Free ebook anthologizes 25 Tico travel stories

The book’s cover was designed by Jorge Pomareda, an award-winning art director based in Chicago. Courtesy of Ernesto Adduci

Writers often have “aha” moments, when a great idea springs from seemingly nowhere. Marcel Proust once smelled a sponge cake, and the unique scent inspired the seven-volume memoir “In Search of Lost Time.”

For Ernesto Adduci, that moment came in an ordinary waiting room. Adduci is a Costa Rican native now working in advertising and marketing in Chicago. When his father passed away, Adduci had to return to Costa Rica, and he found himself sitting in a waiting room for eight hours. As he sat, the normally shy Adduci started talking with the people around him, most of them advanced in years. He learned that many of them had never really traveled.

“After talking with these gentlemen and ladies, I realized that none of them would have the [formative] experiences I have had traveling,” Adduci recalled in a press release.

Moved by the experience, Adduci started soliciting travel tales from his friends and colleagues in Costa Rica. The result is “25 Aviones” (“25 Airplanes”), a diverse anthology of stories collected into a single ebook.

The book itself describes all kinds of situations and morals, but one of its most striking aspects is the range of people represented: Vignettes come from such diverse personages as sports writer Manrique Yglesias, singer and music producer Bernardo Quesada, chef Úrsula Valverde, dentist Sergio Murillo, and even former Costa Rica president Rafael Angel Calderón Fournier.

More striking still, the ebook costs nothing.

“The book is free and can be downloaded at 25aviones.com,” wrote Adduci to The Tico Times. “There’s no money or glory involved in this.”

The book is composed entirely in Spanish, but the prose should be accessible to most intermediate readers.

“The beauty of human beings is that we can do whatever we want,” writes Adduci on the “25 Aviones” website. “I hope that in this testimony you will find a friend who says, “Travel, if you can!” – just as my father always said.”