Our bus driver-guide told us, \u00e2\u20ac\u0153There are four seasons here: summer, summer, summer and summer.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d And he was absolutely correct.<\/p>\n
He made that flippant remark as we rode high up into the mountains of Puerto Rico on Monday. I don\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t know how many of the 60-plus passengers even caught the driver\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s exaggeration, as many of us were nodding off in the heat and humidity in San Juan.<\/p>\n
Along with almost a thousand others, my wife and I had naively assumed that the higher up the mountain you go, the cooler; in fact that\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s why we chose that particular tour of the Viking cruise we booked in late October to the British Virgin Islands and a handful of other scenic islands clustered around that site.<\/p>\n
We\u00e2\u20ac\u2122re in our fourth day of an 11-day cruise of a half dozen attractions in a place we\u00e2\u20ac\u2122d never been. But we hadn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t been totally unaware of weather conditions here, as locals have told us this season is, well, unseasonably hot and dry.<\/p>\n
Still we wondered while making comparisons. If a drive up Gallinas Canyon can give us temperatures 10 to 20 degrees cooler than in Las Vegas, why isn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t the same happening here?<\/p>\n
And another slight inconvenience was I was having to convert just about everything mathematical. The currency rate in Puerto Rico is the same as the U.S. dollar, but everything else seems different, from the temperatures to distances. So, if you ever wonder how hot it is while in the Virgin Islands, be ready to re-compute the reply. The first day we kept hearing that the temperature was expected to reach around 33 degrees. \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Only 33? Why that\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s just a couple of ticks above freezing,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d we heard one man, from Texas, exclaim.<\/p>\n
But that\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s centigrade degrees, which, according to my Fahrenheit-Celsius converter means it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s hot. We\u00e2\u20ac\u2122d ask how far we needed to walk to a camera shop. A guide said \u00e2\u20ac\u0153no more than five or six kilometers. My U.S.-standard-to-metric converter translates those kilometers to a long distance.<\/p>\n
Do you remember when, in the \u00e2\u20ac\u02dc80s there was a metric movement in American schools, the goal being to make every U.S. student proficient in metrics? My oldest son, Stan Adam, was helping me drive in those days, and he\u00e2\u20ac\u2122d instruct me to back up the pickup \u00e2\u20ac\u0153about three meters.\u00e2\u20ac\u0153 Of course, my response was, \u00e2\u20ac\u0153I don\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t think metric. How much do I really have to back it up.<\/p>\n
When we finally reached the camera place, \u00e2\u20ac\u0153where they have everything photographic that you\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ll need,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d according to our Sunday guide, all Bonnie and I found were those film-loaded disposable camera. Why buy a camera, use it, then discard it anyway? We wished this territory of 3.6 million people had a number of places to buy a real camera.<\/p>\n
Depending on whether we traveled along British or American roads, it is my understanding, driving conditions change. Several of us pilgrims felt uneasy when a second driver, this time Mr. Joseph, kept hugging the left side of the road as he navigated the sharp turns on the way to the highest point in Tortola.<\/p>\n
His assistant, Doreen, filled us with tidbits of information about the territory that \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Columbus didn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t exactly discover,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d and asked if we had questions. She meant, of course, that there were people living on these Caribbean islands even before Columbus was born.<\/p>\n
As our bodies became mini-sweat factories in a bus that lacked air conditioning, someone I know well, had the temerity to ask a question intended to crack everybody up. \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Yes, Doreen, I have a question: When will you tell Mr. Joseph he ought to be driving on the right side of the highway?<\/p>\n
In San Juan, a U.S. protectorate, people drive on the left side; we\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ll visit some U.S. territories, with the expectation people will be driving on the right (correct) side.<\/p>\n
The comment drew a chuckle from some in the bus, but the answer was already obvious. We all must have known that in that area, drivers stay on the left, and that I was joking, but my question drew more \u00e2\u20ac\u0153tsk-ing\u00e2\u20ac\u009d than laughter. Now if the driver or Doreen had said the same thing, people would still be laughing about it.<\/p>\n
Our complete tour will include stops at places like Antigua, St. Lucia and St. Thomas, all towns of historical significance, such as the lack of wild animals or the 12-months growing season. We saw mangoes, coconuts, bananas and dates.<\/p>\n
We were impressed that the guides certify the rainwater as it cascades down the mountains, is safe to drink. In Antigua it is otherwise, as the rainfall is scanty, and the country desalinates sea water.<\/p>\n
In our post-retirement years we\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ve done a bit of traveling; we were relieved and pleased that a flight to Puerto Rico to get on our cruise required a much shorter airplane trip than a flight to Europe.<\/p>\n
Among the several hundred passengers on the tour, we\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ve heard almost no Spanish at all. The Spanish we do hear sounds like a m\u00c3\u00a9lange of sounds with some African mixed in. We overheard and understood perfectly what a native said on his cell phone. But suddenly he appeared to be speaking an entirely different language, of which I picked up maybe one-tenth of the words.<\/p>\n
Almost all the passengers are from the states, and many of them are oh-so-eager to discuss next week\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s Presidential election. Almost all have an opinion on The Donald and Hillary, and many even know about Gary Johnson, New Mexico\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s former governor.<\/p>\n
But unfortunately, about all that most people recall about Johnson is the brain-freeze he suffered when, on national TV, he failed to identify Aleppo, one of the hot spots in the Middle Eastern turmoil.<\/p>\n
As we left Las Vegas a few days ago, we wondered whether winter \u00e2\u20ac\u201d or at least fall \u00e2\u20ac\u201d would ever arrive there. We\u00e2\u20ac\u2122re hoping tepid, or even cooler temperatures will await us. We\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ll soon be ready for a change in the 24-hour-a-day steam that bathes Puerto Rico.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Our bus driver-guide told us, \u00e2\u20ac\u0153There are four seasons here: summer, summer, summer and summer.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d And he was absolutely correct. He made that flippant remark as we rode high up into the mountains of Puerto Rico on Monday. I don\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t know how many of the 60-plus passengers even caught the driver\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s exaggeration, as many of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":22,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[2],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/rezio.net\/woa\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1564"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/rezio.net\/woa\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/rezio.net\/woa\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rezio.net\/woa\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/22"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rezio.net\/woa\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1564"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/rezio.net\/woa\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1564\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1565,"href":"http:\/\/rezio.net\/woa\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1564\/revisions\/1565"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/rezio.net\/woa\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1564"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rezio.net\/woa\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1564"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rezio.net\/woa\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1564"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}