My Pair of Hooters: A (bumpy) trip to paradise

You know those places that you research online and they look awesome, but then you get there and you realize that the right angles and a good camera can make a place look better than it actually is? Flor Blanca, in Costa Rica, is not that place. Pictures can't do it justice, though they are pretty cool too.

I'll start at the beginning. We arrived in San Jose on Thursday afternoon and met some friends from Trinity, Annie and David, who flew in from Austin.

Costa Rica is a difficult country to get around and if we wanted to take the land option to get to our resort it would've taken us five hours. No thanks. So we had a charter prop plane scheduled. A driver picked us up to take us to our plane, and we were told us that there was a surprise waiting for us. What our driver did not seem to know was that we had no idea what we were getting into and everything was one big surprise.

So we go through a small security screening again (old school style) and after they determined my breast pump was not a bomb, (it took a while, but I saw the look of recognition in the guy's eyes and he said, "Ooh, el leche por un bebe.") we were driven out to an undisclosed location where a helicopter was waiting.

Annie was much more excited about the chopper than my husband. He was a bit skittish about the whole idea of flying in small objects. But he enjoyed the ride.

Some background: a friend of ours (and of the UNC basketball program) owns Florblanca where we are staying at. So as a surprise, he sent a helicopter to take us there. So nice. Unfortunately, the weather conditions prevented the chopper from being able to make the flight, so we took a 10 minute helicopter ride to our plane. If I could have drugged Eric and then drug him on the plane, I would have. I had to be the cool calm and collected one in the bunch because let me tell you who wasn't....

Clearly this was taken early in the trip, because David is smiling. I took a video of these two during some of the roughest parts, but it may not be family friendly to share.

Yeah see those clouds? We flew threw them. I'm not scared of flying on small planes, but flying through lots of turbulence in the pouring rain with no land in sight was a touch unsettling.

But then we saw this out our window, which was pretty amazing.

After the flight, Eric asked the pilot, "Have you ever flown in conditions that bad?" Nope. "So that's the worst flight you've had?" Yup. So yeah, there's that.

Then we had an SUV take us on a 45 minute drive to Flor Blanca. It certainly made me appreciate the paved roads of the USA. I'm glad we got the whole experience and were able to see more of Costa Rica, but taking a chopper and landing right next door to the resort would not have sucked.

We arrived and even the monsoon that surrounded us could not dampen our spirits. This place is just amazing. There are less than 8 villas and if I had to guess I'd say 20 people are staying here right now. It feels like a private resort. Everything is open air here (except air conditioned bedrooms) and our villa is amazing.