Ticabus from Granada to Costa Rica

I sit here typing this blog post from the comfy seat of a fully air conditioned Ticabus. I thought it might be appropriate to reflect on my feelings as we leave the country we have called home for the last (almost) nine months. I would love to say I am sad to say goodbye to Nicaragua but those aren't the feelings I am having right now. Most of the people we said goodbye to over the past few days, I am sure we will see again so it didn't feel like a real goodbye. We left our house in Matagalpa 3 days ago but we really had our minds set on going to see friends in Granada and then more friends in Costa Rica. I think my farewell to Nicaragua might have been more dramatic if we had flown out of Managua (the airport in Nicaragua) instead of traveling by bus to Costa Rica for 6 nights before we are actually home. If I had to do it over, I think flying out of Managua would be the way to go. It would be a clean break. However, because we are leaving via Costa Rica, we got a chance to spend a couple of nights with our friends Don and Jacque before we left and we get to spend 6 nights with a family we met in Costa Rica when we first arrived. I am a little nervous about how that is going to work out and I hope we aren't an imposition on their family. They wanted to see us on the weekend and we don't leave till EARLY Thursday morning so we get a nice long stay with them. Hopefully the fact that they will be in school/work on Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday will give them enough of a break from us. I am also hoping to cook dinner for them every night which should help too. The kids are looking forward to having some kids to play with and it doesn't hurt that there is a pool at our friends' apartment in Costa Rica either!

So I guess I am feeling unsettled about leaving Nicaragua. I am not sad but I am not happy either. I don't know what or life will look like 1 month from now so I am trying to live in the moment and not worry about what I will miss about Nicaragua and our life here. Realistically I don't even know what it will be. I know I will miss the people we have met (until we see them again) but what differences between life here and in the US I will long to go back to I can't say. I do think I will miss Chicken Buses (they are old school buses that make up the public transportation system in Central America) since hopping on a Metro bus during rush hour will never resemble a packed chicken bus where it's totally appropriate (or unavoidable) to spoon a stranger for the duration of your ride (30 min-3 hours). I don't anticipate being home in the US on a Thursday afternoon and saying "You know what would be great right now? A Chicken bus ride!" but I will look back on it as a unique experience that cannot be duplicated in the US. Most of the food I would miss, I can still get in the US, aguacate (avocado), mango and piña are all readily available at home (although we won't be able to get the mangoes from the back yard) even though they will be more expensive. I am sure I will miss the easy pace of life here but right now I am excited to get back to a more structured life.

All things considered (and there are a lot of things to consider) I feel at peace with our future. We don't have a house to live in when we get back but we do have the shelter of a church. In January I went to a seminar about prayer in Matagalpa and one of the speakers, who is a missionary in Panama, talked about needing a large sum of money for their mission work and he prayed for "extravagant provision". He said he worships a big God who can do anything, even provide extravagantly. I was more unsure about what our future would hold in January so I clung to that prayer for "extravagant provision" and began praying and asking God for that. God is wonderful and amazing and funny. He has answered my prayer, but not with a big check deposited in my checking account (like He did for our speaker) but with lodging in Granada, lodging in Costa Rica, kitchens to cook in during our travels so that we don't have to eat in restaurants and so that we can bless those who have taken us in. He has extravagantly provided a place to live in until we can find a rental house and get back on our feet financially. This is His extravagant provision. Even though we barely have enough money to get home I am very much at peace with that knowing that God will provide. He has extravagantly provided us with friends throughout our travels (and of course back home). We have met people from all over that we will keep in touch with and who know that if they are ever in the Seattle area, they have a place to stay and eat with us. And we know that if we ever end up in their neck of the woods, we have a place to stay too. We have met a lot of people without kids who have gotten to know our kids and I think our kids have made friends with a lot of the adults we have come to know, in a way that they wouldn't have back home. Kids talk to kids, while adults talk to adults. But since we are a package deal (no such thing as adults only evenings) we have all gotten to know new people.

So far (1.5 hours into it) the Ticabus seems to be a good experience (compared to our Transnica experience) although there is no toilet paper (I should have known). We were all up at 5 this morning so the kids are all asleep in their luxurious bus seats (compared to a Chicken bus) and we will cross the border in less than an hour. The border crossing is the most stressful part of the bus ride but our much improved Spanish (mostly Joe's) and a general idea of what to expect (we haven't taken luggage to Costa Rica before so we don't know exactly what to expect) and the fact that we are "only" traveling with 7 checked bags and 6 carry ons (instead of the 9 checked bags, including 100 lbs of books that we came with). So what could possibly go wrong?

OK, We made it through the border crossing out of Nicaragua, and we were even able to help a couple from the US that didn't speak any Spanish and they thought they were being told that they bought tickets for a bus but now there wasn't room on it. They had been waiting at the border since 7:00 in the morning and it turns out that someone had told them that the bus left at 7:00 so they arrived at 7:00 at the border. They did have tickets on the 7:00 AM bus but that is the time it leaves Managua. There are no official stop times for the route in between capitals so they told them they had tickets on the 7:00 bus but they failed to understand that that was the time it left Managua. So Joe was able to translate between the driver of our bus (the 6:00 bus from Managua) and the couple that had been waiting at the border for 2.5 hours.

We also made it through the Costa Rican border. We didn't need proof of departure in 90 days when we came to Nicaragua (even though they have the same requirement as Costa Rica, to leave the country every 90 days) and we do have plane tickets home in 6 days but we didn't think to print out our tickets (oops!). We have an email confirmation on our computers but we didn't think to pull it up so that we could show it and since there isn't internet we thought there might be a problem. Another couple on the bus (from Boston) said that they had to go to an internet cafe (in Panama) and pay $3 to get on the internet and another $3 to print off their flight info. We were really hoping it wouldn't come to that because I can think of a lot better ways to spend $6! We were the last ones off the bus, we did our passport stamping and the couple from Boston stayed at the counter with us in case there was anything that we didn't understand. I prayed in line that everything would go smoothly and AMAZINGLY the immigration officer listened to the explanation that we have tickets on Frontier Airlines for May 12th but that we don't have the paper, only a confirmation on the internet. We smiled a lot (we were told that sometimes it can make the difference when we did our border crossing in November) and the immigration officer must have been having a good day because he believed that we were actually leaving the country and stamped our passports on our word. God is so good! Then we had to go to the bus and pull off all 7 pieces of luggage so that they could check them (a very challenging process when we came by bus to Nicaragua). Since we were the last people off the bus, we were also the last in line to get our bags checked. The bus needed to go and we hadn't been checked so our bus driver just brought our bags back to the bus for us. Hmmm....not sure how that works but we already had our passports stamped and no one tried to stop him so we got away easy this time again (last time they opened every single bag and ripped the tape off our 2 boxes of books and left us with the mess to clean up). The only issue we had was not enough time to use the bathroom at the border. So we are stuck with the less than sanitary conditions of a bus restroom (no soap, or toilet paper). As we were leaving we saw the couple that was stuck at the border come in on their bus (an hour behind us) so we were glad to see they got their bus and we were glad to have helped a little.

So now we have made it through the only stressful parts of our bus trip. Now we can sit back, relax, and enjoy the movie. The movie they are showing is Inception. What is it rated? Our kids are watching it in Spanish. I hope it isn't bad. It was funny because when it started Bridget said "I know what this is." I was shocked, "really?" she said "that's what he said, 'Yo se que esta eso.'" "Oh, you were translating, I though you knew what movie you were watching!" She didn't, so I told her it was called Inception and then she asked me to tell her the plot. Yikes, how do you tell someone the plot of Inception? She's watching it and keeps asking me questions about it, but I told her I didn't understand (or remember) enough of the movie the first time I saw it in English, so I probably can't help her. The boys are watching in another row and don't appear to have any questions.

So I am so happy that our Ticabus ride seems to be 100 times better than our Transnica experience. I don't know how much our 2 different experiences had to do with different bus lines and how much had to do with our lack of understanding how the system works and our greatly improved understanding of basic Spanish. But I will only be recommending Ticabus to fellow travelers just to be on the safe side.

So think concludes my bus blogging experience. I hope that nothing else blogworthy happens for the remainder of our trip, about 3 1/2 more hours. (nothing did)