Travel Day: Atlanta, USA – Miami, USA – San Jose, Costa Rica + the Emergency Room!
The 5:30am Monday flight from Atlanta to Miami was a great deal for a reason, it is an early (to put it mildly) start to the day! Whitney and I got to bed around 10pm Sunday night but my mind was busy so I know I saw the time approaching midnight. I got ~2 hours sleep and the 1:45am alarm felt like it was about 3-minutes after my eyes had closed. Fortunately though, travel days have adrenaline as the energy reserve so why not use that from the moment you wake up?!?! So, we have a mission, to get to Costa Rica! An outline of how the day unfolded follows:
1:45am Whitney and I wake up (target to be heading to the airport by 2:30am-2:45am). We get ready and do some final packing/car loading.
2:30am wake Scarlett and Nora up, change their clothes (hope there is no meltdown!)
2:45am driving out of our friends driveway. Yay! First deadline achieved
3:20am we are at the Atlanta Airport rental car station waiting for the train to take us across to the airport terminal
~3:45am checking in with American Airlines. Checking in for the 5 of us is still mostly a cluster. The airlines always want us to use the automated machines, but 9 out of 10 times we get to the infant in arms or checking car seats or passports section and we get the warm message of “Please see a representative”. Then we get to move ourselves and all of our stuff to the line of 10, 20, 30+ people that we had tried to enter 5-10 minutes earlier only to be directed to the machines. Always a pointless and frustrating exercise.
To the American Airlines representative’s credit, she kept an eye on the data gathering process as I made my way through the passport scanning and baggage entry phases for all 5 of us and she jumped in to get through a couple of the sections that could have triggered the usual experience. Perhaps the airlines are figuring it out!
4am we head to security. We are ahead of the crowds as our flight is among the first of the day and ATL security seems to be just opening up. “Clear” membership is zero value this morning, unfortunate as this morning was one of the reasons we renewed for one more year. Anyway, we are pre-check so that makes a big difference. Still no meltdowns from the kids or us adults which is a bit of a miracle at this point but we have plenty of time for that yet.
4:30am we have won the “gate lottery” with a terminal (“T”) gate so we can walk from security to the gate. For anyone that wants to see how massive an airport can be, come through Atlanta one day. It is actually really well done, but it is huge with 5 parallel runways and 6 terminals (T, A, B, C, D, E, & F) – always among the busiest airports in the USA. I used to fly up to 40+ times a year when I lived in Atlanta so I know this airport more than one ever wants to know an airport. The terminals are connected by a train system that runs underground to all terminals and a walkway that if you have time is well worth it (albeit tough when I am carrying everyone’s hand luggage, offset by the kids loving the massive moving walkways!)
4:40am at the gate, boarding starts in about 10 mins. Second victory of the day! But don’t under estimate the fatigue building in the team so far, some cracks are forming. No food outlets are open. They are cooking some food in preparation but for those of us on the 5:xx am hour flights that is just to get the food smells and taste buds flowing ☹…
5:30am-~7:30am flight from Atlanta to Miami. Hazel infant in arms, which may as well read “Whitney’s arms”. I was left to wrestle with Scarlett and Nora. It depends on the flight as to which role is better! They were very solid, some screen time, and Nora got a 20 minute power nap as we docked in Miami. No food on the flight beyond a bag of peanuts. The reason from American was it was too early and a short flight. Neither of those responses struck a chord with us as we were feeling the day had already had plenty of hours and 2 hours was more than enough time to eat!
7:30am-8:30am in Miami Airport saw meltdown #1. Nora, the above mentioned 3 year old, did not appreciate the need to wake up for the move from one terminal to the next one – well, awake enough to at least sit upright on the front step of the “BOB” stroller. Enough time to move terminals but not enough time to get food. Wish we had done some better snack planning.
8:30am-10:30am flight from Miami to San Jose, Costa Rica (lands at 9:30am local time = Mountain Time in USA). Full meal service on this flight so that was huge. Scarlett got the end of flight power-nap for 30 minutes as we came into land and it again contributed to a bit of a rough wake up phase as we got off of the plane. Immigration went well. Note to self, only fill out one form (the airline host had given us 5 so I had filled out one each). All the bags, car seats and crib made it and we were all in good shape, albeit feeling the day was long enough and it was only 9:30am local time.
10am (local time) next up, rental car. Best deal had been through Adobe Rental Car. Proved to be a good decision (there are a bunch of seemingly good providers that offer better value than the big name brands). However, there is always that moment of nervousness as you move through the “safe/authorized” vendor room just before you walk out to the curbside pick up area where you are about to be confronted with lots of service providers. Ok, game on! We slowly (with our bags saddled in the configuration that we had settled on since we left Iowa) maneuvered our way along the sidewalk hoping to see an “Adobe Rental Car” sign. Nothing for a bit and running out of sidewalk and vendors, the tension increases. Now I am looking for anyone who may speak English and have some local knowledge. We connect with someone who tells us to keep going and sure enough a few more steps and the Adobe representative came into view. It is a moment of relief and indeed on some trips it doesn’t happen and you pick your way back to the start and work out options. Not today, thankfully! The wait for the off-airport transfer bus to take us to the Adobe office was only ~20 mins but as our fatigue was increasing, internal family relationships were starting to fray. Keeping Scarlett and Nora safe and not agitating each other &/or other travelers was becoming increasingly difficult and unsuccessful.
The car rental office went well, just took some time. Getting through the paper work, installing 3 car seats, and the packing the bags in the right configuration for this specific car (Hyundai Tucson) took time. Time was starting to strain us all.
The car rental agent team member who helped us wins the “Tidbit of the Day” award. He gave us the key local knowledge point “everyone, I mean everyone, uses Waze for navigation” and “don’t enter street addresses, you will get lost, enter the name of what you want” i.e. we were going to “Country Inn and Suites” so enter that name and not the street address. There is a problem with this, but we will encounter that down the road.
11:30am-2pm. All good part 1. Got to the hotel, too early/no room ready to check in. So we went to lunch right next door at a Mexican Restaurant and bought a few snacks from the mini-grocery store. After that it was back to the hotel.
2-5pm. All good part 2. Swam in the hotel pool and hung out. Everyone is starting to lose their marbles to fatigue so we walk back to the little shops next door and grab dinner at the Italian restaurant.
5pm-10pm. ALL HELL BREAKS LOOSE Injury and Emergency Room! As we walk out of dinner and head back to the hotel and bed, Nora walks directly into the corner of a wooden sign and cuts her eyelid open. That was bad and combined with fatigue it was a good old instant cluster. It wasn’t bleeding badly, but was gaping open so we decided to glue it back together once we got to the hotel room (Whitney, pediatrician, brought along some tissue adhesive for just this occasion). Unfortunately, the combination of a stubborn, wiggling toddler and unusual applicator meant that a whole bunch of glue shot directly into her right eye😱
Now that is painful and absolutely not where we wanted things to go. Nora quite rightly lost it. We started rinsing the eye but with only 2 of us to restrain and eye-rinse it was going less than well. And of course the noise and displeasure Nora was in created replica noise and apparent discomfort for Scarlett and Hazel. Yep, a banner unraveling had happened and our hotel was a chorus of screaming children and strained parents.
Whitney is our leader in evaluating all medical ailments and in any treatment implementation, although I unwisely venture into this area more than occasionally. As the unsuccessful eye washing continued it became clear she needed to go to the emergency room. Through the chorus of screaming we madly googled where to go and up popped the National Hospital for Children, fortunately just down the street. Whitney’s direction was for me to take Nora. I paused, pushed back momentarily but she was adamant (She has since claimed that she was feeling too guilty to go). I grabbed Nora, stopped at the reception desk on the way to the car to confirm that the hospital was open, good, etc. Their English (far superior to my non-existent Spanish) affirmed that it was open, had an emergency room and was good. I kept moving, and put our hopes in Waze getting us there. Traffic, of course, was heavy, plus it was dark. It would take us about 25 minutes to travel the 4 miles down the road, not good for my already rattled nerves. Nora, completely exhausted from the day and past 15 minutes, kept falling asleep in the car. My thought was to keep her eye open every few minutes to stop it from completely sealing shut from the glue. About halfway there while sitting in traffic, I definitely had a wave of WTF was I doing come over me. Why am I, the non-medical person, non-Spanish speaking person (Whitney can speak quite a bit of Spanish), in the car driving Nora to the ER which is bound to be a cluster. I thought about turning back to get everyone, but then reconciled if it was a complete disaster I would order a taxi to bring Whitney/Scarlett/Hazel to us.
We finally arrive at the ER. I park horribly and rush in. I ask for anyone who can speak English and the receptionist sends me through a second door. I walk that way holding Nora, who is a mixture of sobbing/screaming and then dozing. Frankly I feel like doing the same thing. I ask a couple of people for help, then come across a lady who does speak English. I explained what happened and showed her the “skin glue”. Cheers to her, she took me to another part of the ER, into a room and told me to wait. Then the ER staff at the National Hospital for Children in Costa Rica took over and thank goodness. They did a great job! A team of 3 doctors from the surgical team came in. I was chief restrainer, holding Nora’s arms and legs, barely able to see through the tears welling in my own eyes as she whaled “its hurting, when is this going to stop?” over and over. Thankfully, and for the benefit of all involved I had no other role to play. The team of doctors then undertook an aggressive eye rinse out. It felt like 20-30 minutes passed, but it was probably a fraction of that time. They worked it from all angles and removed the glue from her eye, layered in ointment to stop infection and put on a full patch and tape coverage. Nora began to calm down. Damn that was intense. The team of doctors then left, onto their next patients. Crisis over. I was given an appointment card to bring her back in the morning to see an ophthalmologist at 8am to check her eye and make sure everything was OK. What followed were lots of (poor) attempts by me to say thank you to the staff and work out what payment was owed. A member of the nursing team finally said, “it is all OK, this is what we are hear for!”.
We wandered somewhat dazed out of the ER into the warm San Jose night. Waze picked up our hotel, I drove Nora home. Nora was mostly quiet, asking a few times if she could be the one to tell Mom and Scarlett about what happened in the ER and wondering what was going to happen tomorrow. I answered that hopefully they would just look at her eye, trying to reassure both of us that the worst of this was over!
The city of San Jose seemed more alive now. The lights, people and even traffic were buzzing. The beauty of being in an unfamiliar land started to return. There was still plenty of adrenaline to keep Whitney and I awake for the next few hours. Nora drifted off to sleep with us, while Scarlett was sound asleep in the other room. Hazel was doing what she does… sleep for a few minutes and then wake up. Tonight the 3-5 wake ups with Hazel seemed a little less annoying on the back of our ER trip!
A roller coaster of a day. We are all together to finish it and, for the most part, in good health. Whitney has sworn off home doctoring for a while. We are ready to head to the Pacific coast tomorrow to the place we will call home for the next month. Right after that ophthalmologist appointment!
