Christmas morning, the four of us set out on a guided horseback ride to the park (known as “Little Yellowstone” for its bubbling mud pots.) Our guide spoke no English, but I enjoyed using my rusty Spanish to converse with him. A few hours later, after seeing the geothermic activity in the park, he told us we were going to break for lunch. I saw him tie up the horses and then go to his saddlebag to produce what I had assumed would be a sumptuous meal for all of us. Much to my horror, he took out one lone sandwich and proceeded to eat. “But where is our lunch?” I asked in Spanish. “You didn’t bring any?” he replied. “Es problema.” “Si, es muy problema!” I screamed. — “We have to return to the hotel at once.”

Upon arriving at our lodging, I marched up to the concierge desk who had arranged the tour and complained. “But madam,why didn’t you bring lunch?” he said. “Because your brochure said we would stop for lunch and besides, there was no place for us to buy lunch around here to take with us anyway!” We then had more greasy hamburgers.

We had a wonderful time in Costa Rica, but I learned a valuable lesson: tour companies operated by foreigners often don’t understand Western service standards. Indeed, a white water rafting trip we took a few days later in another part of the country– that was operated by a Westerner-owned company– included a lovely lunch.

However, on the day we were to have dinner, I had a mammoth turkey leg at Disney’s Animal Kingdom – really bad idea. We had to leave the park early and I was on the verge of vomiting the entire way back to our hotel. My husband took the kids to the pool while I tried to calm my stomach and my intense headache before we had to take the kids over to the Polynesian. But hey, the monorail at Disney only goes one direction – so we had to go through the Magic Kingdom, the Contemporary Hotel, hop off at the Polynesian, drop the kids off, then hop back on the monorail, go back to the room, change into nicer clothes (and I won’t go into what stuffing my cranky stomach into tight pantyhose felt like), and then sit through an overly-long dinner at V&A on our “date night” because I wasn’t going to NOT eat at the “best” restaurant in Disney.

Was the meal worth it? A huge NO. Granted, my stomach didn’t feel good, but the food was only mediocre and the service was so over the top (and I’m a foodie from NYC) that I was cranky throughout the entire meal. My lesson: no more turkey legs and sometimes “best” isn’t always “best”.