is full of adventures, but occasionally a few can turn down the wrong avenue of excitement.

After ten days of vacationing on the Caribbean, I had planned a leisurely ride back to San José. We left in the morning after waving goodbye to the monkeys. We took our time shutting up our beach home and enjoyed a relaxed breakfast.

Friends of ours were vacationing with us, but left a few hours after we did. Because is such a mountainous area, there is often only one pass to and from the beach. One highway runs from San José to Limón and then on to the southern Caribbean coast. (Sometimes an alternate route exists, but it can be longer and much less reliable.)

The main highway is full of potholes, and some people try desperately to fill holes with everything from stones to broken clay pots to coconuts. Road crews are working on the road, and it is improving, but slowly.

I played a game with my daughter, guess that traffic problem: accident? Gas pipe installation? Stubborn cows? Goats? All of the former had happened to us. We were having a hard time narrowing this one down. I tried asking a few cars passing us in the other direction, but no one slowed down enough to hear my voice. After 30 minutes outside of Limon, I telephoned my friends. They were about two hours behind us.

“I heard there was a taxi strike,” my friend said as his voice faded in and out. A taxi strike? How could a few taxis cause thousands of cars, the entire right side of a nation, to stall and go nowhere?

We crawled on, like iguanas along the asphalt. People became more crazed than usual. Drivers decided to pass us. Yes. Pass us. Where were they going to go? My glare did nothing to thwart these evil acts – Ticos AND even a few TOURISTS! would zoom ahead of us and then cut in line when cars starting coming from the other direction. I watched in delight as a trail of about ten cars got stuck on the wrong side of the road, inches from the ditch because the on-coming traffic caught them head on, in the act.

With one bar of charge left on my phone, I called my friends again. They’d stopped someone on the road, and yes, it was a taxi strike. Licensed taxi drivers were protesting the government’s policy of “turn the other cheek” concerning the growing number of piratas – illegal taxi drivers.

Ahead, in the town of Guapilies, red taxis inched along the road in a tortuguismo – a turtle walk. After driving 3 ½ hours (in a ride that would have normally taken one hour), we found a soda - a little restaurant/store to stop at. Everyone dashed for the bathroom, and I ordered everything we could off the menu. I plugged in my cell phone and sat it on top of the hot dog cooker. I asked a trucker, who calmly drank his orange Fanta, if he had any information about the strike.

“No,” he said. “They’ve also go the alternative route blocked off, which is more windy and dangerous anyway.” He also heard the drivers were planning on hitting San Jose tomorrow.

I left the trucker to his casada – a typical plate of beans, rice, chicken, fried platanos or some similar combination the kitchen decided to “marry” together. Why wasn’t this guy on his cell phone, problem solving, yelling at someone, or at least venting? He was much too calm.

The two waiters looked overwhelmed and giddy trying to keep up with all the business. “There is a saying in ,” my nanny said. “En rio revuelto ganansia de pescadores” – when the river churns, it will bring a good catch to the fisherman. The restaurant would do a good business today. We were stuck in the flow of muddy waters.

All the truckers and a few others seemed to accept that these are the things that happen here. As my baby rolled around on the tile floor, I too accepted my fate. But that doesn’t mean I condoned this archaic method of rebellion.

Unless a legislator was stuck in traffic after a ribbon cutting ceremony, how would this demonstration affect the government? With a few words spun to satiate the public, the government would be able to blow the whole thing off. This strike would only inconvenience us “regular folks:” mothers with kids, campasitos-country folk, farmers hauling pineapples to the city, truckers. Many probably had given up a trip to the city for that errand they’d been planning for weeks.

We loaded back into the car with full bottles of water and bags and bags of odd little cookie/cracker combinations. An hour up the road, the tortuguismo began to loosen up and morphed into a lazy snake. Red taxis sped past us in the opposite direction. It was 4:00 p.m.

“They’re quitting!” I shouted. “They want to get home for dinner!” Instead of a statement of solidarity, the strike had petered into a pain in the neck.

At 7 p.m., we were still an hour from home. There were moments I couldn’t see the shoulder, but I refused to drive any faster. I imagined the ire of the drivers behind me. I wanted to scream: it wasn’t my fault! I left home at 9 a.m. this morning!

One of the reasons I moved to was to become disconnected from the trappings of a fast paced society. And it is slower here. Every day I learn what I can and cannot control, which grounds me more to the issues that are most important to me. Occasionally, there is a price for a more isolated life: information does not pass as rapidly here. Take when Arias was named president, for example. After two weeks of counting votes in an unexpectedly tight race, the announcement of the winner passed like a burb rather than the re-election of a Nobel Prize president who’d just been re-nominated in nonconsecutive terms.

Officials tried to fine the drivers who’d participated in the strike. I think they should. The tortuguismo is an outdated, effective method of protest. I imagine there will be a few more before all is said and done.

Next time, before I leave the beach, I may bring a few more bottles of water, and I may pack a few more snacks, but I will remain in a content place of disconnection. A four hour drive over a mountain will always bring risk, so will air travel, swimming in the ocean, hiking in the park, or showering with soap. There is only so much one can do when the river churns up the muddy underbelly.