Category Archives: Travel

Puerto Rico to Colorado- Starting at the End

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Where to start? Well, I guess I will start at the end of the Puerto Rico trip and work my way back to the few days that we missed in between. The reason for the lack of posts was that the internet was out at the house we were staying and that was about the only time we would have been able to update because we were so busy those last few days (but at least our server and router were working!).

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View from the last house we saw on the trip -near another property we saw

Anyway, back to today and yesterday. We saw one final house in the Rincon area (up the hills) in the morning, but we were really pushing it for time, so we left directly from that showing to San Juan at about 10:30am. I was really not looking forward to coming back. It seemed too short of a trip and we really didn’t make any major decisions like we had hoped (more on that later).

On our way back from Puerto Rico to Colorado, we needed to be in San Juan by around 1pm, so you can see that we were pretty tight on time. The traffic was horrendous in Aguada and Aguadilla but once we got on the 22 (the main toll road/freeway) we went a lot faster.

Somehow once we got to San Juan we got turned around and ended up crossing a big bridge with a lot of US and Puerto Rican flags all over it. We needed to get to the car rental return place and knew we must be in the wrong area. We got to the cashier lady that changes money for the toll road and asked her if we were going the right way. She said, no we had to just turn around and go right back across the bridge to the first exit -oh and pay the toll of $3.00 each way!! So we paid the toll, turned around and paid the toll again.

We finally got to the car rental place and then to the airport, got our boarding passes, through screening and on to our flight. The flight to Chicago was uneventful but long. We had about a 45 minute layover and then our plane was supposed to leave. Well, they loaded us up a little late (about 8:15 instead of 7:50pm CST) and then over the intercom, the pilot says there may be a delay, and then that they were deciding whether or not to cancel the flight all together. They would tell us by 10pm.

Well, I was hungry, so Britton and I left the plane for some grub, and thank goodness we did! They canceled the flight at about 9:45pm because of the snow storm in Colorado. They were too backed up with de-icing so they stopped all incoming planes. Too bad we weren’t stranded in Puerto Rico!! 🙂

Tropical-Beach-Anasco
Why couldn’t we be stranded here!? This is my favorite picture I took at the beach in Anasco.

They issued partial discounts (about 25%) to area hotels and they rebooked us for a 6am flight back to Denver. That meant that if we went to a hotel, by the time we got there, spent the money (which would have been more than we paid for a whole week of sleeping in PR BTW), got settled, took a shower and so on, that we would only get about 3-4 hours sleep before we would have to come back and go through security all over again in the morning, so we decided to stake out a space at the airport…Ugh!

Let me tell you. I have never had to sleep in an airport, but it is not the most comfortable place to be. The fluorescent lights buzz, the intercom keeps reminding you not to leave your bag unattended or take rides from unauthorized vehicles and it is kind of cold! Luckily we were able to snag a few blankets and pillows from United.

We dozed in and out of “sleep” with a few other of our stranded castaways at Chicago O’Hare airport when suddenly we heard the cleaning lady vrrooom her vacuum between our legs, through the poles of the chairs, clink our seats and weave in between us. The babies started crying and it was altogether a hysterical situation. I just had to laugh and thought this should be on a Saturday Night Live skit.

One cowboy bullrider named Sean who had absolutely no optimism whatsoever kept yelling at her which only made it worse because she spoke no English. When she wouldn’t stop, he went over and unplugged her cord.


A Cool Walkway through Chicago O’Hare -we were like Tom Hanks in The Terminal!

Then some plane cleaners came at about 1:30am and each and every one had to swipe their ID card, beeeep in, then exit out the door toward the plane, slamming it and letting in freezing air as they went. It was a comedy scene. I seriously should write this skit, I just laugh at how ridiculous it was.

In a way it was kind of cool meeting our castaway friends while we were stuck there. It was kind of like a lock-in and we all were commiserating together. Besides, this is where good material comes from, right?

So finally we arrived back in Colorado (thanks Dad for waking up so early and picking us up in the crazy weather) and I immediately called into work to tell them I wasn’t going to be coming in after all and Britton was able to work from home. I took a shower and a little nap, and am feeling much more revived.

More about some Puerto Rico options/decisions and a few more pics and adventures in a post to come. Stay tuned…

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A Series of Cumulative Events

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We knew that coming to Puerto Rico would bring with it an unknown number of adventures and interesting happenings -or a series of cumulative events that on their own don’t seem like much, but as they cumulate turn into things you just have to laugh about. That certainly has happened this trip.

Cassie likes to call it our “sub-stories” like the secondary stories in books. In the last few days, our sub-stories have been taking up a lot of our thoughts in addition to the primary story of finding a place to live and moving here.

I’ve been having some problems with our web server lately. There have been a lot of new bots crawling the site. It has been causing a crash about every week. (Sorry if you were trying to get on our site(s) and it was down, it’s a lot harder to fix when you have limited internet and tools!)

I had an interesting conversation in my head about the issue in the car. I was thinking about the Chinese bots crawling my server in Greeley, Colorado  while I myself am in Puerto Rico. Odd world we live in.  I’ve had a couple of bots hit the server so hard it crashed. I needed to get the site back up.

We were on our way to San German to  visit our friends Jeff and Katrina Kruse.   When we got there we checked out their property.  It was pretty amazing and fun to see what they have done with it.

 It was fun to hike around (in sandals!) and see all the fruit trees and the cute chickens, roosters and cats. We also enjoyed talking with them about their experiences in Puerto Rico. The night before, we had visited with Nick and Miri again. It’s almost like we already live here with all the friends we are making! 🙂

Graciously, the Kruses, let us use their internet to get our site back up (or so we thought), but apparently it either didn’t work, or didn’t stay fixed (let’s hope it works this time!) and so it was out all afternoon into the evening.

So we thought we’d just fix it when we got back to Rincon where we were staying. But when we got “home” last night the internet was out at the house, go figure. However the power was on and the water was too! We figured 2 out of 3 isn’t bad, so we decided to go to sleep and try to get the site back up and running today.

Turns out having the water on this time was a bad thing.  I woke up this morning and thought I was still dreaming or was at a swimming pool – the water was about a half inch deep on the floor and the blankets were all wet.  We had some clothes on the floor, but nothing important got wet.

1/2 inch of water in the bathroom, hall, and rooms

Our room-mate wasn’t so lucky.  He left his Apple laptop on the floor.  When he picked it up, water just drained out of it.

The toilet had been running most of the night and drained out onto the floor. Something must have got clogged or something…it was actually a pretty funny situation once we were sure our camera, laptop, cell phone and clean clothes were ok.

Also our rental car’s tire has a slow leak, we’ve been having to fill it up every morning.  Seems like we are having to deal with a few problems on vacation!  All the sub-stories of life…keep you on your toes

In other news…We stopped at a beach and we again, and were the only ones there.


Hundreds of empty spaces


Cassie hard at work keeping the palms up!

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Manifesting Our Life -in Puerto Rico

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Today we saw a few properties that were at the top of our list to see. They were pretty much as we had imagined based on the descriptions and photos, but you always get a different feel for something when you actually visit it. It is like a place has a certain vibe or something. We liked the one that we could make into a guesthouse type of place, but we have been doing a lot of soul searching as of late about what exactly we want to manifest in our lives. We seem to gradually get closer and closer to an ideal of some sort, but because it is so fuzzy in our minds, it’s hard to make out. Today (it may change tomorrow) we are leaning toward something a little smaller.

These are the kinds of questions we have been asking ourselves. For instance, do we even want to start a business? Do we just want to lounge around in hammocks all day? Do we want to grow and sell fruit, eggs, and other farm products? Do we want to travel? What will we do for work/money? All of these are factors  in the realm of possibility for us. All we have to do is pull the trigger to set into motion a whole new world. We need to have enough income to do so, and we need to have something meaningful to do with our lives. When you get down to the basics of life, that’s really what it comes down to. We will create our reality one way or another.

It is interesting because in Greeley, usually you can buy a property for less than you can rent it, but here in Puerto Rico, it is opposite. So, that begs the question of whether or not it would be smart for us to just rent for a while? Then we could travel the world or go back and forth or do whatever. Well, I told Britton that I am kind of a home base type person, even though I love traveling. I like to have a “home” I call mine and I am not used to renting (but that’s not to say I necessarily wouldn’t also). 

I think we are really blessed because most people never really think about manifesting their lives; they get what they are given and try to make the best of it. And to some extent we do that as well. But really what we have been given is an opportunity to take our life in any type of direction we want. Sometimes having so many choices can actually be harder than being limited (you know, the kid in the candy store scenario).

Today we seem to have come to some sort of plan that we are both pretty happy with, but we still have a little bit more time here before we make it official, or even to see if all the stars align from other people’s perspectives. So all we can say is row, row, row your boat…steer it the best you can…because you never know where life will take you, and it’s not all in your hands.  

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St Patricks Day in Rincon

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We ended up going to a bar nearby called the Rum Shack.  Well I guess it is more of a resort with a bar, its behind the Lazy Parrot.  Cassie and I walked over and watched the band and hung out for a while.  It seems to be a pretty popular tourist location. 

I didn’t catch the name of the band, but they were pretty good. 

We then spent today looking at a few properties.  Both were about what we expected.  One of the smaller places in Aguada was nice, but a little on the high priced side.  It has a few acres but its on the side of a hill.  It is terraced and could work out for growing plants pretty well and that is one of our requirements.  We would offer a lot lower than what they are asking for. 

Also since we were by the beach, we went again.  Here is another gallery.

I am working on a video to upload, its huge though so it will take some time. 

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