Latin America Collection

When my wife and I decided we were going to
drive to Costa Rica, we had to do a lot of research on
the subject. We knew absolutely nothing about the
roads and very little about the countries through which
we would be driving. When we mentioned the subject to our friends or
relatives, we received a lot of negative horror stories that we would be
captured and killed by bandidos --or at the very least, robbed and raped.
Their knowledge came from the ghastly things we have all seen in old
Western movies with John Wayne and Clint Eastwood and stories of Mexican
bandits like Pancho Villa.

There were times when I was almost convinced I had lost my marbles,
or at least was not playing with a full deck for even thinking of such
adventure. After all, I was 73 years old with an aorta heart valve that had
been replaced with a calf's valve and which was starting to leak again, and
here I was looking at driving over 4,000 miles in as short a period of time
as possible.

We had very limited funds, and could ill-afford a lot of expensive
hotels. The fewer nights we spent en route the better off we would be,
financially. We had a seven year old, high mileage, four cylinder mini-van
that we were planning to drive. It would take a lot of preparation.