Puerto Rico and Numbers

Last night’s decadent treat was cut-up fruit salad in the cabin as a bedtime snack. I’ve done a great job of eating my RDA of melons, but they’re generally in wedges, with the rind on. Last night my roommate and I were delighted to see some cut into bite-sized chunks. It’s the little things in life….

This morning we awoke to find ourselves, as expected, in Puerto Rico. It was sunny, rather warm, and quite humid. I hadn’t made any plans here as neither the ship’s excursions nor the geocacher group’s tour called to me. Instead, Alison, aka Sister Long Legs or SLL and I planned a low-key day that would involve at least two caches. 

We disembarked and promptly found 7 other members of our group so we cached with them for a few hours. We saw Caribbean-style architecture (simple bright-colored buildings), experienced island time (something scheduled to open at 9:30 wasn’t open for at least 10 minutes after that, and heard lots of Spanish and Spanish-accented English. We also saw geckos, dragonflies, several types of palm trees, mangroves, hibiscus, bougainvillea, and nary a fern. We even got to taste Puerto Rican foods. The sights we explored included beautiful ocean scenes, impressive statues, a fort (maintained by the National Park Service), a Coast Guard station, local parks, numerous cobblestones. Definitely a place to come back to for a week or more to fully experience in a way we definitely couldn’t in a few hours today, traveling only by foot. 

My caching “goal” for Puerto Rico was to find two caches. We exceeded that by quite a few, and Puerto Rico became my 50th “country” to find a cache in. For reasons I don’t fully understand, the geocaching website has some different definitions of country than I do: just two recently relevant counterintuitive classifications are that Northern Ireland is considered part of the United Kingdom (which is technically is) and not its own country but the British Virgin Islands are treated as a unique country and that Puerto Rico which is part of the US is also treated as it’s own country. Go figure. 

I wasn’t expecting to find many caches here, but it turned out I found enough that I reached 14,000 finds since I started caching in 2002. I’d carefully printed a sign to that effect before leaving home, thought about bringing it today but failed, and of course now it’s simply a piece of scratch paper. 

At some point SLL and I decided we wanted to wander on our own rather than find even more caches. A few blocks later, we spotted Helen, Chris, Roy and Wendy loitering on a corner that didn’t have a geocache. We joined them for what turned out to be a Puerto Rican lunch in a restaurant they’d found several years ago. The meal included plantains, riced & beans, pulled pork (or maybe it was chicken or perhaps something else), and several other dishes that we didn’t recognize. It was interesting, and consistent with my goal of trying different foods, but admittedly I was not as enamored with the meal as the others seemed to be. 

A cache or two later, SLL and I returned to the boat. I made may way to a pool to cool down and bumped into two others from our big group and we had a lovely chat. Then came dinner and a fun evening of ship entertainment — a singer of ABBA’s songs, GPS sing-along music trivia, and 70s music trivia. Several of us had wondered what GPS music would be and were rather surprised that GPS turned out to be Global Positioning System and not an esoteric type of unfamiliar music. The GPS, which sounded remarkably like Siri or Alexa, would recite lyrics to a song in a monotone and we had to identify the song. Our group didn’t do great at that, but then a ringer came and “we” (really he) won the 70s music trivia. 

In other useless numeric news, today I reached my 1000th consecutive day of meeting my step goal (which includes the option of a rest day after six consecutive days meeting the goal). 

Tomorrow will be Dominican Republic and a kayak trip with a few other cachers.