We woke up at the Ceiba Bed and Breakfast, had a nice continental style breakfast, then headed off to Vieques where we had planned to stay the night. First we drove around Farjado and looked for the lighthouse there since we were on a kind of “lighthouse tour” of the island, and we had by now found nearly all of them.

Fajardo

Then about 12:30pm we went to the marina to get tickets to Vieques Island off the east of Puerto Rico. The ferry left at 1:00pm; we were a little confused why we were segretated in the terminal as “visitors” and others were “residents” but one lady told us that the ferry had been at times congested so much with visitors that the inhabitants couldn’t even travel back and forth to their homes which they apparently do with some frequency to buy groceries and other things that are either hard to come by or really expensive on the smaller islands of Culebra or Vieques -what are also known as the Spanish Virgin Islands.

Arrival in Vieques with ferry in background; Ferry ride

Anyway, that wasn’t the case for us and the ferry ride was pretty uneventful and fun.  It was also very inexpensive; only a few dollars each. As a larger boat, it was Britton’s first major boat ride for travel -if you don’t count various boat rides on Horsetooth Reservoir in Fort Collins for example.

Once we got there, however, we felt like fish out of water (ha!) without a car. We tried to find a guesthouse that we had seen in a travel magazine as being fairly inexpensive, but the locals hadn’t even heard of it. So we walked up to the lighthouse on that island and took a few more pictures.

In Vieques

We decided since we had to walk everywhere or take a taxi maybe we would just take the next ferry back, but we had just missed it, so we walked to a little bar right by the sea -Al’s Blue Sea or something like that. We sat and drank and got a little hungry, but they apparently don’t serve food there. What they did instead was did give us menus for the local restaurants nearby that we could either walk to or have delivered, so we ordered a pizza!

It was nice talking with the people that live there. Almost everyone in the bar were gringos who had moved there from the states. They told us about how and why they had moved, most due to the winters up north (mostly from New England states). I had a great (but pretty expensive) piña colada and Britton had a few beers. A sailor guy (someone who owns a sailboat) tried to talk us into going sailing on his boat, but it was $110/pp!

They also tried to convince us to stay the night on the island but the only thing left to see was the Bio Bay and they said it wasn’t that great because of the almost full moon that was going to happen on that night. The light of the moon would make it so the bio-iluminescence would not be as visible. So we headed back on the 6:00pm ferry and drove around and around again looking for a hotel but finally ended up back at the Ceiba Inn since we knew where it was and were comfortable there.

Friday we got up fairly late since we knew we would have a lot of time to kill before we got on the airplane back to Colorado on Saturday morning. We thought we might go to a casino, but we decided to see El Yunque -the tropical rainforest instead. We found Mount Britton which we thought was funny and awesome since Britton isn’t even a Spanish word. We saw the beautiful waterfalls and a definite change in vegetation.

We then drove to San Juan to make sure we knew where the car rental place was, just in case. Well, we got really lost (not a surprise by now), but finally found it and asked when we could return the car. They said they were open 6am to 12 midnight. We knew that to catch our flight the next day that we would have to turn it in as early as possible.

We then decided to find the Plaza de las Americas and have dinner and walk around. The mall is huge! It has over 200 stores and 40 restaurants and like 40 movie screens! So we saw a movie and walked around a little more until it started at 7pm. We watched “Skeleton Key” which was pretty good, especially the twist at the end.

We hung out pretty late and then just crashed in the car again since we were going to get up around 5am anyway. We slept most of the time in a neighborhood until flashing lights awoke us and we saw a policeman looking in the windows of the car! They didn’t say anything to us, and just left though.

We awoke before the sun was even up and filled up with gas. Britton had been doing it on his own for a while by then and had learned the expression “tanque lleno”. At this station he said they had asked to see his ID when he paid with credit and laughed  when they saw it was from Colorado. We then dropped off the car and took the shuttle to the airport. We had to go through something for the USDA -an agriculture check for plants and seeds and insects- which was a new process to us in addition to the normal security.

About 10 hours later we were out of the dreamland of two weeks spent all around Puerto Rico and were back in Colorado… dreaming of a way to return, for good.