The adventure continues. Jill had a rough night in battle with Montezuma's Revenge. We're not sure why it hit her and not me, because she's the one who is paranoid about what she eats and how it is prepared in a foreign country. I, on the other hand, seem to be living a charmed life, accidentally drinking the water at a hotel in San Jose and not thinking about the food that was given to me on the rafting trip.

We stopped by Stella's Bakery in Monteverde that morning for a loaf of bread for the road and some brownies for me, and we drove over to Canas--a different route than the one we had taken before, but just as rough and long. At Canas we filled up with gas and got our next surprise--the car wouldn't start. We had had some trouble with it that morning, but I thought that I had simply flooded it rather than it being an endemic problem. The starter would turn over, but there was no oomph from the battery. My first thought was to call the rental company, but the phone was occupied and it looked like I would have to deal with an operator rather than being able to dial direct. The next idea was to push start it, with the held of a friendly servicio employee, but after two tries, we determined that that wasn't going to work. He waved at me, and ran over to another friend, who got into his small white Toyota pickup. Ah, a jump start, I thought. Jill was in ready agreement-- until she saw that they didn't have jumper cables, but were stripping two pieces of wire to use. It was probably one of the unsafest things I had ever seen done with a car--they connected one end of a stripped wire to the positive on our battery, the other to the positive on the Toyota, then the negative to the negative, foregoing the ground. But it worked. We decided to drive straight to Tamarindo without stopping, and to handle calling the rental agency and obtaining a new battery there, where we would have the luxury of staying for two nights, so if there was a problem obtaining one, we'd already be where we wanted to be.