The opportunity of a lifetime; an experience to remember forever; one heck of a lot of fun. Pick your phrase. Whichever one it was, my trip was all that and more.

Imagine, if you will, a snowy night in March. It’s about 20 below zero, and yet 18 high school kids are gathered in front of Bracebridge and Muskoka Lakes Secondary School, suitcases in tow, passports clutched tight. Midnight arrives, along with the coach bus and our three chaperones, and we all step in, ready to leave behind our lives for a single week in search of something more. Something warm and sunny. And with beaches… don’t forget the beaches.

We get to the airport — after a McDonald’s stop first, of course — around 2:30 in the morning. As our plane doesn’t take off until 6 a.m., we have time to kill. Playing cards are pulled out, text messages are flying, and some people choose to catch up on the sleep that they’re missing. But not for long. Soon enough we are able to board the tiny plane (three seats per row — total) and head to Houston, Texas, and our connecting flight.

Once we get to Houston, everyone’s feeling much more awake, and, I’m not going to lie, the Starbucks definitely didn’t hurt. We wait a few more hours, buy a few Stetsons and hop onto the next plane, which was thankfully a bit bigger.

“I would have to say that the trip to Costa Rica was awesome and that it was worth every penny. The only thing I didn’t like was the small plane from Toronto to Houston; it really was not fun,” said Liz R., a slightly claustrophobic student from BMLSS.

It’s not until another three hours later that we see it: the volcano. But then it’s gone, disappeared into the clouds. A pretty amazing first sight of the country nonetheless. The descent feels a little like a roller coaster, due to turbulence, but we make it safely to the ground and immediately feel the sweltering heat of San Jose. Ahhh, bliss.

We meet our tour director, Wendy, and are herded to our bus, a coach with — you guessed it — air conditioning. The sighs of relief are many. We bustle off to our first hotel, a little place 10 minutes from the airport that has a pool, which we all naturally head to. After a few hours of soaking up the sun, we head back to our (massive!) room to change for dinner.

We were told several times before we left that the main diet in Costa Rica is rice and beans. But of course no one believed it. Yet there they were, first meal of the trip. And from that moment on, we never once had a meal where you couldn’t reach down the table and grab one or the other. Seriously, they have rice and beans at every meal — and I don’t just mean every day at dinner. I mean breakfast, lunch and dinner, seven days a week. Wow.

Stay tuned for the continuing story in next week’s column.