It was getting late, so Eric and I were getting ready to tell Cecilia we had to leave. We had mentioned this earlier and she had responded with a crestfallen face.

We got lucky. The phone rang and it was Ana, inviting us to come out and visit with her and her friend at the restaurant. Cecilia was going to come with us. I told Ana we'd come right away in a taxi. I didn't know that Cecilia had other plans. So after I hung up, instead of jumping out the door, we toodled around the apartment for awhile, and then began walking to the restaurant, which was a little more than 2k away, near downtown Alajuela.

Cecilia says she loves to walk, but since she works 15 hours a day in the soda, she doesn't get many chances to do it. It was a gorgeous night. That was the first time we saw the moon on its side. It was a half moon. The bottom half was lit and the top half was dark. We used sign language to help explain to Cecilia tht in the U.S. we see the moon upright.

We walked by the local high school where Ana graduated and her siblings still go. It's the same high school former president Oscar Arias went to. It's a little run-down looking, but it's very good. Cecilia says she pays 10,000 colones (roughly $40) a month for each of her three kids in school (two in high school and Pamy in kindergarten). She also pays 72,000 colonees for every two months of Ana's universidad. She joked that she needs a new husband to pay for all her kids.

I don't know how much Cecilia, who is 42 years old, earns at the soda, or if there are free public schools in Costa Rica. But the tuition doesn't sound so bad. It works out to about $250 a month to put four kids through school, including one kid in college. Cecilia owns her home so she probably doesn't have to pay rent.

The night before, Cecilia had asked where we were staying. She mentioned the hotel of a friend of hers. It's called Hotel Charly. She strongly recommended it and we had said we'd check it out. Earlier in the day, we did check it out. It was nicer than Hotel Villareal, but it cost $25 instead of the $20 we were already paying, and we didn't want to go through the pain of switching hotels. So we didn't.

Well Cecilia fixed that. On our never-ending walk to the restaurant, we stopped by Hotel Charly's, and Cecilia greeted her friend, the manager Laziro. She pleaded our case and bargained for us and got him to lower his rate to $20 a nite. I still didn't want to move because it was such a pain, and also Laziro wouldn't let us keep our bikes in our room, as we did in the Hotel Villareal. But Cecilia was really putting herself out for us, and so was Laziro, and it was a nicer place, so finally, just to make everyone happy, we said we'd change in the morning.

We finally got to the restaurant, which was a bar, and met up with Ana and Giselle. They wre wondering where we were. The place was playing some American music--some kind of light rock. I ordered a margarita, but I have to say, it wasn't as good as the ones I got at Arriba with Katy. Eric got a daquiri, only because I ordered it by accident. We had a fun time. At the end of the evening, Cecilia wandered over to the next table, where her lawyer happened to be sitting drunk. She was having a great time and Ana had a hard time tearing her away. Finally Ana called a taxi and we all got in and left the door open for Cecilia, who got in with us. It dropped us off near our hotel.

The next morning (Sept. 10) we set out for our first ride. A short, 8k ride to Santa Barbara, a little town famed for a cheap seafood restaurant called Banco de Mariscos. We rode up and up and up for quite awhile, and found the restaurant just as the afternoon storm hit. So while it thundered and struck lightning and poured torrents of rain outside, we sat inside, munching on sea bass and flan. It's quite a cozy feeling to not be on your bicycle in the rain.

We let it rain for a few hours, and as it let up a bit, we started on the road back down. But the rain had filled all the potholes with water, so it was hard to tell which ones were small and which ones could munch front tires. Well I found one of the latter. I slammed my wheel through that pothole and knew that was the end. So it was that I got y first flat--my fat slick tires, which had survived gravel roads in British Columbia and Alaska, finally succumbed to a paved road in Costa Rica.

It took awhile to fix it, but luckily it wasn't raining. We made it back to our hotel without further bad luck. I think Eric was happy that it happened to me for once instead of him.

We got back in the mid-afternoon, and I discovered just how rough the road had been. As we rolled our bikes into the hotel, my rear wheel literally fell off. I'm glad it didn't happen during the ride.

I was really looking forward to unwinding in our hotel's nice little courtyard, which was full of potted trees and open to the sky. I wanted to sit in there and drink coffee and read. Unfortunately, there was a talkative American guy in the courtyard, and he wasn't going away, because he was helping out the manager by watching the hotel's front desk for the day.

His name was John. He was very very nice, but he was sort of loud and dominated the conversation and finally I couldn't stand it so I went to our room and slept. Eric hung out and talked to him some more. He is a native of Santa Barbara, Calif. who has lived in many places and is now trying to get a business going in Costa Rica. He's the guy I mentioned in the intro with the failed recycling business. He is now writing a tour guide to Costa Rica. Oddly, he didn't really know much about the country. Instead of writing the book himself, he was getting people to write sections for him. He suggested that I could help with the section on bicycling but working for free or on spec doesn't really thrill me.

Next: we try to go to Volcan Poas

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