We're All Here Together

Dear Friends,

We’re here…blessed by the grace of God abundantly expressed by so many of you. Thank you to Mom, Susan, Cindy, Penny and Dave who came to the rescue when our vacuum cleaner broke the day before our departure, to Blair for helping Heidi with last minute errands and cleaning, and to John for taking care of putting on the car license plate and lawnmower oil.

And, a special thank you to all of you who prayed. I was so touched when I met a colleague in Walmart a few days before we left who said we were on her calendar for July 7th to include us in her prayers that day. And I know friends from the Lafayette Square Society were thinking about us as we travelled—especially our pets. Getting the pets here has given me unquestionable proof that God is Mind and Love and also helped me see that actions--the expressing of gratitude, trust, and obedience--are also prayers.

Our golden retriever Bogie and our cats Piko and Caleb are family and an important parts of home for us. One of my first web searches in exploring Costa Rica as a destination for our family sabbatical was researhgin travel with pets. There is no quarantine on dogs and cats entering the country, and at first glance, bringing them with us looked like it would be simple enough. Wrong.

If you have a small pet, like our cats, you pay a fee, buy the right size carrier, and can easily get a confirmed reservation on a flight. A large dog is a different story. I think I called every airline that flys to Costa Rica—some twice—trying to find a reasonable arrangement for Bogie. Continental is the only airline that flys pets as cargo in the summer, but they take great care to keep them the proper temperature, exercise them on layovers, etc.

However, July is a peak travel season to Latin America, and when I first began investigating flights, the airline policy was that pets could only fly standby. Bogie would fly from St. Louis to Houston and then to Costa Rica. There was one only one flight to Houston each day with the properly sized and air-conditioned cargo bay and because of rules pertaining to connecting flights, Bogie would have to stay overnight at Continental’s kennels in Houston. We couldn’t get Bogie on the standby list until 3 days before his flight, and even then he could only fly if the flights were less than 75% full. It could take several for days for there to be a space for each leg of his journey. But at least there was a way to get Bogie to Costa Rica; he likes being with other dogs at kennels, and we knew someone with a pet sitting service that would be willing to take Bogie to the airport day after day in St. Louis, if needed. So we booked ourselves on a less expensive airlines and trusted that somehow the “Red Sea” of regulations would part for Bogie.

In mid-April, I decided to call back to get a clear definition of “3 days ahead of time,” and found that the rules had just changed in our favor. Continental was now guaranteeing one cargo pet per flight. No more standby, and you could make the reservation beginning 12 days ahead of time. Yeah! This was progress. (In fact as the rules now stand, you must make the reservation more than 3 days ahead of time.)

I knew that Piko and possibly Bogie needed to have their teeth cleaned before we went to Costa Rica, and made an appointment for the vet to look at them the afternoon after our Upper School graduation. The final week of school is crazy, and I kept wondering why I had made the appointment for that day, but I was too busy to call and change it. That morning, I searched online for “rules for taking pets to Costa Rica” so I could print the shot requirements for the vet in preparing for a future appointment. In addition to printing the official regulations from the embassy website, I also looked at several personal postings and learned that while the embassy regulations say that all shots need to be given less than 30 days before travel, rabies shots have to be more than 30 days (a rule the airlines later confirmed to be true). So, all the pets got their rabies shots that day—had the appointment been the next week, it would had been too late.

The personal postings I read also raised other questions which led to another timely call to the airlines. Once again the rules had recently changed. I was able to make Bogie’s reservation right then (not just 12 days out); however, if you didn’t fly with your pet, you were required to hire a broker (approximately $600 on top of the airfare) to coordinate the pet’s travel with the airlines, and import fees had increased to $250. So we changed Mike’s reservation to have him fly with Bogie (who could now get a connecting flight the same day) and swallowed the extra fees, grateful that we knew Bogie had a space on the desired day.

From the personal postings we also learned that we needed to have the pets’ certificates of health stamped by a USDA vet in Jefferson City, Missouri—another important detail not clear on the embassy site or in information from the airlines or vet.

The story doesn’t end there. (I’m sorry this is long, but each step is such wonderful proof to me of God’s care.) We took Piko in for his teeth cleaning (Bogie ended up not needing it), and the day after he came home, one of his eyes was infected. The ointment the vet gave us wasn’t doing any good, and the day for the pets’ exams for the certificates of health was drawing near; so we decided to stop using the medicine and asked a Christian Science practitioner to treat the situation with prayer. I really struggled with faith and trust. The morning of our vet visit, the Bible verse, “He performeth the thing that is appointed for me” spoke to me in a new way-- God would perform the appointment for Piko. Although Piko’s third eyelid still covered a portion of his eye, it was not at all inflamed, and we received the necessary certificate of health.

We also asked a Christian Science practitioner (THANK YOU!) to pray with us for the pets during our flights. Piko did great the whole time. Knowing that Caleb didn’t like being in his crate and wanting to be kind to fellow travelers, the vet had given us a pill to calm him. It didn’t work. Caleb meowed and pawed to get out of the crate during the whole flight. Fortunately, he was underneath a family with loud children, and his meows weren’t noticed much by others, but he clearly wasn’t a happy camper. So, I checked in with the practitioner between flights, and she reminded us that Caleb hadn’t left the kingdom of heaven and agreed to continue praying. He was calm and only meowed a few times on the next flight as well as on our four hour van trip to Monteverde the next day. For Caleb—truly amazing!

Bogie’s adventures continued the day of travel too. The airlines had told us that there needed to be three inches of clearance in the crate above his head, and we’d measured it carefully. (And a bigger crate wouldn’t fit on the small plane between St. Louis and Houston anyway.) But when Mike got to the airport, they were concerned that the crate was too small and weren’t going to let Bogie fly. Finally they agreed to take out the crate pad and let Bogie fly. Then, their flight out of Houston was delayed. The delay, however, turned out to be ablessing. Because they arrived in Costa Rica so late, Bogie was delivered to the baggage area rather than to the cargo facility. As baggage, we didn’t have to pay the anticipated import fees. Like the cats, Bogie was treated as a family member, not a commodity.

The pets seem to appreciate how special it is to be here with us. They love the cooler weather. In our smaller, one story house it is easier to keep an eye on all of us. Tico dogs usually live outdoors and are very sociable. Bogie has made many new friends—the trio of dogs that greets us on our walks and the two that share our back yard fence. Bogie has accompanied us to outdoor cafes and loves rolling in our grass.

We’re all here together…and you’re here with us in our hearts.

Gracias amigos,

Maria