Surprise Travel Tips

The first day of my trip to Costa Rica was full of surprises. The first and perhaps biggest surprise was that I didn’t actually get to Costa Rica because my passport, marked valid through April 4, 2008, was no good. Apparently, to visit Costa Rica, you must complete travel at least 30 days before your passport’s expiration date. Go figure. I guess I was supposed to know that a specific, cited expiration date was not definite, but approximate, and whimsically variable from one country to the next. The manager of customer service at Delta told me this as I watched, holding back tears, as my daughter left without me. I convinced myself said manager was just providing me with sudden and unwelcome information. It wasn’t her fault; the freakishly tall, ferret-faced bitch was just doing her job. I knew, too, that I was not giving up this trip without a fight.
Which brings me to the second surprise: it is possible to get a passport in one day. This is especially true if you enter the passport office sobbing “I have an emergency! My daughter is on a plane to Costa Rica right now, and I have to find her!” While I neglected to mention that my daughter is 25 and quite self-sufficient, that was only because I didn’t want to take away from the drama of the moment. This strategy proved effective. The passport office employees totally came through, from the chubby self-important security guard to the nondescript bureaucratic drone who took a few minutes of attention away from his ham sandwich to process my paperwork. Thanks, fellas! Thanks, too, to the guy at the Express Photo adjacent to the passport office, even though the picture he took made me look like a brunette version of Nick Nolte in that unfortunate D.U.I. mug shot. Not pretty, but valid, until approximately March 16, 2018.
The next morning I arrived back at the Delta terminal. The manager was busy humiliating some old codger in a wheelchair who’d missed his flight to Dubai. I checked in and proceeded through security with a smile on my face, confident I’d be well on my way to Costa Rica before she “discovered” the thumbtacks I left on her chair. Surprise!