10 days in Puerto Rico

This is Hard Parking, brought to you by Wright Honda and Wright Toyota out of Scottsdale, AZ. I'm your host, Jay Fenning

coming up on today's show. I recently went to Puerto Rico

for 10 days. Those would be paying attention

to me on social media. Saw that, but.

Before we get to that, before we get to this word, before we online, just want to speak my mind about some things.

That's something that I do on this show.

Every once in a while I talk about stuff that's happening on in the that's happening in the real world.

And I'm a little disappointed. I'm disappointed with some of

you, and I'm mostly disappointed with just the world and the state of our insensitivities. Or the state of our

sensitivities are like thereof when it comes to disasters.

There's something that happened and there's something that's kind of disgusting me right now and it's it's always tricky because there's no win, right? It's a lose, lose.

When you decide that you're unhappy with society, you're unhappy with social media, you're unhappy for with people being people in a world where a lot of the times when I do these type of conversations we're or these these speeches we're examining something like the the Houston shooting.

Selfdefense or not selfdefense, you know, we're looking at the Brittany Greiner release. You know, what was that really

all about? The first part of that, I said

my case. The second part of that, I

recanted everything I said in the first part or most of it.

But it's always hard when we speak out on what we see happening on social media. And I use social media just as

much as anyone, obviously. And so I'm prepared for the

negative comments I'm prepared for.

All the nasty that comes along with this.

But when I was in Puerto Rico, that's when we had this thing with the Titans submersible, with the five people that went down. I mean, everybody knows about

it, but I'm going to give you a recap anyway, historically speaking. And we lost sight of it.

And within a day or two of this story popping up, we already had memes out there. We had all these funny GIFs,

memes, all this stuff talking about the submarine.

You know, James Cameron, famous director, came out and said it's a bad idea. He wouldn't have signed off on

it. It was a poor design.

Then we found out. What we all feared is that this

thing was gone. It imploded, everybody inside

died. But there's still all this stuff

on social media making fun of this situation.

And I'm not trying to be higher than Mighty, but I think it's a really sad case. It's a sad example of where

we're at in the society where we're at in this culture.

We're how desensitized we are at all this stuff that goes on to where there's not even a time to bereave.

There's there's none of that. It's just immediately this

happened haha. Let's make jokes.

Let's make let's see how many means we can make out of this thing. Let's see how much fun we can

make out of this. And I had said something on Hard

Parking Violations which is the the Facebook group for the podcast and got into it with a few friends and a lot of my friends are doing this stuff too and.

I'm not going to call them out personally for doing it.

This is this is where we are. This is where we are in society.

But the thing with the police officer last year who slept with like 5 police, destroyed social media, smeared cyber bullying, wouldn't be surprised if she killed herself.

She didn't as far as we know. But that's the type of stuff

where people just taking run with it.

There's like, there's. No chill.

And it made me wonder. You know, it's we.

We're so desensitized now at all this stuff.

Between all the school shootings and and you know, all the other things that happened. We're just so desensitized.

We're. I don't want to say we've lost

our humanity, but we've definitely lost our empathy and our sympathy. And I I'm not really blaming

social media for this because people are people, whether social media exists or not. And I don't have TikTok, but I

had a friend say you should see all the stuff on TikTok cause like I don't have to see the stuff on TikTok because I see it on Instagram, I see it on Facebook.

And think about this, in 1986, I pulled it up just to be factually here. Most of you weren't around then.

I mean, let's just call it like it is.

Most of you were. You weren't even born or you

were. Super young.

I mean, I was in grade school in 1986.

The Space Shuttle Challenger broke apart 73 seconds into flight, all members of the crew obviously dead.

Well, seven in the world grieved United States was brought to its knees and we still talk about that.

Not as much now as we used to, but for years.

Every year on January 28th we talked about the disaster that was the Space shuttle Challenger if that were to happen today in 2023. Are we bereaving?

And this isn't everybody. Some people are they, they get

it. It's too soon.

There's that whole thing, you know, too soon.

But I don't think that we bereave.

If we shoot up a space shuttle right now and it blows up and people die, ha ha. Rich people dead, astronauts

dead. And it's.

I don't know what we're doing anymore.

And again, I don't call out my friends who do this.

I've said something to one or two of them is like, look, man, this is. I don't, I don't look at this

stuff. It's not cool.

That one was funny. I saw one that was funny.

But I don't spread it. I don't send it.

I don't, you know, I just, I don't understand what's going on. But I could promise you that if

that were to happen today with the space shuttle, it'd be the same deal as a submersible. This Titan submersible.

Poor design thing. And I'm not here to talk about.

The differences and who who we choose and choose not to bereave. Sure, there was a migrant boat

full of hundreds of people with six or 700 people that that sank. I think at the as of like June

30th, they've recovered maybe 100 people.

They've they've alive, they've pulled up even more dead and there's still hundreds missing. So it isn't an outcry thing.

Thousands of migrants die every year.

Literally. Look it up.

I did. Look that up.

And it's not that we don't care, just no one ever talks about it.

But as soon as this high profile thing goes down and we spent all this money on the news trying to find this stuff for science, it goes down and everyone makes fun of it.

It's just it's just weird because.

At the end of the day, people died.

Whether people died, you know, trying to find salvation and and and a new life on a migrant. Boat or people?

Spent millions of dollars to build this submersible Titan thing. They go down to the Titanic and

it implodes and they die. It's it's a sad day.

It's a sad part of society that when we just we make fun of that stuff. And I know I've been saying the

same thing over and over and over.

Is it fair to just immediately jump to the comedy that is social media and making fun of this stuff or is it foul?

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So we're not wasting any more of your time.

Let's talk about Puerto Rico. We're there for 10 days.

The reason we went, so my motherinlaw's birthday is her 70th birthday and we actually planned to go to Puerto Rico in early 2020. Tons of earthquakes and things

happened in 2020 and then eventually 2020 Pandemic era ramped up and nobody was really going anywhere.

We kept trying to redo it. Eventually we just got a credit

for our tickets because when you cancel your tickets on the airlines, you get like you get like a year credit and that's pretty much it. But we're finally able to go and

it was, you know, it was a great time for birthday officially is in a few weeks, but June just worked better for everyone.

So who went? Pretty much anyone and everyone

within the family. You've ever heard me mention

maybe 25 people came down from the mainland between Arizona, Michigan, Buffalo and the greater Buffalo area and Florida. So I know Puerto Rico is an

American territory. So people say it's American and

you get it's kind of the nuanced conversation.

USPS is down there, a few other things American dollars recognize, but make no mistake, it's it's barely.

Because the Dominican is right there.

And I would say that there's probably a lot more similarities from Puerto Rico to the Dominican Republic than there are to the closest part of the United States, which is Florida.

And we're going to go over all that.

But the way I broke this down is I started thinking maybe I'll just break it down, you know, by section instead of 100% chronologically. So what I mean by that is I got

some travel notes for you. The good, the bad, the ugly, the

vacation homes, the the beaches, the food.

The food is very important. My rental cars.

The rental car situation there is is quite sketch.

Let's jump into a travel notes. First off, I like to fancy

myself as somewhat a professional of a professional traveler, like I know how to pack.

Hindsight 2020, I still probably brought too much, like I bought one of those scales to weigh your bag.

It's like a little loop thing. You hook it around, you pick it

up. Yeah, you lift your bag up and

it tells you within probably a half pound how much you're.

Luggage ways, which is a great tool.

Saves you from going to the airport, putting on the thing, getting the person behind the desk that says oop, you're a pound and a half over and then you have to crack open your suitcase and sit there and gut it with all these other people in line. Sometimes they let you through.

Rare is that. So we know before we leave the

house, kind of what we're sitting and I always come in around. I would have been about £40.41

but then my wife packs too much shit.

I don't know if it's a woman thing.

Because my motherinlaw packed too much shit.

My wife's in there yelling at hers like, you don't need this, you don't need that. She brings.

She wants to bring the full bottle of of hair product instead of putting it in the smaller container.

And by the way, we're going to Puerto Rico.

They have Walgreens, Walmart, they have Costco, they have Sam's, they have everything you have here, pretty much.

So I keep that in mind when I'm traveling.

It's like okay. Well, if I run out of

toothpaste, I'll go to the store and buy some more.

If I run out of body wash, I'll go to the store and buy some more. I don't need to bring the giant

thing of body wash because it weighs my suitcase down.

So I ended up with we brought my uncle, so my motherinlaw's brother, we we bought a bunch of clothes for him, probably for a late birthday present or just because he needed them.

So I had eight or nine pounds of his clothes, and then I had probably 10 pounds of my wife's between her, all her bathing suits and her. Makeup bag that actually opens

up into three completely different sections and probably weighs about 7 pounds. Poqueria.

You'll hear that word a lot. Poqueria.

That's junk. That's become my favorite word.

Poqueria. Your poqueria.

My bag would have weighed 41 pounds except for I have 9 pounds of your poqueria. So we call the Uber XL because

our flight is like 6:00 AM in the morning.

Maybe call Uber, said okay. We got to leave here at 4:30, no

later than 4:30. So it's myself.

My wife, my motherinlaw, my brotherinlaw and his wife, they right over here. They're almost late, but they

get here in time. So the Uber XL is advertised.

It's a Toyota Highlander. 5 people they say.

So there were five of us, but everyone had a full size suitcase. We all had a backpack and at

least one or two other little carryons between all five of us.

It took us 10 minutes to kind of Tetris configure our situation.

And then my sisterinlaw was. Smashed in the back of the third

row because we had to put one of them down.

My wife sat on my lap, sort of like on my lap, but on the edge of the chair. We got there, got there.

We connected in Atlanta. The connection flight ended up

being delayed. But we get on the plane and then

it has problems of course, but it was an old plane.

Delta, what are you doing? And for those of you may have

seen this on social media, I posted it.

Buttons missing on the little T v's on the back.

I don't remember if it had the old cigarette lighter style like the like the 12 Volt hole where you have to bring the the cigarette lighter connector. It was a janky plane so we sat

there for a while and then we had to get off and 1st off before we got on the plane. My brotherinlaw was kind of in

one of these moods. He gets like that sometimes he

gets agitated. So he goes up and asks the guy

and they guys like hey, the flight to Puerto Rico's going to be a little bit delayed, you know, stay around here.

He said something that was. Kind of confusing, but you could

kind of look around and and and understand what he meant.

So my brotherinlaw walks up and asks him a question.

And then as my brotherinlaw was walking away, the guy gets on the microphone. He's like, again, as I said, and

he reiterated what he had said to people.

So there's two ways you can take that.

Number one, it was a little abrasive and it's only rude if you think he's talking to you. So the guy was, in my opinion,

thinking, all right, I think the guy was military.

Former military. If this guy had this question,

somebody else may have had this question.

Everyone's going to have this question.

So let me reiterate what I had said.

My brotherinlaw took that personal.

So from that point, he kind of, every time the guy got on the microphone, my brotherinlaw left over there.

He's like, you shoot it, you shoot it.

I don't understand why you'd be so rude.

I'm like, yeah, it was kind of rude, but I'm thinking, dude, just fucking let it go. But my brotherinlaw was on like

Level 9 the whole day, which didn't help.

So when we get on the plane, we have to get off the plane to switch planes. And it's the same guy.

We're standing up there. So now nobody wants to ask the

agents any questions. And I kept trying to tell I was

like, hey, go up there and ask him how much longer it is, you know, knowing that he's probably going to be a Dick about it.

But no, everyone's smart. They're like, no, hell no, I'm

not going up there. You go up there.

If my brotherinlaw would have went up there, he would have end up fighting the guy and then he would have getting arrested because I would have been like, you know, I don't know him.

I'm not traveling with them, trying to get to Puerto Rico, but The thing is, we get off the plane and my motherinlaw, we always get her a wheelchair. She has oxygen issues.

She could walk, especially now, you know, 10 years ago.

It's a little rough sometimes. Her health isn't very good, but

we always take advantage of the fact that she gets a wheelchair because then my wife can board early or she could take Zeke because Zeke was with us. Like I said, everybody, anyone

you've ever heard me mention at in the family is going on this trip. So we had this like.

Decent sized group from our contingency.

So we got off the plane and my motherinlaw thought she left her phone on the plane. Now you have to go back up there

and say, excuse me, we think we left our phone on the plane and the guy is the same guy. So he's a little militant,

little abrasive but not too much.

Like I can work with that. I'm really good at pivoting and

working with different personalities.

Not everybody can do that. So we're like, where were you?

We're like, well, my wife picked the shit seats too by the way.

34 E So it could be somewhere on that row. 34 Ede or F they go

and check. All the people come off, all the

cleaners are like, look, that thing's not there.

We checked everywhere. We don't know where it is.

Obviously, once you leave the plane, you can't get back on regardless of what you left. So we walked back to my

motherinlaw to deliver her the news.

I'm just going to call her mom for the rest of this.

And the phone was in her lap between her legs the whole time.

That's what we're dealing with here.

Get on the plane, watch a couple movies.

More on that in a second. The San Juan airport terminal

when we finally got there. So it was a about a four hour

flight from here to Atlanta. Then almost another 4 hour

flight from Atlanta to San Juan. Very long day, especially when

you got up at 4:30 in the morning, got to San Juan and the airport had a the terminal had an interesting smell to it.

It smelt like. My mom's.

I remember my motherinlaw smelled like my mom's old house on 17 E 16th St. in Holland, MI. Which is kind of weird, right?

It's a weird observation to make, but my brain is like, oh, we're in Puerto Rico. This is a Puerto Rican thing.

Maybe the smells of all the cooking and the different foods have infused the airport, and that's why it reminded me of her old house. So we're in Puerto Rico, so

let's get to the movies in between.

Traveling there and traveling back, there are four movies I'd like to talk about really quick. So I tried to watch Ant Man,

Quantum Anium, and I've seen that, and you guys know I'm a.

Huge fan of the MCU. But I just couldn't watch it

again. And it's weird that it's not

every watchable for me. I the second one, I've watched a

few times. I've watched the first Ant Man

probably 15 times. But I I think that's the true

measure of it, right? You go and see it in the movies

like I do every time an MCU movie comes out, And it wasn't bad. But trying to watch it again, I

just couldn't get into it the second time.

I could have been tired. So then I tried.

To watch 2001 Space Odyssey, because it's like a 2 1/2 hour movie, I wanted to burn some time.

That's a very slow movie and the fact that it's it's a 2 1/2 hour long movie in an era where most movies were 90 minutes or less.

But I kept falling asleep in the 1st 10 minutes.

I had to switch movies. So what I ended up watching was

65 with Adam Driver. I thought 65 was interesting.

That's one where they show in the previous.

Where he crashed lands and the only survivor that he has with him as a little girl and they land on a planet that's inhabited by dinosaurs. And when you read the summary of

the movie it says Adam Driver. I forgot whatever his name is in

the movie. Crash lands on this planet and

realizes he actually landed on Earth 65 million years ago.

I don't think he ever actually had that specific realization.

I couldn't really tell because I was using the the earbuds that the airlines provides and they were shit.

Like those are shit. They're so shit.

I ended up buying a pair of earbuds.

On the way back from San Juan, much better sounding, but I don't think he ever realized that in the movie.

It's not a it's an interesting movie, one part about that movie that I appreciated. He has this gun that never seems

to run out of energy. You must be like or bullets.

It's an energy gun, so it runs out of energy at some point.

I'm sure didn't have it to him in the movie, but when he shoots these dinosaurs, they actually die.

Like, how many movies have we seen when you have this beast and they can take all the bullets, I'm like, that's not realistic. Not that the beast is realistic,

but that bullet, if you put that bullet in that animal's head, it should kill it. So this guy took out a lot of

dinosaurs. That's what I'm trying to say,

including the big ones. Well, a couple well played

shots. Big ones are falling.

On the way back, I tried to watch a movie called Assassin Club and it froze on me from San Juan to Detroit, which was our return trip. I watched half of Assassin's

Club and from Detroit to Phoenix, I watched the other half of Assassin's Club features, the Snake Eyes guy.

And I forgot the girl who's in it.

I I would know her really quick because she's kind of like the.

Up and coming Spanish ethnic Colombian looking girl.

That doesn't really describe anything, but she's.

Pretty hot, you. Have to look it up.

Assassin's Club. And then I watched Stand By Me

and Stand By Me is an American classic movie, and I'd only seen bits and pieces of it, kind of like The Lost.

Boys, it's one of those movies that it was.

It punched above my maturity level at the time where it came out and I decided that I'm going to watch.

The movies that were supposedly great, when I was too young to appreciate what it is I was watching and it's a really good movie. This movie came out a few years

ago. I want to say it's called The

Boys where it's like 3 or 4 friends and they're all school age kids and it's pretty. It's kind of a vulgar movie, I

would say it's it's verbally vulgar, but it's it's how kids are, I mean. Find me a middle school boy

who's not driving a drawing a penis on a piece of paper and and drawing someone's else head on it and saying this is you, this is your mom, you know, so it's kind of real like that.

Stand By Me is kind of an older version of that.

It's kind of vulgar as well, especially for the time.

Really good movie though, and it features River Phoenix, which is, which is Joaquin Phoenix's older brother in River Phoenix.

Of course, he died from a drug overdose decades ago, but he was really good in that movie. I was like, God, that kid looks

so familiar. Who was that kid?

And I looked it up. I was like, oh, that's River

Phoenix. Because I was relatively young

when that happened in media, which just wasn't what it was now. So I remember River Phoenix

dying. I think he died outside of a

club from a drug overdose, but that's all I remember.

So stand by me really good. Let's get back to Puerto Rico.

Where did we go? We're in Puerto Rico.

We went to San Juan Aguada. Aguadilla Juanica Luquillo.

For Hardo, Siba and Culebra, I'm going to take you through those.

So we arrived because of the delays, 1:30 in the morning.

Now, I had a rental car, a minivan selected.

To be picked up at 11:00 PM. So when I got there at 1:30,

they didn't have a minivan, but they offered up a Ford Transit, which is those little transit vans.

Almost like the kind of the Amazon vans before Amazon got the big deal with Rivian, and now they're all a bunch of Rivian vans. Not big for us because we had a

lot of people, again, as myself, my wife, my motherinlaw, which I said I'd refer to as my mother, my son, my brotherinlaw and his wife. Because what they were going to

do the next day is they were going to arrive with my sisterinlaw, who was flying from Texas.

I forgot to mention Texas earlier, but not that night.

They had a lot of wranglers and transits and a lot of weird miscellaneous cars, but they didn't have any minivans so and everything they had wasn't going to be, you know, big enough, but they did the right thing. This was National, the customer

service, like a motherfucker. They said let me check and they

scoured the entire facility, all the rental car facilities, and they found me in minivan. They brought us a Kia Carnival,

which visually looked really good, but I'll tell you how good it was in a little bit. But we sat there for an hour

once we picked up the car, just burning gas.

In fact, the notification popped up on the dashboard.

The car is just sitting here. It's going to turn off in 30

minutes. It's almost like if you watch TV

too long and you get that little popup.

Are you still watching this? This is because Jalen's rental

now, I don't know. Like she said, she rented it and

when she showed up they cancelled it.

This was through Hertz and I I don't know, I don't know what really happened, but it we literally sat there for an hour waiting for Jalen and Mario. To get their shit together so

that we could get to the hotel. If that's gone, she goes to help

them. Then Wilson leaves, which my

brotherinlaw, he goes to help them.

So it's just the rest of us sitting there I think, and I could be wrong, this is what I think happened.

I think either they cancelled her rental or she never fully confirmed her rental. And my wife, she probably is

like, hey, I'll rent you a car. So then she probably got on her

app and ended up renting him a car.

If I would have known what really happened then I probably.

Could have just got on the app and rented a car myself.

And renting them a proper car. And I say proper car because

they rented a Toyota Corolla. Now my daughter full size

suitcase, her boyfriend full size suitcase.

They had a stroller that they checked in.

They had a baby seat that they checked in.

They had a booster seat. They had a small carryon roller

bag. They had another most of 1

Zeke's and another small roll on carry for probably all the Nova's diapers. Which again.

We're going to Puerto Rico, Costco, Walmart, anything and everything you'd ever need is there.

Then they have this giant like Baja off road thing that folds up like the pull behind wagon, but it's the wagon that's also a baby stroller. There was no room for all the

stuff in their car and that's why we sat there for an hour.

And so we end up having to put somehow they got all the shit in their car and we end up getting to the hotel at 3:45 AM.

So now. We've been up mentally almost 24

hours. Granted, there's a three hour

time difference from where I'm at, so they're Eastern Time.

We're right now in July, technically Pacific Time, although we're also Mountain time, but technically it's Pacific Time to three hour, you know, 3 hour time difference.

One thing I noticed with our rental car the next morning when we were going to go to Costco. So the plan was to get up, go to

Costco early. Yeah, right.

No one's going to Costco early when you don't get to the hotel till 4:00. O'clock.

My sisterinlaw is going to show up and half people go with her.

We stop at a few nice locations on the way to the other side of the island, which is ultimately where we're headed 2 1/2 hours away. Had to get there at a certain

time so that we could meet the landlord of the Airbnb and they can walk us into the address because the address doesn't show up on the map. Let's talk about my Kia

Carnival. It was older, higher mileage,

and my CarPlay kept going out at the most inconvenient time, so I'm in a. I'm at a place that I'm

unfamiliar with, relying on navigation, car place.

I don't have to sit there and hold it and it keeps going out.

So I have to force my wife to help me because she's not.

And I don't know if she's going to listen to this or not, but she is probably the worst copilot on the planet.

I could be having issues and it's not like okay, honey, I'll look it up. I'll look for a place to eat.

I'll look for the hotel and I'll guide you.

I know. Sitting there scrolling through

her phone, TikTok texting someone.

Doing something just completely oblivious that hey, I could use your help here, but this key had a little bit of body damage too.

What we found out the next day when we're trying to pack up everything is the door wouldn't close.

So what the passenger side door like automatic, electronic, whatever door kept partially closing then opening up.

So we played with it probably 10 minutes and we finally got closed. We all go to Costco, three cars.

So my sisterinlaw. She had a Honda, like a CRV.

Nice, actually, very nice. Probably the nicest car of all

the rentals. Not the nicest car in Puerto

Rico, the nicest car of all the rentals, which is interesting because on the mainland, Honda doesn't do fleet rentals.

Puerto Rico and Hawaii are two places that I've been to either American or American territory that do have some Hondas, so that's interesting. Note, same thing with Acura.

So after Costco, we decided that.

OK, we I, I go, you know what, I'm not going to drive 3 hours to the other side of the island with this rental car.

So we had to make the executive decision to take it back to National and trade it out for a different one, which is at least an hour. Out of the our way.

So then Jalene and Mario, and then they they go to the other side of the island. We have Zeke.

He's on vacation with them, all of us.

But we had Zeke. 90% of the vacation and so it's just at

this point. People go all their own ways,

you know? My sisterinlaw takes my son and

my brotherinlaw and my sisterinlaw and they go and they get to explore and do some cool shit.

So it's myself, my wife, my motherinlaw and Zeke.

So we go to National. Took a while to swap out the

car, a lot longer than I thought it would.

We were eventually able to swap out the car and get on the road.

Had to get Zeke some food. He was hungry, so I stood in

line at Burger King for 30 minutes to get him some chicken.

Like chicken fingers. Let me tell you about Burger

King. You may have seen this on my

social media. They have one in San Juan that

is Spiderman based, it is Miles Morales spider verse based.

So the color of this Burger King is kind of a a purplish blue.

The drive through looks like, I mean it still looks like a drive through, but it's got kind of this corridor you drive through, it looks like spider. Legs The Burger King sign is

inverted. In an angle and it's got like

these little webs that are kind of holding it on and there's a giant spider symbol from is a Spiderman 2199 or 2099.

Whatever the One is. I don't know if you guys seen

the recent Spider, you know, Mars Morales One, but it's the Spiderman that looks super cool. He almost looks like Spawn,

super futuristic. He's actually the antagonist of

sorts in this latest Spiderman movie, but it's got kind of his symbol on one side. It's super cool.

So I took a bunch of photos of that and we didn't go.

We end up going to eat. At this one place that Jaylene

recommended and then we headed to San Juan.

We got to the vacation home in Iguada at about 8:00 PM and I noticed the red lights everywhere.

So I looked it up. I go, there's a lot of red

lights and they're kind of creepy like red St. lights.

So if you guys remember when I went to Hawaii, they had kind of these lime colored lights and it's for the same thing.

The red doesn't trick like the like the sea turtles because they're I guess they're drawn to the light.

I was expecting to see a sea turtle crossing the street.

Never happened, but the address was weird.

More on that later when I start talking about some of the observations of the island. But the place we stayed in was a

lovely gated home pool, beachfront property.

You may have seen on my Instagram Stories.

We got in the water the next day.

It's the warmest water I could ever remember getting into of all my travels. It was the exception of my own

pool in the middle of the summer where it's not even comfortable.

It's just too warm. The next night, family started

arriving. We actually, some of our cousins

were less than a mile down the road, which was super cool from Florida. They stopped by.

We had another family stop by. My uncle stopped by.

He has a home in the area that he flew down to maintain, which is she's he's close. To my my motherinlaw.

I guess I'm just going to call her motherinlaw.

I'm confusing myself here. The following night the cousins

from Michigan came in like that. Next day we went to a crash boat

beach, which is a beautiful beach.

Water was clear. First time I had seen water that

clear. In a long time, you know the

water's at your waist and you can see your feet.

That's pretty clear. Did an excursion to the jet

skis. Got back to the beach.

We're going to stay there for a little bit longer because we had other cousins that were coming down to meet us there, which they did. But weird phenomenon there, the

bees, they are attracted to fruit, they are attracted to trash. So when we get back to our our

beach spot, because some people went on the excursion, some people didn't sign up, so they stayed and stayed there and the little place on the beach we got back there were bees everywhere.

Like I'm talking 20 or 30 B's, swarming the trash cans, swarming, trying to get into the stroller.

And my daughter was late as hell, showing up probably 2 hours after everybody else was at the beaches, you know, That in itself was a whole other issue.

So we decided to leave and and go back.

And then our other cousins met us from Michigan that night.

They ended up staying with us. The rest of the time we're in

Iguada because let's talk about their rental car.

They went out to eat. Well, we went out to eat.

Well some of them showed up with us but some the the the large majority of them, they went out to eat on their own and 1st when they tried to pick up a car, apparently the rental facility that they use tried to give them a car with a taped on bumper, another car which is full of cigarette smells.

My brotherinlaw, my wife's other brother they give him a car that end up having a flat tire. But the biggest thing is

Josolito is what I'll call him because it goes by Elvin or Joslito. Elvin.

So Elvin's group. The car that they tried to get

one of the taped on bumper and had a cigarette smell before they finally got a a vehicle. They took the vehicle to dinner.

When they got back from dinner they found out that their vehicle had roaches in it like it was Roach infested.

They say and I quote the backpack had like 9 or 10 roaches on it. They were freaking out.

So then they went to the Airbnb and they didn't like the way the Airbnb looked so they told the owner that they had a Roach problem there too. Which they didn't.

It's a little sketch. I don't know if I would have

played that card. I didn't.

I didn't know that for like a couple days later they go, Oh yeah, we told them that they had roaches.

They really didn't. We just didn't like the place.

They're going to give us some money back and they're going to send the people out to a fumigate the house.

I'm like, oh all. Right, whatever.

But they ended up staying with us the rest of the time we were in Iguada. Had a great time there.

A little bit about that Airbnb. Each room had its own mini

split. Which is the little the air

conditioners that you can mount up on the wall.

They're really nice ones, not the ones you stick out of your window. The main part of the house

didn't, So I mean, it had these big open windows that when it was windy, you can open it up and it felt great.

But when there was no wind, it was just stale and hot.

But sometimes while we were there, it was so hot I would just disappear into the bedroom just to cool down, to be completely honest. Better food situation.

Food situation observations is a separate from going out to eat.

It seems it's. I found that early on on

vacations, because none of us had really seen each other in a long time. Early on on vacations, everybody

shows up, we're drinking beer. Speaking of beer, media is like,

there's their official beer. I did the research.

What are the best beers that are media, Media, Ultra, Media Light. That's what we drank.

Like 90% of the beers we had were Medias and there were other beers we have you know, Heineken and Corona and and Coors Light.

My cousin bought some Coors Light.

Elvin did. But when you first show up, like

we went Yvette and I, the next morning we got there, we went to Walmart and we essentially went grocery shop.

And what happens is you buy all this food to last you for the next couple days. You guys know where I'm going

with this, but as family starts to arrive, we haven't seen each other. They come hang out at our place

because our place is great. I mean, it's really nice.

Everyone's in the pool playing ping pong, drinking beers, time to eat. People, we go, we blow through

our food. Every time it's time to eat,

people show up. And then what are you going to

do just and, you know, secretly give people a secret whistle to let them know their dinner's ready?

So family is family. So you run out of food kind of

in one sitting. This was the last couple days.

So this is the main reason why we're there.

My mom's my motherinlaw's 70th birthday.

She's from the island. She grew up there.

She hasn't been back in over 25 years.

She lived up in the mountain, and then she lived in a little town called Wanaka. GUANICA, but it's pronounced

Juanica. Monica is like an hour and a

half drive from the place that we were staying in Iguada, which means I can't drink that much because I have a whole car full of people. So pack full of people.

We go to Sam's, we pack it up with stuff that we have to buy for this party in this place that we rented out.

We bought all the beers, water, some giant sports style coolers with a little spout at the bottom.

We bought all sorts of stuff. Get to go there, kind of pre set

up. We had cousins that live there.

They live in Wanaka as well or that area.

They did a lot of the work for us as far as scoping the place out, renting the place they were.

They came in clutch. We couldn't have done it without

them. So we're in this little party up

in Monica and everyone's having a good time and I'm looking for something. I want some of this street food.

I want to find like my favorite thing that my motherinlaw makes is bacalaitos, which are like these little.

Salted cod fritters they kind of look like so imagine and this is this is this is probably why I like I probably like them because I like Long John Silvers it's almost like long John silver style batter but there's just tiny pieces of fish kind of spread across this otherwise just you're just otherwise eating like this fried dough chip thingy Baca Laitos and I love them so I'm driving to get some supplies I need to buy foil and. Saran Wrap and a bunch of stuff

that they just this place just didn't provide.

Which by the way, the guy that we'd hired and paid a lot of money for the food for this event, he shows up and he doesn't have shit with him. He doesn't have an extension

cord, doesn't have a, doesn't have any serving Ware, shows up with these full vegetables with no way to cut them.

So then my aunt and my wife and other family, they're back there cutting the lettuce and cutting the tomatoes.

I'm like. How much money did we pay this

guy just to show up, drop this shit off and leave and we got to basically all serve ourselves, which is basically what ended up happening. Needless to say, I had to jump

in the car a few times and run to the store.

Put my cousin with me the first time Jeremy is his name.

Second time I was like, I'm going to call my own.

It's just down the down around the corner now.

Puerto Rico, Juanaka. They warn you when you rent your

cars. Ours didn't tell us, but others

have. Don't stop at the red light.

Keep going. And they have this thing there

where the violence, there's so much stuggery.

You can get carjacked really easily if you stop at a red light, you know, especially when you're out in the middle of nowhere. So I'm keeping that in my head

and going through this small town of Wanaka, and I kind of, you know, it's it's like Boyz in the Hood or it's like any other great ghetto movie from the 90s where I decide to go on my own.

You hear gunshots, I'm bleeding out.

They take my car, I'm dead, you know?

So all that stupid shit's going in your head.

Go to the store, you know, and you try to speak a little bit of Spanish, but they speak English, which is great.

So I bought this shit. But I noticed outside of this

place that we rented, there was like this fry place, like like food, like fried food. There's a little stage and stuff

like that. And I go, oh, I want to go down

there and check it out because maybe they have Baca Laitos because so far I hadn't seen them.

And everyone tells me, oh, you go to Puerto Rico, you got these Bacaritos that are about the size of a dinner plate, like an elephant here, like this. And usually the ones I get

around here are about the size of an iPhone, about half the size of an iPhone actually. And so that's what I'm looking

for. So these a bunch of these

little, cute little old ladies are in there.

And you know, I I go back to the place and I drag my wife out and I go, hey, there's a place in the corner and they got some stuff. I want to check it out.

Maybe they have Baca Lahito's, maybe they got she's like okay, I'll walk with you. So we walk down there and

Bacahito's one dollar $1.00, that's cheap.

Apparently they're two 3-4 dollars everywhere else.

I ended up buying two of them. Greasy as hell though, and I

tried to walk back to the place my wife's like, where you going?

I go, I want to go back to the place.

Like this is kind of on the corner, so it's not that far.

It's like 45 second walk, like you can see the front door from where we're standing and it's dark.

She goes, no, no, my mom told me don't ever walk into a place with food unless you plan on sharing it with everyone.

I'm like, yeah. I get it.

So I sat there eating these, these very greasy baca la eat those just just grease pouring like like literally pouring down my fingers. I have to go to back to the

front, grab a couple more napkins, think them.

Oh, this is really good. Thank you so much.

I love it. So the party's over.

Like my motherinlaw. She was bawling out of her head.

Man. I've never seen her that excited

and that happy to be around people.

And we all appreciate it. We all loved it.

But everyone's drinking. I can't drink that much because

we all know that. If alcohol hits me the wrong

way, and I know that sounds funny to say, but those of you who know me well know exactly what I'm talking about, I'm no good if I take the wrong shot. If I drink the wrong beer, if I

drink the wrong liquor and that hits me the wrong way, I become a very tired almost. It's almost like a tranquilizer

to me and I didn't want to deal with that, having to drive an an hour, just over an hour back to our home in Iguada from Juanaka and these very poorly lit. Roads riddled with potholes,

even the main roads, they're there not as often.

If you're on the you stay on the inside lanes, stay on the outside lane, you're in the middle lane, you're probably gonna be pretty good. I mean, there's six lanes on the

main road, the little back roads where we were at.

Would destroy any car that I have because they have these weird dips. Instead of speed bumps they have

like these, they have like the speed dips.

So it's almost like you're driving into this this concrete ravine. This concrete ditch and then

driving out the other side, it's clearly for drainage, by the way. Wild horses.

Yeah, there's wild horses in Juanica in that part of Puerto Rico. There's wild horses everywhere,

but you don't see them as much. And I don't think you see them

at all in San Juan. But on the central of the

island, the South Coast, over on the east side, you see wild horses and you see dogs. Not as many dogs where we were

specifically that night. But.

Before the end of the trip, you get in the neighborhoods and there's a lot of wild dogs and they're ugly.

Like, they're ugly. They're not even big.

Most of them are little. They're not Chihuahua little,

but they're somewhere between like a Chihuahua and like a medium sized dog, most of them missing hair.

And it just, it's weird. So we pack up all the party and

we're all headed back. So we're going and remember what

I said about the red lights? So we come to his red light and

I know it's my car. My my cousin Ralphie, they're in

one car. My sisterinlaw, Emily, she's in

the Honda. We're in the minivan, we're in

the carnival and. Eddie and Jose who?

Or my family from Michigan, they've actually, they actually came here before. I talked about it before.

They're the ones that Marcello gave the shitty car to and didn't fix it correctly. And thank God nothing happened

to them. So we're driving, but we have

all these cars around us, probably six or seven cars.

Tight formation like you see in the movies, security formation.

You come up to this light and they run it.

So the next car runs it, the next car runs it, the next car runs it. Like I'm treating these lights

like a four way stop, even though they tell you don't stop it, they say just plow through it because you can look around and you can see if other cars are coming or not.

That's what that's the thing. People are cutting people off

and the G PS:. Does this weird thing.

So we're all following basically bumper to bumper again into this weird security formation blowing through these red lights.

Sometimes we come to a stop and then go, but the G PS:.

Had us exit drive and then immediately get right back on the same path. It's almost like you exit, you

go down this little service service Rd. slash parking lot

and you get right back on the same Rd. for no reason at all.

That happened a few times on this trip where I'm like, ah, I'm not doing it this time. I fell for it twice.

Otherwise I said this is a shit exit here, but I'm pretty sure I could just go straight and sure shit super weird Puerto Rican roads, but this Kia, the second Kia that I had, the warning lights kept going off. That's okay driver.

Lane assist warning beep and it switches to high beam warning beep. Then it switches to lane

departure warning beep. Then it switches to some other

warning. The car play was stable.

I didn't have that issue, but it kept going through all this stuff the whole trip, like the entire I had, I had this Kia Carnival. That's because when I turned the

first car and I got a Kia Carnival again, but there was a newer Kia Carnival and I'll tell you a little bit about that car in a minute. But the entire trip these like

beep, it's it's got to be it's most annoying.

Kia, you suck. But my car play stayed

competent. So that was basically it from

that first part of the trip. And then what happened was day

or two later, after hanging out, doing our thing, weather, turning the shit, it was time to go back to San Juan, where we were going to spend the rest of our vacations and actually do the excursions and things like that.

So we said bye to a lot of the family.

We thought we were going to see more of them on the other side.

We never really did some of them, we did some when we didn't. So we left in multiple cars,

Jalene and Mario and Nova, which is my, you know, seven month year old granddaughter. They took one car and Zeke was

with us, my motherinlaw, my wife, myself and Zeke.

Then you know, Emily and all them took her car and they were able to go through and look at a bunch of cool shit.

We had a one way to eat at this, the Chinese fusion place.

Shout out to Joe Nieves, Joe Desa.

Your wrong name wrong. Show it goes by Chupacabra 1971

on social media. So we go to eat this place

called La La Topeka China and Agua Dia.

And this was the first time where my motherinlaw was like, oh, this Mafungo. It's good.

I'm going to get into Mafungo later.

But the rest of the family, Alvin, they wanted to go back down to Wanica in that area and kind of say what's up to the rest of the family my wife gets a phone call from?

Her on my motherinlaw's sister and she's like, hey, you guys coming down. Well, the whole family's coming

out here. We thought we were able to see

you guys before you went to the other side.

So now we have this guilt thing going and we are now an hour in the opposite direction of the 1st place.

That took an hour and a half to get to from our original place in Iguada. We make the executive decision

to buy a couple coffees, cafe con leche and head back down to the Wanica area. So then our day of exploring and

seeing the cool shit that we didn't see the first time because we were too busy exchanging the car from San Juan to Iguada. Has now been eliminated from

Aguada to San Juan the other way because we have this detour.

So we drive back up again back down the side and it starts pouring rain. It it is like tropical storm you

can't see shit and I'm driving this Kia Carnival.

There's potholes and we're gone this we're going through this country back roads wasn't scared but it definitely hairy situation and all I was really doing was thinking okay.

If the car in front of me drops, that means we got to stop.

We can't go further. We were going through 6/8 inch,

which doesn't sound deep, but if you think about it, go ahead and do that measurement with your hands through six or seven inches off the surface of wherever it is you're sitting.

That's a lot of rain, and that can go from that to deep in no time. The good thing about that is you

can kind of float over the pothole, right?

So we made it through. We got down to where my

motherinlaw basically grew up. Horses again, everywhere.

You know, in fact, one of the funny, the, the interesting things is we're driving through this little town and it seems like a normal town, right? Not necessarily a poor town, but

I saw a group, it was probably five or six kids and they're teenagers, normal looking teenagers.

They all had a horse. They were all walking the horse.

So back in the day you would think that that's they'd be walking their bikes, right? Maybe they're all tired of

riding. So they're walking their bikes.

They were walking horses. They didn't get a photo of it

because I was driving and. You know, my wife's not really.

She's like, oh, that's cool. But still not, you know, didn't

take a picture. She's on her phone or doing

whatever. Maybe she's sleeping, but we got

down there and, you know, it's very low income, man.

Where she grew up, my motherinlaw, she started crying.

She was overcome with emotion as we got closer, you know, because she just hadn't been there in so long.

I don't know if she had good memories, bad memories, but they're just memories we hung. Out there for probably 30-40

minutes and. One thing about Puerto Rico, I

didn't say this earlier, whether we were at the Iguada beautiful house or the house that we are eventually on our way to is the plumbing situation is very sus on the island of Puerto Rico not as much hurricanes as earthquakes.

You get a lot of earthquakes and this, the overall infrastructure is the electoral grid. The plumbing grid is bad.

So you were lucky if you could flush toilet paper down the toilet. Otherwise every bathroom you go

into says please don't flush the paper.

So you have to wipe your ass and put it in the trash.

So we had wipes as well. So you know, you know, wipe your

ass. Then you get the wipe and finish

it off doing the throwing the. Thing.

And where she grew up, I couldn't even find out.

I know. I don't even know how to flush a

toilet. So if I'm kind of bad at, took a

piss and then, you know, I flush it, there's probably something they pool somewhere that flushes it like there was.

I checked the bowl, there was no there's no button, no knob, no nothing. But that's where she grew up.

Tiny, tiny house. And it's, it's humbling.

You appreciate everything. Not that I don't appreciate my

life, but you also get a better understanding of why she is the way she is with a lot of things. You know, it's some she's been

in the United States since she was 25.

She just turned 70. But there's.

Some things from that core life experience that just don't change. It's funny she made the the

comment while we were there in Puerto Rico.

I don't like this place. I would never move back because

she's so used to the mainland and there's Puerto Rico is full of haves and have nots. I don't think there's much of A

middle class. People get what they need to

survive. You know, people make money.

It's all relative. And I'll talk about cars in a

little bit. There were nice cars, There were

shit cars. There's places where you just

can't go unless you have a van or something.

Like there's a lot of places I could not.

Go with my NSX in Puerto Rico. They just, you just couldn't.

I couldn't go to Wanaka. I couldn't have gone down those

streets and visited where she grew up.

And there's houses, It's paved, but the streets are so tight.

And remember what I said earlier about the little instead of a speed bump, it's like a little speed ditch that would just destroy my car. There's no way I can get through

it. I would rip off my front bumper,

rip off the rear bumper. It's just there's no way anyone

with a low vehicle. And weirdly, I saw vehicles that

were low. But I'm telling you, they they

must know like the secret way. To get around because you just,

you can't do it. Graffiti overall in Puerto Rico

was very underwhelming. We were all kind of disappointed

with the wall art. There were some, very few,

especially, you know, we're in San Juan.

Once we got there, they were kind of nice, but overall you might see a beautiful painting on the wall.

Then someone did some shit graffiti over it.

So we live there and we get to get to San.

Juan. And we stayed at a place called

Casa Siesta, which is behind a gated community.

There wasn't well, it's not really well, I guess there are gates. Every street was closed with a

gate with a padlock on it. And then there was a main

entrance that had a guard tower. Not I don't think they had a

gun, but it's security and they had the little gate thing and you had to tell them every single time where you're going.

While you're there, they open the little thing and you drive into your house. The house was really nice.

You guys may have seen the picture of that.

It is more open floor plan, more modern and.

You could flush toilet paper down the toilet, but no wipes.

But it was about three 2 1/2 blocks from the beach and it was beautiful. But we thought when we got there

we we had a ton of food that we brought with us across across the island to this fridge. And now this fridge is packed

with the same beers, leftover beers, a bunch of food, all sorts of shit. We didn't want to leave it at

the 1st. House that we overcompensated

for. But a full bottle of Hennessey,

Because my cousin Jeremy kept buying bottles of Hennessey, but he doesn't even drink. So now we're stuck with it.

And we had a Remy Martin VSOP that Mario my my daughter's boyfriend bought, and that's Okay.

I ran out of Glenfiddick that I had bought for the 1st house.

I was almost out of it. And then we had a bunch of beer

and much of miscellaneous. She had a bunch of bunch of

patrone guys, if you're still with me coming up, we'll talk about the nightlife, we'll talk about the beaches and we'll talk about the cars. So the house also in San Juan, I

forgot to mention this, there was a, So not only did we have the security tower, but once we got to the house, there's a keypad to get on the property. So there's an outer gate.

So there's a keypad to get on the property.

Once you got on the property, you walk 10 feet to the front door of the house. There's a keypad to get in the

house and there's a keypad to get out of the house.

Apparently this area was really bad a few months ago, and now it's just been kind of turned around because there's cops everywhere, there's undercovers everywhere.

But I guess it was really bad a couple months prior to that.

So the real estate is reflected. In fact, that is a house right

next door to us for sale for 1.2 million.

And we thought about it like I've looked at it, but it's missing that main gate with the keypad.

So there's a there's a few changes we'd have to make because of everything that this place has.

All the weird shit that's that's weird with Puerto Rico, the beaches are not weird and it's damn it's it's worth it to go just for that. There's two big attractions in

downtown San Juan, in Old In. I think it's Old Town San Juan,

New Town San Juan, old San Juan, beautiful downtown.

We went to the Fort, but we missed the castle.

If you ever plan on going to San Juan and going to the Fort, I'm telling you Uber, we did this thing.

And there's not a lot of room to turn around, and this is super tight. Hilly streets drove around for

20-30 minutes, couldn't find anything.

Ended up dropping off my motherinlaw, my wife and Zeke in front of the Fort. And Marcello and his friend

Daria stayed with me and we drove around for another 20 or 30 minutes and I was getting ready to circle around and take them back to where I dropped off Yvette and them and just go back to the Airbnb and take an Uber. And we were probably 6 miles

from this location, but in traffic, that's a long way.

Fortunately, I found a parking spot.

I ended up doing a U-turn and holding up traffic on both ends until I kind of wedge myself into the spot.

So yeah, definitely Uber if you go.

So we walked around, we did that, and then we bunch of photos. Then we decided to go eat, went

to a place called a Choco bar. I'll talk about Choco Bar in a

little bit. Pretty cool experience.

So next morning we had to get up and take a catamaran.

We ran into catamaran for eight people to to go to Akacos beach, which is a super famous beach. So we had to drive to Fajardo,

which is like an hour away. Again, lot of driving.

I did a lot of driving on this trip.

I did all the driving on this trip.

So we drove to Akacos or we drove to to a Fajardo, got on the catamaran. We're a little late getting

there and people started feeling a little seasick.

It wasn't that bad, but. You know by the time we got to

where we were all jumping in and and doing a snorkeling a beautiful by the way. So we we'd stopped right by

where the Caribbean Sea meets the Atlantic Ocean and you can visually see that the mesh of the waters and it was one of the most amazing things. We jumped in the water.

I think we're 25 or 30. Feet deep and you could see far

with those with the the snorkel gear on.

Wasn't a lot to see, you know we could.

See the little fish here and there?

We all secretly want to see something like a Barracuda or a reef shark or something that's not threatening, but it's make for a good story. None of that was there, but it

was still a really good time. But people started feeling a

little seasick and you guys know, I get I get motion sick, I bought, I have motion sick patches, I have ginger chews, I have all that kind of stuff. And I don't like ginger, but I

don't like feeling motion sickness.

I used to have the wristbands called C bands.

I gave them to my motherinlaw to use during COVID.

And I don't know where they're at.

They're in her room somewhere. So I've been relying on those

little patches because when I went to, because remember when I went to Hawaii, we did that excursion and I got sick and threw up off the back of the boat and the little fish ate up all my vomit. And that was another story.

I have to go back and check that one out.

It's Dang. That was an old podcast episode,

actually. I think it's the one called

Tacos. I think it was episode eight.

Yeah, something about tacos in Hawaii.

Anyway, I only had a few more of these patches left.

I should have bought more if I left, but then everybody needed them. So Marcelo wasn't feeling good

and I wanted to give him one. But then Jaylene took it and

gave one to Mario, gave 1 to Zeke.

A waste of it. A patch on Zeke because I found

it later on the floor of the boat because he didn't like it.

So he peeled it off. And then I gave out most of my

candy, my ginger candy, and people didn't like that either.

But would you rather eat that and have it settle your stomach or be nauseous on a boat with another hour?

Ride back the Coco's beach was beautiful once we got there.

Played around, we were there for probably a few hours.

Jumped back in the catamaran, stopped at the Quillo on our way back. When do we do that catamaran,

the Quillo? I don't know.

You know, I don't remember if I think the day before we went to a Cocos beach, we did another with the the other excursion at the forest. So what we ended up doing is we

went out there as a group. There was, you know, twelve of

us. And we were in this giant group.

You had to put on these, these helmets and these, these, these vests, and we, and we hiked, got fully submerged in water, jumped off the Cliff, the rope and all that kind of stuff.

That's what we did. And then on our way back from

there, we stopped at the Quillo, had some food and yeah, that's it. We had some food and went back.

Then the next day we drove back out to Fajardo.

It's like every day. We went a little bit further the

first day, which is the Quillo. The second day was for Hardo,

which is 15 minutes past the Quillo.

The third excursion day was Culebra in the Culebra beach.

You had to drive to Siba, so Siba was another 15 minutes past for Hardo. So my drive went from an hour to

hour and a half, no to for 45 minutes to an hour to an hour and 15 minutes. That one was the ferry ride and

we got on a smaller. It was a ferry, but it was a

smaller ferry than I'm used to getting on.

Thank God I went to Walgreens the day before to buy some more motion candy, and I found some of those those wristbands, like their version of the C bands, because that was a tough ride.

My motherinlaw decided she wasn't going to go.

Zeke didn't go. Jelene didn't go, Mario didn't

go. So the baby didn't go.

Everyone started kind of feeling a little sick at that point.

And so it was just really the four of us, myself, my wife, Solo, Daria, and our three cousins, my cousin's girlfriend.

And then there were four other distant cousins that were there that we met up with. People got sick on the ferryman

Solo didn't throw up, but he was very nauseous.

So I made sure I gave him one of the wristbands and gave him one of the little candies. I took out a whole handful of

the candies and dropped them on the the table behind me.

My cousin Nicholas, you know, they were out really late the night before, so they only had like two or three hours of sleep. We didn't even think they're

even going to make the ferry. But they showed up, so him and

my other cousin Vincent, they both got sick and threw up.

Nick says it's just because it happens every time he drinks.

He's a so he's aquatic man, he's Navy.

He was almost a frog man, like that's how good he is.

And he does stuff with sea life. He's a marine biologist or

something like that right now. But the motion sickness is

motion sickness. Then we had another person in

the family get sick. I didn't get nauseous, but I

started sweating profusely. And I think what had happened

was my body was trying to process what was going on because it was hot. There wasn't much air flow in

there, but I I was sweating like.

Why am I like that meme of that dude I think of Saturday Night Live, the light guy who's just sweating profusely.

But I wasn't nauseous, but my body was trying to figure out what the fuck is going on. We made it to Culebra.

I rented a golf cart and you know, we drove around, had a great time there. If you go to Culebra, I would

recommend renting a car. They have jeeps there, like they

have real vehicles. I didn't know that.

So we did the whole golf cart thing. 1st we picked up some

food and went and ate with a bunch of chickens.

You guys saw that on my social media.

Then we went to Flamenco Beach and we were there pretty much the whole time. Flamenco Beach is beautiful.

It's one of those beaches that you think they would.

They probably film movies there because it looks like this giant Cove, although it's really not and it was raining off and on.

So it's the perfect thing, right?

Who doesn't want to be in the ocean when it's raining?

No lightning, it's just raining hard.

And you're half in the water. The cold rain is hitting you

from the top, the warm water is below.

And then it's gone in 5 minutes and it's sunny as hell.

It did that to us probably half a dozen times while we were there. Sometimes you had to get out and

cover your your clothes and stuff like that on the beach.

But I decided to walk. So I walked all the way to one

side of the the tip. Visually you can.

I was hundreds of yards away, but I could still see the beach.

Like if something were to happen to me, nobody would have known.

But I decided to do it anyway. And what happened was I took my

iPhone. And I stuck it in the water

because it's water resistant, no special case on it or anything.

I just hit record, dipped it in the water and watching the footage afterwards, you can see 2030 feet in the water, you can see the coral, you can see all that kind of stuff.

So I walked back to where the family was and then decided to walk to the other side because it looked like there was a giant rock back there. My cousin said that thing over

there looks like a rock. I go, yeah, they go, that's not

a rock. I go, what is that?

They go, what's a tank? There's two tanks over there.

Like an Army tank, he said. Yeah, there's two tanks over

there. One's in the water and one's

offshore. So I decided to walk all the way

down there. And you guys saw that video on

social media? Pretty cool.

Apparently back in the day they used that site for testing, testing weapons, nuclear weapons, testing, bombs, America artillery tests. In fact, I guess there's signs

back there that say do not cross this line.

A radiation warning. Da da, da, da.

I never saw those, but I didn't look for them.

So we get back. We checked the time and it's

almost time to go because. Flamenco Beach is about a. 2.

About a two mile ride from the pier.

Then the place I had to drop the golf cart off was about 3/4 of a mile from the pier. So what I needed to do is we

needed to pack up, drive this slow ass golf cart 2 miles to the pier, drop off Yvette, Marcelo, Daria, all our shit.

Then I had to drive the golf cart to the rental place, wait for them to get their shit together because it took them forever the first time when I was picking it up.

To take me back to the pier. So now time is money, so we're

all packing up. It's starting to rain.

We go, we're still on Daria. I go there, right here.

I turn around, they're gone. They had decided, probably

because they're drunk, just to walk down and see the tank for themselves without any regard of the time.

I attributed to being drunk, because Marcel is pretty good with that. Nine times out of 10, he walks

up and says, hey, what time is it?

Do we have time to go down there?

So we all pack our shit up. It's raining now.

Like, really good. So we help the cousins pack all

their shit up. So it's just myself and Yvette,

the cousins all packed up and left because they don't want to miss the boat, stop raining, selling Daria, nowhere to be seen. So I go back onto the beach

because we're visually, you can't see where we're at to where the beach is because you have to kind of walk up the beach and go through like this little opening and kind of go around and that's where you have the restrooms and the the gift shop and all that shit. Nowhere to be seen.

I'm like, shit. So I go back over to Yvette.

I forget to bring her change of clothes, so now she's a little upset at me. I go, hey, here's my shorts,

here's my shirt in here. I don't have to change.

I don't mind just wearing my bathing suit on the ferry.

Not a big deal. I'm used to it anyway.

Take my clothes. So it takes me 10 minutes to

convince her to take my clothes. Meanwhile, I'm looking at the

clock because now the plan was the boat leaves at 4:30 or starts docking or starts boarding at 4:30.

It's now almost 4. Solo and Daria are nowhere to be

seen. I'm starting to get pissed, but

not too pissed. My mind is like, all right, if

we missed the boat, that's fine. But I can't miss dropping off

this cart. And I can't drop off this cart

if we're all stuck here because the golf cart people were like, if you're not here by 5:00, we close.

Which tells me I'm stuck with that rental overnight.

We're not planning on staying there overnight.

So that's the real thing here. If we missed the boat, we missed

the boat. We'll get another ferry.

I'm sure it's not a big deal. I go back to check for them two

times. Finally, the third time, I wash

off my feet. You know, I put on my my Adidas.

I'm like, I'm just going to have to go on my shoes so I can run, get them full of sand. So I go over there.

I see them and they're down about a hundred, 100 yards away trying to get a coconut off a tree.

I'm just like, Oh my. So I yell and somehow they hear

me. They can't hear what I'm saying,

but they hear me yelling. So who knows my voice?

I do this motion. I'm pointing my wrist.

I do this thing with my arms. I'm like, come on, we have to

fucking go. I probably didn't hear that.

Just heard me yelling. And then I turned.

I started running. They so they started running.

They got to the cart. I said guys, we got, I didn't

yell at them surprisingly. So we're packing everything in.

My wife puts my she goes here, I'm going to put your trunk laws, which is your flip flops, and put your trunk laws right here on the floor. I said, all right so we're going

and for whatever reason the golf cart is going so much slower than it was on our way there. I'm just like, Oh my God, we're

never going to get there in time.

It's like 4:00 o'clock now, right?

Now remember, I have to drop them off and then come back, drop the cart off, and then wait for those slow motherfuckers to take me back to the pier. So I'm like, oh, it is what it

is. Oh my God, we're not going to

make it. Why is this thing going so slow?

And then I realized, and my wife said she's putting my my chunk laws on the floor. But I look and I realized she

put it. Behind the gas pedal.

So I was only going like half pedal.

And you know how golf carts are. They're full scent or no scent,

you can. You can't really creep in a golf

cart. Well, you can if you put

something behind it like I did. I go, Oh my God, I pulled it.

My my chunk was my slippers up full speed and the full speed is like, what, 8 miles an hour on a golf cart?

10 mile an hour. But before we were creeping.

So I dropped them off, go to the place, wait forever for them to figure their shit out. They give me a ride back to the

pier. Boat ends up being a few minutes

late, but this time the ferry that arrives, it's a real ferry.

And by real ferry I mean they got cars on there, takes them 20 minutes to load all the cars on there.

They got the giant outdoor deck, they got the nice air conditioning inside and no one's getting sick on that, thank God.

So that was a nice quiet ride back and that was our last excursion day there. You know, we had the next day

was like a full, full blown beach day.

But you know, at the end of this trip, you know, no one's really talking to anyone anymore from the rest of the family.

It's like, hey, we're going to go out tonight like that.

We plan to go out with the family, you know, every night.

And it really didn't happen. Like we went out with Alvin and

and his wife, Margie, and you know, my my my niece, you know, and then of course, Eddie and Jose, they're fucking troopers.

So they came out with us and we had a great time.

In fact, one night we went out and Eddie, Eddie is he, he and my wife are nuts when they drink.

So we're at 1 club. And they don't really check your

I D's, they just patch you down the guys, right?

So a guy, it's Eddie's turn and I'm not really paying much attention. This is like our third, third

club and he's open. He's like opening up a shirt and

the guy gets mad and says you can't come in.

So he's like, I can't come in. I'm like, what?

What happened? What just happened here?

I thought the guy wanted to see what I got, so I unbuttoned my shirt. And basically Eddie, he didn't

really flash him, but he kind of, you know.

And the guy was just totally turned off to it.

So he thought, and he's like, no, this guy's, he's messed up in his head. And I go, no, no, Eddie's cool,

Eddie's cool. So I got Eddie and you know,

Eddie. And if you haven't figured out,

Eddie and Jose are a gay couple. And they're probably my favorite

cousins, actually, honestly, on my wife's side.

And they're all that's, that's saying a lot because I get along with everyone, like really well, but they are a freaking hoot.

And so it's no surprise. Like, I would be surprised if

Jose did that. Eddie doesn't It didn't really

surprise me that he did it, but thank God I got him back in, you know, But that night was crazy, you know, that probably had five or six shots of liquor before we even left the house.

So you guys know where I'm at with that.

I'm like, Oh my God, this is going to be a long night.

But yeah, the last day or two, it's just it was just us people in our Airbnb because Eddie and Jose had left like a day before or two days before, you know, Alvin and them left.

But I think also the day before we left, so it was just us had time to do laundry and do all that kind of stuff and go enjoy the beach that was near our house and the beaches there are fantastic. Let's talk about the cars.

So my rental car, this Kia Carnival, I think I talked about it. You know, I kind of alluded it

had some weird issues. It held up well, but it had

these stupid issues. I wouldn't.

The Kia Carnival is a great looking minivan, looks a lot better than, you know, like the. The Chrysler Pacifica that I'm

used to getting as a rental because you're limited, you know, but I wouldn't trust them electronically given what I experienced driving around Puerto Rico.

There's a lot of observations, the police lights and their meanings, the emergency vehicles, big trucks.

So one thing you notice about big trucks is they all have these. These LED's on the firm, they

they're on the grill, they're on the windshield.

They're always flashing and I don't know what that means other than probably, hey, I'm a big truck.

Please pay attention because you all drive like shit.

The way people drive in Puerto Rico is mind blowing.

Forget a turn signal. Some people drive well under the

speed limit. Some people drive like they're

late for work all the time. Throw that in with the the red

lights, the stop signs. What we found out is from 12:00

AM to 5:00 AM. I guess it's it's actually

illegal to run a red light, but you have to come to a complete stop, which I observed people not doing.

And I also never saw someone run a red light when there was a cop there. Speaking of the police, they

have weird lights. They have.

I saw some with all blue lights. I saw them with blue and green

lights actually like a blue strip light and a green strip light of LED's. I saw some with no lights.

What that means is no lights are not on patrol.

Red lights and green lights means it's on active patrol.

All blue lights means it's a state cop, not a not a city cop.

So and if they want to pull you over, they get on their horn and tell you pull over. I also read that you have to do

a lot. You have to do something really

bad to get pulled over in Puerto Rico.

Like, these cops don't give a fuck or they got too much shit to worry about. But it was super weird to see

between that and same thing with an ambulance.

Ambulance. They always have their lights

on. So the thought is, how do you

know if they're in a rush? Well, maybe they're driving

faster, maybe that's it. Maybe they turn their sirens on.

I don't remember really hearing the siren, but imagine every emergency vehicle that you see with this lights on.

Because here in the mainland that means get over or you're getting pulled over. Or they're rushing to get to

somewhere. The LE D's all over the front of

the big trucks. They're also decorated, kind of

weird and cool, almost like you would see over in Japan sometimes, which is a little weird.

Street signs and fast food and Spanish helps.

It's applicable. So I've been doing the dual

lingo thing. I haven't done it in a while

though, like probably a month or two.

But the cool thing about Puerto Rico is none of the signs are in English. They're all Spanish, but the

stop sign still looks like a stop sign.

So when it says Pod APARE. You know that means stop the one

way arrows, the under construction arrows.

You know you understand what that means, the exit.

Only you understand what that means because you know what That you know what it looks like. You know that not everything is

a direct translation. So for example they have

transit, though I could be saying it wrong.

Transit though if it's transitive with one arrow that means one way, a transitive with both arrows that means two ways.

So it's not the the text isn't. They don't have a different

text. Reduct or velocity, Dad, means

reduced speed. You could tell because where the

sign is, where it's placed and how it's used in other countries, you just have to read the room, right?

You have to read the traffic. Okay.

This must mean exit here, this must mean this over there.

You can't. It's not obvious that you can

see that. You know when I'm going, When

you go to Burger King, you go to McDonald's.

First off, there's Burger Kings everywhere.

There's more Burger Kings at McDonald's.

The food is not the same. So if you want to get breakfast

at McDonald's. They don't have biscuits.

They have like these weird sandwich breads.

It's like they have breakfast burritos and stuff like that and they have some of the sandwiches the same.

What's the, the pancake sandwich thing with the syrup, those syrup things. They have those sandwiches drawn

a blank. I don't know why.

I just can't think of it, but that's really it.

But you can see the signs. You know, Okay, this means drive

through. This means breakfast.

You know, this one, one. You know here all of our drive

through say drive through there. Burger King says something

different than McDonald's. But you know it means.

Drive through houses and addresses are out of whack in Puerto Rico. The G PS: is good for a general

area for a lot of places, but it won't take you to the front door in many places. So you kind of get there in that

area. I think I'd mentioned earlier

the house that we went to in Iguada.

You go to the address that the guy tells you and it just stops in the middle of the street. We had to drive a couple streets

past that, take a left, then take another left at the next street, and then our house was on the right.

So what we had to tell our family is once you get to the end of the the the directions, keep going.

Take a left on this street. Look for this sign on the side

of the wall. Go to the next thing.

Look for this sign. Turn left on this sign.

Super weird I think when I was looking for parking when we're in San Juan, at one point I pointed out to Marcelo, I said look at this. My G PS:.

Was spinning in a circle as I was driving.

Literally spinning in a circle like I was stuck on the North Pole. It was super weird.

I think there's a car scene there.

I'm confident there's a car scene there because because there was a lot of Mitsubishi Mirages and Lancers, there's a Kia Soul beat. I forgot to look that up.

A Toyota Echoes, Hyundai venues were everywhere.

I saw a couple of late model Civics, not necessarily the newest ones, but the one like the FK8 type.

You know, type bars saw a few of those.

They were pretty nice. San Juan had a lot nicer cars

than obviously the rest of the island based on what I was saying earlier, so. You know, we did see a

Lamborghini truck. You know, there were some nice

BM, W's, Mercedes, they had some nice cars there.

I saw a couple Porsches that were pretty cool.

But for the most part you can tell the way that people worked on their cars, fix them up, that there's definitely a car scene.

It'd be nice to kind of go there and go to one of their car mates or something. A lot of pride in the cars.

It was really nice. But the potholes are everywhere,

OK? The roads are murderous, I think

said that earlier. Almost everywhere I drove,

whether it was San Juan or Guadalagudia.

Juanica, you had to always be careful driving.

You couldn't drive too fast. And if you were driving fast,

which I did a few times, you had to really know where you're going. Otherwise you'd hit these

potholes and just blow your vehicle up.

I've never seen so many random potholes anywhere.

Like, there's like, hey, I'm going to Detroit, OK, we'll stay away from 8th Ave. because 8th Ave. is riddled with potholes.

No, every street, almost every street in San Juan.

Especially once you exit and you kind of weave your way back to the place that you're staying, you know you have to be really careful because of the potholes, not for the people, but because of the potholes, stop signs. What are those?

I said pottery earlier, but a lot of the traffic lights were out here in the mainland. We treat an out traffic light

like 4 way stop, no such thing there.

And a lot of the traffic lights that are out or right off of exits on the freeways or freeway on ramps.

So you come to the freeway and you have to go under the freeway and get on the freeway on the other side except the lights out. So you have to time it.

You've got to kind of Sprint across or you just have to force your way out there. Like nobody really speeds on

those streets once you're on the main highway.

There's always a few cars. We were running late a few times

and I was driving like a madman, like I am a a trained Puerto Rican driver at this point. In fact, I thought I was going

to come back here and drive like a complete asshole and a moron in a disregard for anyone else on the road.

Haven't driven a lot yet, but I think I've got it out of my system. But they're like, seriously, you

have to force yourself into traffic.

Cross traffic ain't stopping. I saw a few times where you get

close and they might flash their lights, which means either A, I'm going to keep going or B, you can go ahead.

So you have to kind of read that temperature visually of what they want you to do and what you're going to do otherwise you. Just had to kind of force your

way in. That's it for my car

observations. If I were in Puerto Rico, if I

were to get a house because we've been looking.

Now I don't know if we actually will, but you know when you visit somewhere you like because I did the like Puerto Rico, the beaches are second to to none. I mean, Hawaii, right?

Hawaii's great, but the main beaches that we went to, all of them, none of them crowded, all of them beautiful.

Clearwater. You go to places like Hawaii,

you go to the nice beach, it's. Going to be crowded.

Or since it's on its own as a cluster of islands, the water is going to be a lot more rough. There was definitely rough

waters off some of the beaches in Puerto Rico, But since it's so close to other bodies of land, whether it's, you know, the British Virgin Islands or the Dominican Republic or not too far away from the United States, you know the water has an opportunity to break from some of the continents nearby, which I think makes for a more cleaner, clear water experience, makes for better overall beaches, you know?

As long as you're not on the side where the seaweed accumulates. When I went down to look at the

tank, we're on flamenco, I kind of went around kind of a corner and just there was 1520 thirty 40 feet of seaweed between the shoreline and the water and there was no way I was going to go through that to get an up close selfie.

I just kind of took the photo from from a distance now to the biggest part of this, the food. This is going to be the most

controversial part of this. I'm going to talk about the

alcohol and I'm going to talk about the food.

So the liquor scene, in my opinion, is kind of not there.

I bought 1942 at one place. I got a double shot of it, a

double serving, and I am spilling half of it down my wife's shirt. It was one of those tight

situations where I was trying to hold the cup and she was dancing and she hit my my elbow and right down her shirt.

But there's doers, which I hate and I've only tried it once, so I'm gonna have to try it again someday.

There's doers everywhere. They have Jack Daniels and

everything else. Just about everything else is

rum. Puerto Rico is a rum place.

Don Q is their very famous, most popular rum.

Then you have Bacardi. Then you have any handful of

other stuff. Sometimes in bars you'll see a

McAllen 12 and an 18. You might see a Glenn Fiddick.

But you know, other than Jack Daniels and Jack Daniels, you know, honey, there's some Chivas.

I never saw Woodford out at the actual places.

And I'm sure it's there. OK, guys, I'm sure it's there.

But just if you walk into 20 bars on the island of Puerto Rico, you're going to see Don Q, You're going to see doers, you're going to see. Some of the other stuff that I

had mentioned previously, you're not going to see Whistle Pig as much stuff like that. You're not going to see a lot of

Scotches. But the food, mostly

disappointing and you know there.

Were some nice spots. And I felt bad for my family,

OK? Because, you know, I live with

my motherinlaw. She cooks for us.

She's always because she's been here for 9 years.

And then of course, we've been married for 19.

So my personal experience of Puerto Rican food, other than every once in a while going out and trying a restaurant that might be Dominican food or something related, is through her. So the red beans and rice, which

I don't care about, Mofongo, which I think is largely overrated, and that's the controversial take that I have.

Bacalaitos, which I love. My wife doesn't like my

motherinlaw cooking them because it's frying and frying's not good for you. The empanadas, a big thing for

them or the like. We call them panadias.

So some place they call empanadas, a place called panadias. You know, the most of the food

reginos, there's a bunch of them.

Most of the food is fried, and I feel that there's a definite ceiling to fried food. Because if you follow a

traditional recipe, it's created, it's all put together pretty much the same and then it's fried, right.

So Mofongo, let's let's go back and talk about Mofongo.

Mofongo is a staple in Puerto Rico.

Mofongo is primarily made of one of two things.

Mostly it's from plantains, not regular bananas, but these are the plantains. They come plantanos, plantain

bananas, and they're huge, they're huge and they have like kind of a they're, they're. They're curved like a banana,

but they have, you know, where the sides meet.

It's a little more sharp and you don't.

In their culture, you don't typically eat those when they're yellow, you prepare them when they're green.

Dominican Republic, they eat them when they're yellow.

They're super sweet. They usually eat them with

breakfast, fry them up. Whatever Puerto Ricans, they

take that and they smash it. They cook it, form it, almost

like a like you go to some place, you eat and you get like a scoop of rice. It's not loose.

It's just like this perfectly formed scoop of rice on your plate. It's kind of like they're Mashed

potato, except for they have juca for that.

And so Mofongo is usually either plantains or it's made from JUCO, juca, juca. And I'm not a big fan of Juca

either. I mean, I like potatoes, but I

don't care about that much, so why would I care about Juca?

I've had mofongo a few times there and it was okay, but I would never order it by itself. My motherinlaw loved the mofongo

at the LA. Topeka, China and Agua Dia.

And it was. It was infused.

So a lot of times you get it and it's infused or it's a fusion with other foods so you can get a pile of fungo and it's got, you know, fried pork on top of it or it's got shrimp on top.

It's got something else on top of it.

And you and you eat it like that.

Sometimes you get it when it's just plain is a small side.

I mean, it's a side. I mean, sides can only be so

good. Am I right?

The mayor. What's the famous American side

is French fries. Not everybody has good French

fries, Am I right? Of course I am.

Some people's fries suck. Some people's fries are good.

Some people like steak fries. Some people like this really

skinny fries. You know, it's like mafongo.

Mafongo is their version of a fry.

I just said that, you know, when talking to my wife, it's like, well, that's like our potato, that's like our rice.

But no, you eat rice, you eat potatoes or juca and mafongo was like French fries. So you you get it.

Almost anything you order you can get with mafongo as a side or they have Mafongo as their separate dish with shit on it.

And we had a couple good Mafungos.

Again, I'm not really big on it to begin with, but I think overall is overrated. And going back to the family,

everybody from my wife, from my motherinlaw, from our family from Florida, our family from Michigan, our family from New York, family from Texas, Everyone was a little disappointed with the food that we had.

And I felt bad because that's all they talked about forever.

So I can't wait to go back to Puerto Rico.

The food, the food, the food. I can't wait to taste the food.

I can't wait to eat the food. The food's going to be so good.

Food's the best food in the world.

So good it goes good. Mostly overrated, mostly

disappointing. Now, we found a few places that

had pretty good food. You know, I had Baca Raitos

twice there. I had the one that's super

greasy in in Juanica, and I know there's good Baca Raitos somewhere. Also had some Baca Raitos at

that Choco bar in San Juan. The best thing I had in the

Choco bar in San Juan was chocolate grilled cheese.

That's right, I said it. Marcelo ordered it.

I took a bite of it. I wouldn't go there for it, but

it was actually pretty good. Their bacalitos were the worst

bacalitos ever had, super dry, believe it or not.

And they actually take them and they fold them in half and refry them and use them as Taco shells.

It was like eating paper. It was terrible.

So you know, we, I had a chocolate old fashion, which is great there. But people have talked about

these giant bacalitos that I just never came across.

You know, my wife wanted to tripletta, which is some sort of, I think it's like a sandwich with all with three different meats on or something. We never, we never came across

that. I know it's there.

But given all of our excursions are back-to-back to back, you know, we only had so much time to pick a place to eat.

Speaking of picking a place to eat, the more people you have, the harder it is. Right?

And the first part of a vacation, everybody wants to do everything together. But as you step through vacation

by day 4, by 5, week two, everybody does their own thing.

All right, we're going to eat over here.

We're going to eat over there. Hey, guys, we're going to go eat

over here. You can join us if you like.

And everyone just kind of starts doing their own thing.

But even with us and we're staying in the house that we were staying in, there was six or seven of us.

It's like, OK, well, what does Emily want to eat?

She doesn't want to eat this. OK, what does Marcelo want?

He don't want to eat that. What do I want to eat?

I want to eat this. OK, My wife doesn't want to eat

that, but she wants to eat this. But Jaline doesn't want to eat

that because Mario wants to eat this.

And it just becomes like this big fuck it.

Just eat what you want. And people can come and come

with you or not. That's always my mindset.

But my wife is such a people pleaser.

That became kind of a. Kind of a kind of a shit show, I

think one thing that we, we, we said about the food is mas is better, right? And that's one of those things

where everyone thinks their parents cooking is the best or the worst. Most of the Puerto Rican food

that we had that my motherinlaw cooks, she cooks better.

We found a few things that was better than hers, especially when we went to the island in Culebra Culebra.

We stopped at a place that was near the pier.

We bought food is to go only we went somewhere.

We sat down, we ate it and it was really good.

My motherinlaw makes that same food, but that was just as good, if not better, some of the stuff that she makes.

And so I actually want to go back and kind of find the stuff.

I want to go back with just my wife, which will probably never happen. But I want to go back with a

smaller group of people because you have more freedoms, because you don't, You're not trying to make sure everyone else is happy. You don't care when anyone else

is eating. You just want to eat what you

want to eat. You want to go to the beach that

you want to go to. All that kind of stuff.

So we're but, but the food reminds me of Italy in the fact that when you go to Italy, everyone there thinks they can cook. And So what happens when

everyone thinks they can cook? You have a lot more options of

eating Italian food, but not quite as limited as a cuisine, as Puerto Rican food, because Puerto Rican food is limited.

You know, name me 7 Puerto Rican dishes, you're going to start repeating yourself before you get to 5.

And that's not unlike too many cuisines.

But most cuisines rely on some sort of a fusion mixed with something else. But Italy, everyone thinks they

can cook. So what happens is you have a

lot more options, but not as much the the good food is more spread out. And that's all I'm trying to

say. That's all we're trying to say,

because we did have things that were good.

But overall, the family was disappointed because they just had this grand idea of just, oh, mommy's is good, but this is going to be better because it's from the mainland and hell, as I record this just two hours ago. Just two hours ago, my

motherinlaw made Pontidias, and I had three of them.

And I don't think I've had them in months, but I want her Pontidias now that I've had this shitty empanadas that most of the food places in Puerto Rico sell.

She made them fresh. But most of the time when you

create that, when you make that, you have to make it and you have to freeze it because you never know when people are going to be there. So you go to these little

stands, whether it's off the excursion or if it's on the side of the road, or if it's some other place, or if it's inside a restaurant, they take it out. And they drop it in the fryer

and they give it to you when it's frozen or they already cooked it and it's just sitting under the heat lamp.

So that's obvious that it's not going to be as good, right?

But let's wrap this up. This is actually a longer

episode, and most of you probably still aren't listening.

But that's okay. I don't care.

I've said it me and long vacations, I'm going to say maybe it's everyone. But for me specifically, I think

people start missing their own beds and their daily routines.

And at some point, family drama starts to set in.

So the first part of the trip, we had some family drama like okay, This cousin doesn't like that cousin, This aunt doesn't like that nephew or that aunt because of some shit that happened 10 years ago, some shit that happened 30 years ago.

And now they're going to see each other.

They may start fighting when they see each other.

You know, you have a lot of that stuff.

The more people from family get together, the more likely you're going to have people who don't like each other and even your own family. You have drama, right?

Because. If you're going with just your

spouse and your kids, that's one thing.

But when you go with your spouse and their siblings, or your siblings or someone else's siblings or the parents, at some point, drama, conflicts. That's in.

Because maybe you don't get along with your brother as much.

Or maybe you don't get along with your cousin, or maybe your son's a pain in the ass. And after two or three days on

our trip, those personalities start start clashing.

And now people are mad at each other, you know, So for us.

I don't think we we really didn't have that much family turmoil internally to just our family structure, which was quite amazing. Honestly, it was just whatever.

But that's the only drama I had and it really isn't even drama.

But eventually, over a long trip, drama starts to set in.

Everyone in my group got some level of sick, whether they were seasick or you know, Jalene lost her voice and now you know, my wife is still sick, Zeke is still sick.

My motherinlaw was a little sick for one day.

Marcello got a little sick. Jalene Mario got a little sick.

You know, other people got sick. It's just at some point in a

vacation, you know, at the end of vacations, everyone does their own thing. First few days, where are you

guys going to eat? I think I said this earlier.

Hey, let's all go over to this house and hang out like I fully expected people to come by and hang out at our house.

On San Juan and Elvin and the fam did like a day, but they were staying already almost an hour away from us.

So that expectation wasn't there.

My cousins were staying minutes away.

We never, they never came by the house.

We saw them on excursions. But we had a lot of liquor.

We had a lot of, you know, beer. We had stuff that we needed to

get rid of that, weirdly, we got rid of most of it, but you know.

If that would have been the first day everyone would have been over, or the if that would have been the first part of the trip, everyone would have been over every day and we would have blown through our food in a day and a half.

But we end up throwing a lot of shit out.

Mostly leftovers. But there was there was food

that we had to leave behind. You can't fly with it.

Like what are you going to do with it?

The last morning I slammed like 3 beers like oh I can't let this go to waste pop thank God it's a light beer with no after taste.

It's actually pretty good. I actually missed my die light.

I know we miss a lot of food spots.

I know that. You know, So take our

observations about where we did eat in the level of poor shit.

Shitty service too, by the way. Not a lot of good service in

Puerto Rico. And the awkwardness is, is when

they come up and they run your card and it's, you know, flipping around like, oh, where's my tip?

You know that awkwardness where you don't give them their 20%?

It's easy for us to say I wouldn't tip somebody, but try saying that to someone when they're sitting there right in front of you. Most people aren't going to do

that. It's the in person version of

the keyboard commando, right? We're going to be back to Puerto

Rico for sure. I wasn't joking.

We are looking at real estate. Some of the properties there

aren't that bad. There's a lot of roaches, the

infrastructure is bad, the electrical grid is shitty.

When we were driving to San Juan from Aguada, I noticed as it got dark some of the street lights, like the ones on the freeway, they were blinking. And I thought maybe it was a

some sort of a warning of like bad Weather's coming hide, but looking it up, it's just their electrical grid that that string of lights like Christmas lights had a loose bulb or something super weird. That is my trip to Puerto Rico.

Guys, thank you so for hanging hanging through through this.

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10 days in Puerto Rico

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