Well, tomorrow is officially our 2 year anniversary of living in Puerto Rico (here’s life when we first arrived)! My how time flies! We still have so much to look forward to (or it could be seen as so much to do!) that time just sort of slips away from us. Perhaps it is the lack of snow and cold that makes everything sort of meld together, or maybe it is that we don’t have any real pressing urgency to be anywhere, but time has gone by so fast.
Turkey troop in the sunlight
They say a picture is worth a 1000 words, so rather than attempt to write about our daily lives too much I thought I would just share many thousands of words in a few pictures. Thank goodness for pictures to capture a few of these fleeting moments.
Summer rains and heat means things grow super fast -so we both get out and mow!
Preparing the site for the bridge crossing over the quebrada
Beautiful troupial in a tamarind tree
Britton, Kitty and the turkey poults
Friendly soft-eyed cow at Steps Beach
Strange yummy fruit finds at the Farmer’s Market – A porcupine looking pulasan
Plumeria and trinitaria (plus sphinx moth caterpillars)
Watching ships passing and clouds building
Days of sun and beach and nights of jamming music
And lots of time outsidewith the animals: Me, Kitty and a chicken
Luz is the shorthand way of saying electricidad in Spanish. It literally means light, but in our case it will eventually mean a full size fridge (amongst other things)!! Yay!
It may not look like much, but getting this hook-up was quite the achievement!
We finally made a decision about a month ago after much deliberation and chose to go with grid-tie electricity instead of solar power. Since then, it has been a lot of work to get to that point! Even though we hired out the work, we have learned that it is important to be involved or at least present in any project.
The first step was to dig a trench about 500 feet. At first there were only two middle-aged guys doing it and it was getting done, but the going was slooow because it was hot, steep, and hard work. I have never seen a skilled 50 something-year-old electrician getting down and dirty digging a trench like Papo, but I have come to expect the unexpected in Puerto Rico!
Checking out the sanja (trench) with our friend Anthony after the guys left
After a couple of days just working with one other guy, Papo brought in a larger crew and the trench-work (literally working in the trenches) went a lot faster. It was still super hot though and everyone on the team had to change clothes at the end of the day because they were just drenched in sweat. Late summer is not the ideal time to do manual labor in the tropics because if it wasn’t super blazing hot, it was raining! Also, Tropical Storm Erika did nothing in Rincón, but in Maricao it downed a lot of lines. So Papo took about a week working there instead, helping restore people’s power which was definitely more important than our project.
Trench almost to the cabin!
When work commenced again it was time to lay cable -the thickest cable I think that is available. In order to do this, they had to unspool it and send it down the trench. And then cover it with the conduit tubes and seal them.
Unspooling the wire! Orlando, Papo, Cocolo and Ivan with the spool of wire Covering the wire in conduit and running it down the trench
Tube is laid and ready to be filled in with caution tape
The next phase was to build a junction box and run the copper wire into the cabana and chip out a space in the wall for the breaker box. Britton helped bring supplies and materials and oversaw a lot of the work. His Spanish is still a little bit Tarzan, but I think he could work on a Puerto Rican construction crew now if he wanted. These guys speak virtually no English, so necessity is the mother of invention. As I reminded Britton, immersion is the key to learning any language (though construction Spanish has a distinct dialect and vocabulary ha!)!
Junction box
Double breaker boxes in the cabana
The final steps were to hook everything up, plaster the holes, cement the lower portion where the conduit crosses the quebrada and check to make sure it all worked. Well, everything seemed finished, until the sky opened up and just dumped an aguacero on us.
Trench in the torrential downpour
Britton and Papo went through the rain and mud back to the cabin to go do a final check, but alas, it didn’t work. No sense in trying to mess with electricity during a storm like this, so they called it a day. He would need to return a final time to figure out what went wrong. We were a little nervous that the fresh cement wouldn’t hold through all that rain, but the next day we checked and that, at least, stayed solid.
The turkeys went with us to check the quebrada crossing, and everything was still intact
When Papo returned, he figured out the small issue. He connected some wires and we all walked to the cabin for one final check. Amazingly, not only did everything work, but it had hardly any voltage drop at all! Well done!
Voltage at the cabin was almost exactly the same as at the studio cabana 500 feet away
Luz! Literally!
Afterward, our friends needed a little help from Papo but since Papo speaks no English and they don’t speak Spanish, I went along as interpreter. As we were heading up, Papo honked and signaled us to stop. For a beer! Then after we left our friends’ house, he wanted to stop again for more! Since it was Friday, and we had such a huge accomplishment we went with the flow. The bar was called called El Nuevo Encuentro (The New Encounter) after all! How could you not stop at least once (if not twice) with a name like that! It was hill top with a great view and the wind blew my hair all around as we enjoyed some cervezas, billares, alitas, and amistad.
Having a new encounter and beer with Papo!
Sometimes it’s hard to put into words exactly why I love Puerto Rico, but this is part of it! I mean, come on, our electrician took us out to the bar! How much more welcoming can it get?! Rarely are things completely straightforward here and lines (like working/playing) are often blurred. And I just can’t help but love it so much. It lights up my life! 😉
Our tropical food and other adventures continue daily.
Fresh, delicious papaya
This month we harvested our first papayas as well as our very first pineapple. I have never been a big fan of papayas because to me they smell a little like vomit. But this variety was actually pretty good and didn’t have the smell.
Pineapples are probably up there as one of my very favorite fruit, and we’ve had such issues with root rot here that I got so excited I just had to wear our first little harvest on my head along with some home-grown bananas! Haha, poor Britton always has to put up with my silly shenanigans.
Just call me Chiquita
In addition, it’s avocado season in full steam. Nearly every meal and snack now includes fresh avocados. Each evening and sometimes morning we go scour beneath the avocado trees. We have found four large mature avocado trees and we have planted another 8 or so, that are off-season varieties so (hopefully) soon we will be so overrun with avocados we won’t know what to do! Most days we’ve collected about 5-10 large avos. It’s amazing how much you can extend a meal when you have avocados. We have them with our eggs in the morning, with salads at lunch and with pretty much anything for dinner (nachos, rice and beans, etc).
A typical daily breakfast is almost all home grown -avos, mangos, starfruit, and scrambled eggs. We look forward to growing our own peppers soon too
Large orange iguana hanging out eating our fruit too- on the parcha vine!
The animals are all doing well. The baby turkeys are now living in the coop in a smaller cage and we take them out for walks daily until they are hawk-proof (about 3 months old). And of the two chicken chicks that survived from the original 6, one was a hen and the other a rooster. The hen is a gorgeous black chicken mix of auracana and Jersey giant and lays really cool green olive-colored eggs. The rooster is beautiful and huge, working for his place in the pecking order.
The birds crowding around Brittonat dinner time
There are still four large male turkeys toms, and we need to decrease numbers because they fight a lot. But we want to wait until we have a stove and fridge to properly handle them. In the mean-time they are looking more beautiful than ever.
Turkey looking good
We are in the midst of a large project that I will write about once it is completed, but we have had quite a few days off as well. We have been going to the beach, hanging out, and playing music with friends.
Afternoon rain clouds form at Steps Beach after we went snorkeling and the water turned an amazing color
September is a quiet month in Rincón. The local Puerto Rican tourists have left and the North American tourists haven’t arrived yet. There are afternoon rains nearly daily, threats of hurricanes, and the heat can be super intense to work outside. (We take LOTS of showers and have all the fans on after sweating outside!) But I still wouldn’t trade it for anything.
When we’re not working we spend a lot of time just chillin’ in the Big Sky park of our yard with its ever changing painting
When we first arrived at our property, we hadn’t even walked the whole perimeter. When we finally did, we took a machete and a spider stick and just hacked our way along. We got lost multiple times. We looked for flattish spots to place our feet and eventually as we walked it over and over again, a few trails became apparent. This was true trail blazing. Since then, our trails have become more and more refined.
One of the more “raw” unworked trails
Most people would probably say that we should have built trails (or better yet, a road!) BEFORE we got started on the cabin in the woods. And that would make sense. But, we took the old wooden house down before we had selected the site of the cabin. So therefore we had basically set the timer on using the wood since it was sitting outside on the ground. However, since the shell of the house is basically done we are doing some of the trail building and access-work now, in between major projects on the house.
Single track path as it has been for a while that turns into the wider, flatter, more accessible trail
Building trails is important because most of the property has a slope to it and when it gets wet it can become super sketchy to walk on. Britton and I are used to slipping, sliding and occasionally falling, but if we bring over people who aren’t, well, results vary wildly. Plus, when we live in the cabin and need to walk there in the rain with groceries or whatever, we’re going to want to make it as pleasant and easy as possible.
Britton standing on the newly flattened area and turkeys on the graveled area
Here’s how to build a trail, or at least how we do it:
First, we bring over some of the wood that remains from the deck of the old wood house. Wood that is not structurally as great as the stuff we used to build the cabin but that will work for outdoor projects like this. They are about 12 ft long 2x8s. Then we stake them with some cut rebar. Next, we dig out the side of the hill a bit and flatten it to the wood.
Britton loads the arenon into the truck and brings it to the halfway point where he then wheelbarrows it over to the trail
And finally, we bring over some sand/gravel to pour over top. In the future we may concrete it, but probably just put pavers to keep it rustic.
Turkeys are enjoying it so they can walk side by side
There are other parts of the trail that dip down with a more obvious incline and so we also have also learned how to make steps.
First steps we built. Need a little more work
Steps are basically the same idea except you want to keep the rise pretty standard at around 7-8 inches and the landing on the steps should be flat. Some of our first steps we are going to have to re-do a little because they slope downward and/or are too steep. They can be made with fallen wood, boards or cinder blocks.
Moving cinder blocks for steps (with more wood to move!)
To make cinder block steps, just place them where you need (they are naturally about the right height for a step), place the rebar in the holes to stabilize them so they won’t move. Then just back fill the top and inside the holes. Concrete them if so desired!
Cinder block steps
And, eventually, the biggest part of the trail/access to the cabin will be a bridge. It is actually not necessary since the quebrada rarely has any water in it, but it would cut out a lot of the up and down walking and we wouldn’t have to make as many stairs. And if it DOES rain enough to have flowing water we wouldn’t be without access (or have to wade through muddy water). We had been considering a huge suspension bridge that would be about 100 feet across the whole property, but now we are thinking of just a smaller 20 -30 foot span down below that could either be of wood or wire suspension. We are thinking of doing this once the exterior of the house is completely finished (with siding/windows/doors) but before we start on the interior.
Once the trail to the cabin is complete there are always lots of other trails to build throughout the gardens and jungle. And we love that we’ll probably never truly be finished.
Watching ships passing and clouds building
