Costa Rica Driving Adventue Day 1: Newport, MI to Terre Haute, IN

The adventure planned many years ago has finally begun! I started the day taking Oscar, Gretel, Midas and Bugsy to the vet for their final checkups. To import pets to Costa Rica, they have to be determined to be healthy by a vet within 10 days of arrival. To give me the most time to get to Costa Rica, I scheduled their last appointment for the morning of departure. Everything went fine at the vet. Midas made a new friend, a boxer puppy. The two traded friendly barks for about 5 minutes in the lobby. By the way, it's not easy taking 4 pets to the vet at one time by yourself. I guess I will have to get used to it until I pick up Barney and Dean on Saturday. Then I headed home to do some final packing up of the suv. It was 38 degrees out. Michigan apparently wanted me to be cold until the end. Then I headed out to the USDA office in Lansing.

We had an appointment at 2:00 PM to get the pets USDA approved certificates to travel internationally.

After waiting 45 minutes I finally got the certificates that were approved for Costa Rica. Only one problem, they weren't approved for Mexico, Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras or Nicaragua. Oops on them. I told them of the mistake and waited another 30 minutes for the worker to fix it. Then I got the approved certificates a second time, but......Honduras was left off. Sigh, government workers. Lucky I was paying attention. This required an additional 15 minutes to fix it.

At 3:30 I left. As I was in Lansing for the last time, I decided to look for my grand father's old law office. My mother gave me the address last week. The address she gave me was 800 Bauch Building, Lansing, MI. It had no street address. A google search showed nothing. I did a quick look around downtown and couldn't find it. So I decided that my time was too short and headed out. Strangely enough, my grandfather also quit law at a young age but he quit in order to become a farmer, lol. After a quick last stop at my law office in Taylor to make copies, I headed home to get the pets and say bye to Lori. It was a bit sad leaving Newport, but off to bigger and better things.

The pets were surprisingly good for the first leg to Terre Haute.

All four alternated sitting on my lap, sometimes 2 or 3 at a time.

Midas took advantage of me being busy driving by getting into the candy bag. Gretel barked quite a bit at headlights and rumble strips. We got into Terre Haute at midnight and checked into the lovely Travel Lodge.

A prostitute was standing in front of the next room when I checked in, lol. I guess I will have to deal with slum hotels for awhile as the nice ones don't take pets. After a cool morning this morning, it is supposed to be in the high 80's later today. I will officially be done with cold weather in a few hours. Off to Oklahoma!