Yeah, yeah I know I’m late. I get to all of that later on.
Ten days in Puerto Rico.
I arrived in the rain, late at night and very aware that I was out of my safety zone. The hotel was less than five miles away but I drove for an hour trying to find it. These strange new roads aren’t marked the way I am accustomed to and even when the occasional sign is posted, it is often covered by overgrowth. Driving in San Juan in a lot like driving in Miami but without laws. Imagine the chaos you’d get if you had a large city in which all the drivers knew that the cops were not going to pull you over for something as trivial as pulling up on the sidewalk to get past a driver stopped at a red light. Where it is perfectly acceptable to run the stop sign/red light as long as you are pretty sure there is no traffic coming. Traffic lanes (where they were visible) were merely suggestions and were often ignored. This is driving in San Juan. Every driver in Puerto Rico is an expert mathematician and can make calculations on the fly. They know the exact size of their car, your car, both speeds, acceleration and traction and somehow weave in and out of traffic into spots that I wouldn’t have tried to fit a motorcycle. But, I never got hit. I even found that (for the most part) when you did cut someone off or got cut off, it was never personal. It was just traffic. Here in the states if you cut someone off they’ll follow you for miles just to scream and holler at you. I’ve personally missed my exit on the highway just to catch up with a guy that cut me off so that I could bark at him. But that’s not how it is down there. You may get the occasional finger or even get the frustrated yelling but it’s over in seconds. It was, after all, just traffic.
One of the first things I noticed was that everything was green. The street signs covered by tree branches, the mountains with very little exposed rock, the abandoned buildings that nature quickly reclaims with vegetation. The island gets so much rain that the trees just never stop growing and spreading. I went up into the rainforest while I was there. The guy at the guard shack said that El Yunque had already gotten 190 inches of rain this year and they’ll probably hit 250 inches before the end of the year.
I was surprised how much driving you can do in the rainforest. For some reason I expected a parking lot outside the entrance and a bunch of hiking and biking trails. There were trails but you could also drive around under the canopy. It got so dark under there that I had to turn on my headlights and it was 1:00 in the afternoon! I got out and walked down one of the trails but it wasn’t what I was expecting. I saw relatively few birds, and it was like walking around in the woods anywhere else. “Rainforest” is just an image in my head I guess. I did see a lot of those little Coqui frogs and they were cool (and loud) but I didn’t see any tropical birds. Not in the rain forest anyway. While we were waiting for the parts by the air traffic tower we saw about ten birds flying around. I barely noticed them until someone pointed out that they were green. I took a closer look and they all looked like parrots, green with a red splotch on their head. They fluttered around a tree for a while and even lined up on the fence. I took a couple of pictures but those are the ones that were lost in the laptop crash. I just thought it was cool, parrots flying around there like pigeons here.
I finally made it up to the Arecibo Observatory. It was a nerd paradise. You park at the bottom and walk up the rest of the mountain. So it is more like a “semi-in-shape nerd” paradise. Along the way they had stations showing the scale of the solar system. In the parking lot they had the sun. It was just smaller than a basketball. the first station was Mercury and in the glass display was a speck of dust. Earth was about the size of a pea and Jupiter was about the size of a quarter. I took a LOT of interest in Jupiter and read everything on the display twice. Not that I really care that much about Jupiter but I needed to catch my breath without telling Jose to wait up for the fat guy. I wasn’t fooling anyone… So we got to the top and there before me was what I had made the entire trip to see. The largest single (immobile) dish on the planet. I’m sure that if I had dragged Teresa up there she would have killed me. “What? What am I looking at?” There was very little to see unless you are into it. Even then, there is very little to see. They have a visitor center where they had interactive displays. It was like a school field trip to a museum. I spent a lot of the time (and digital film) out by the dish platform. I got a whole bunch of pictures of me and Jose standing in front of the dish and the transmitter/receiver bell. The place is huge. I know there are larger arrays out there but the size of this one dish is very impressive. More impressive that the dish is the tower/cable system used to hold up the Tx/Rx bell. They were doing maintenance on the bell while we were there so we got to see a few people using the catwalk and cable bucket to get out to the main bell. The people just fade to ant size as they approach the bell and only then do you get a true sense for just how big this thing really is. I had a lot of fun, bought a few souvenirs and took a bunch of pictures. Some people believe in various gods and travel to a special shrine to pay homage to their deities. I believe in science and my pilgrimage is now complete.
Most of the rest of the trip was not as exciting for you to hear about but was definitely the BEST part of the trip for me. Work kept getting interrupted by various problems. My camera died from the humidity. I was careful to keep my laptop out of the humidity but it still died. Tony had the same trouble and his laptop died within hours of mine. We were able to Frankenstein the two laptops together and get a working machine so we could complete our work. Unfortunately, the new path between Miami and San Juan is down and the path from Miami out to the telco cloud hasn’t even been built yet. So as soon as we completed our install we got the word to come home. Between only working until 3pm and being cut short a few days, I had plenty of time to visit with Jose.
I was unsure of what to expect because I hadn’t seen him in seventeen years and back then I was more obnoxious that I am now. Hard to imagine huh? So I gave him a call and we went out one night. It turns out that we have a lot more in common than I thought we would. We ended up hanging out just about every night and I got to meet his fiance Irmaly. She is a very sweet woman and she didn’t seem to mind that I took up a lot of their time while I was there. It’s too bad that I wasn’t there on the island with Heffner because the two of them were a lot alike. Old guitar players that are fed up with the ridiculousness of the metal scene and are digging on other genres that showcase the guitar without being the obnoxious-over the top shredder. I got a lot of cool music from him and he copied a lot of my music library too. We drove around listening to rap in Spanish. He’d pause it, give me the translation and then play the next line, pause, translate… It was funny.
I got to see a lot more of the island than I would have if I were out there on my own. I only hit the Burger King once and it was 3am. I ate at all the back wall places and ate a lot of the local food. Mofongo, beans and rice, plantains and lots and lots of pork. One stop we made at a roadside stand. We got a bag of pork rinds, sweetened bread and a few cups of fermented sugarcane. It tasted like a sugary version of my meade. Oh it was sooo good. I normally don’t like pork rinds but I figured “what the hell” and dug in. I still don’t like pork rinds. But the bread was good. There are a couple of Mexican restaurants down there that I will hit every time I go now. They have these super huge burritos and they are delicious. The other place had something called Chilaquiles (or something close to that) and it was incredible.
We walked around Old San Juan at night and I fell in love with that city man, it was just so beautiful. The fort is huge and a lot of the city wall is still intact. A lot of the appreciation I have for the place comes directly from Jose’s tour. As he’d show me something around the city, he knew a story about it and you could hear it in his voice how proud he was of his home. It wasn’t just him either, our local FAA tech would also talk about Puerto Rico like that, especially when he was telling me about the history of San Juan. When we had to wait on a phone call (more time spent waiting than actually working) Tony would go sit in his truck, crank up the AC and play solitaire on his laptop. I sat out in the sun with Juan and he would tell me all kinds of things about Puerto Rico. He was especially happy to hear that I had a friend down here that was showing me around so that I wouldn’t waste the trip by hanging out in the hotel room. I couldn’t agree more. Walking around with Jose and Irmaly and looking at the city at night while smoking a freshly rolled cigar… A memory that will stay in my brain for the rest of my life.
I did spend two nights in the hotel but they were when Jose was busy and I spent a lot of that time in the bar or in the casino. Tony and I had dinner up there one night and I was drinking JW Black. I just wrote up the differences between whiskey and scotch for the webpage a few weeks ago and I saw the bottle of Blue Label sitting up there. I asked the bartender how much he was charging me for my Black. He said $7.50. I asked how much for Blue? $25! Yeah right, that’s why I’ll never know what it tastes like. The next night I won $100 at blackjack and ended up in the bar again. I drank four shots of the blue and to be honest, I don’t have the palate to really tell much of the difference. Oh sure it was smooth but was it smooth because I saw which bottle it came out of? Would I be able to tell in a blind taste test? I don’t think I could. I’m sure SOME people could, but I’m not that guy. By the time the fourth round came it tasted great! But then, gasoline would taste great if you drank enough of it.
I pretty much stayed out of the casino even though Tony won over $280 at nickel slots. The first night we were there Tony and I played blackjack. I put down $20 and after about a half hour I was up about $30 and saw that he had gone out. So I dropped my entire $50 on the next round. I drew to a nineteen on the house’s ace. Of course she had the blackjack, I lost it all and we went up to the bar. Another night I dropped $10 at the nickel slots and another $20 at roulette but made another $20 at blackjack. With my $100 bar bill winnings I figure I walked away with $70 of the casino’s money. Not too bad, especially considering that I was being cavalier the first night and let it ride when I should have at least pocketed what I had put down. I figure gambling is an entertainment expense and not a way to make money. I bet the whole $50 because I went in planning to lose the original $20. It was worth the expense to risk it all and go for the big win because I figured I had already lost it all when I put it on the table. It’s all for fun.
So that was the trip. There are probably a million things I haven’t written about but with the laptop down I haven’t really had a chance to write this up because any time I’m at the house I’m busting my ass trying to pack up the den. I’ve got it well under way but there’s still a long way to go. I’m such a hoarder.
I’ve got pictures coming and even a few movie reviews but there’s no way I’ll get to them in the next couple of days. Teresa just walked out here and busted me for not packing/cleaning the den. Sitting on my ass in front of the computer again…
Tomorrow is work at the ARTCC and hopefully getting HP to repair my laptop. Tomorrow night I’m back to packing the place up. Friday I’m going down to be with family as they have the ceremony of putting my Grandfather into the earth. I’ve got to make it back up here and get to Home Depot/Lowes to buy the paint and supplies for Saturday. This weekend a lot of friends and phamily are coming over to help Teresa and I paint and do those little repairs that are beyond my scope of expertise. (Big embarrassed blushing here) I’m not used to asking for help but I was poked and prodded until I promised I would. When I did I was shocked at the response. I’m looking forward to this weekend because the number of people that are planning on coming should make short work of all this paint and repair. I’m scared to death of having so many people trying to help but I’m also overwhelmed at the love that came flowing this way when we admitted we could use the help. It really is amazing how many people are out there that want to help out. So, we’ll get both the inside and outside painted, a little bit of wood replaced (before we paint of course), a few plumbing problems fixed and the jungle trimmed back to a respectable yard. The landscaping expert is showing up with a trailer full of equipment and a dump truck! How cool is that? I plan on working my ass off Saturday and Sunday and we’re even planning on working in a poker game on Saturday night. This is going to be a fun weekend.
So, if all goes will, HP will have my laptop repaired and I’ll be back on the road next week. If so, I promise to get these pictures up here and write up a few more entries. Sorry this one was so late but it’s out of sheer will you’re even getting this one and it will probably be the last you hear from me until Monday or Tuesday. See ya then!
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