we got there, it turned out that buses to the Limon province leave from a different bus terminal than the one we arrived at. Finding a taxi willing to squeeze a surfboard into his sedan was a challenge in itself, but we made it to the other terminal. Haha... only to find that we had missed the last bus to Puerto Viejo by about an hour. Luckily we found an awesome hostel for $10 a night, which has free internet access! So we ate dinner in San Jose and now we are watching the Super Bowl! Tomorrow morning we will be on a bus to Puerto Viejo by 6 am, if everything goes according to plan. But so far on this trip, nothing has gone according to plan, but everything has gone wonderfully.