Yesterday, we made it back to the USA, landing in Charlotte, on time and without incident. As we were on an international flight, we had to go through customs. No problem. We had to recheck our bags and then go through airport security again. I was searched and not in a nice way. It was the most invasive search that I have ever had. I was shown the cartoon diagram of what the scanner saw, or rather didn’t see. It appears that in the words of humorist Dave Berry, “I had a fuzzy groin.” To make matters worse my ass was fuzzy too. Later, Anne suggested that while the TSA agent was poking around back there, I should have told him, that I had had diarrhea that morning, my turn with Montezuma and they say that she is the nice person.   

Anyway, we eventually escaped security and grabbed a bite to eat. It was about then that Charlotte, began living up to its reputation of being the Philly of the south. It had been raining when we landed and continued to rain until eventually, we took off, but that was much later than scheduled. Our 10 PM flight was first pushed back to midnight and then one and I don’t think that we even hit that time window, but off we eventually took. By the time we got to Saint Louis the airport was pretty much shutdown. I’m not even sure if TSA was still working. There were no cabs, so I called an Uber which swiftly arrived and whisked us home. It had been a long twenty-one-hour day, but we are home now, and we got to sleep-in, in our own bed last night and not on some airport carpeting.

Throughout our trip, we took tons of photos, but some of the best ones that we brought back were taken by our guides. Pictured is a shot of the most iconic frog in Costa Rica. Randol led us a night walk and took this photograph and many others and then shared them with us. His technique was pretty simple, just stick his phone in the creature’s face. Except that he knew how close he could get to it, knowledge that had been acquired through much practice. This shot is now my phone’s wallpaper. With all of these pictures and the stories that accompany them, there will be lots of blog posts about Costa Rica for some time to come.